“Masquerading as a woman”: The South African disguises acts and the ghosts of apartheid surveillance, 1906–2004

Michele Bruno was one of nearly 350 partygoers in attendance when police in Forest Town, Johannesburg, raided a so-called gay party in 1966. South Africa of the time was marked by burgeoning concern within apartheid’s National Party government over homosexuality, considered an aberration and a direct threat to the state and to Calvinistic morals. Indeed, until this time non-normative expressions of sexuality and gender, often conflated as one and the same, were under “constant but not severe surveillance” in South Africa (Grunkel, 2010, p. 52). As Marc Epprecht (2004) argues, “The military establishment regarded homosexuality as indicative of psychological weakness or unfitness for the coming battle. It also suggested vulnerability to communist blandishments or political opposition to apartheid” (p. 147). It became clear after the party that the police did not have enough legal clout to address what Mark Gevisser (1994) has termed the “queer conspiracy” (p. 31). The raid and those in attendance made front-page news in South Africa and a climate of public and moral outrage followed.