A n ana lysis of the intersections bet ween race and class in representations of Black and white gay men in QueerLife

This article seeks to critically analyse how intersections of race and class shape representations of Black and white gay men in QueerLife , a South African online magazine. It focuses on QueerLife ’s ‛ 4men ’ section and how its content represents classed and raced gay identities. My argument is that QueerLife forwards racialised and classed representations of the gay lifestyle, which reinforce homonormalisation within what is known as the “Pink Economy”. Using Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) to read the underlying meanings in texts and images, the article concludes that QueerLife is complicit in the construction of gay identity categories that seek to appeal to urban, white, middle-class gay-identifying communities in South Africa. The article also demonstrates how, when Black bodies are represented in QueerLife , exceptionalism mediates their visibility in this online magazine. Overall, the findings demonstrate how Black and white gay bodies are mediated online and how their different racial visibilities are negotiated within the system of structural racism. The Pink Economy thrives on the construction of affluent gay and lesbian culture. The article concludes that QueerLife is complicit in the construction of gay identity categories that seek to appeal to these affluent, urban, white, middle-class, gay-identifying individuals and communities in South Africa. It also demonstrates that when Black bodies are represented in QueerLife , class and exceptionalism are used as ways of mediating their visibility; that is, making them conform to rubrics of whiteness.


Introduction
Paradoxical as it may seem, it remains -to this day -unclear whether the increase in gay representation in magazines is a good thing, considering the race and class politics that lurk in the South African landscape. There is, as such, a need for researchers to pursue this inquiry, particularly in an era where the emergence of online magazines has led to a greater distribution of gay representations. South African magazines that represent gay men include Exit, Gay Pages, Black Mamba, The Advocate and QueerLife. QueerLife is a magazine that hosts several contributors under its "4men" and "4women" web sections, and the other aforementioned magazines are important spaces because they expose the myth of the rainbow nation and the difficulties of the pursuit of race and class equality within the already excluded gay community, as well as the persistence of structural racism. In apartheid South Africa, race was divided along four categories, namely white, coloured, Indian and African/Black (Posel 2001). I however use "Black" in this article to broadly refer to people of colour, that is, "African", "Coloured" and "Indian" persons. "White" in this article is used to refer to persons whose skin colour, nose shape and hair type have historically been used as a means of telling them apart from the former, giving them access to privileged spaces and resources. Meanwhile the term "class" is used to refer to an economic group with economically distinct features that are shared among its perceived members.
Along with the gradual ascent of gay magazines both in print and online, there is now a greater appreciation for sexual diversity in South Africa (Beetar 2012). However, this sexual diversity is heavily loaded with the continued dehumanisation of gay people by homophobic persons, layered with the exclusion of Black and/or poor gay men by upper-middle-class and/or white gay men. The argument presented in this article is that QueerLife exhibits racialised and classed representations of the gay lifestyle that feed into stereotypes that are functional for the Pink Economy. According to Katlego Disemelo (2015:6), the Pink Economy can be understood as 'a hyperreal world of leisure and luxury goods and services which supposedly signify individuated upward mobility within the context of late capitalism'. The Pink Economy thrives on the construction of affluent gay and lesbian culture. The article concludes that QueerLife is complicit in the construction of gay identity categories that seek to appeal to these affluent, urban, white, middle-class, gay-identifying individuals and communities in South Africa. It also demonstrates that when Black bodies are represented in QueerLife, class and exceptionalism are used as ways of mediating their visibility; that is, making them conform to rubrics of whiteness. These assertions are informed by existing literature examining the intersections of race and class in gay politics by Gustav Visser (2008), Samantha King (2009) Disemelo (2015, Tommaso Milani (2015), Finn Reygan, (2016) and Zethu Matebeni (2018) among others. Similar to the arguments made by these researchers, I hold that the representation of gay men in QueerLife adds to the racialised and classed aesthetics that inform the imagery of the ideal South African gay man. This is in a context where the post-apartheid rights-based dispensation has tended to benefit white upper-middleclass homosexuals (Milani 2015). This article's contribution to existing knowledge lies in its exposure of how race and class act as factors that mediate one's position as an "ideal" gay person online. This is more so in South Africa -a country whose legacy of apartheid saw to it that racial classification informed social status (Posel 2013), creating a race and class divide. This article also concurs with Milani's (2015:443)  South African social identities are rooted in the historical discourse of race and apartheid (Moolman 2013). The earliest forms of gay organisation in South Africa were primarily fronted by white, middle-class gay men, hence the impediments created for Black gay people are still present in the ways in which the local gay press represents a ‛particularised' (white) version of gay masculinity (Reddy 1998:68). That, along with the historical inequities of apartheid, assures gay white men with financial resources the ability to render themselves widely visible in the media, which accounts for why gayness is equated with whiteness in the popular consciousness (Hoad 1999). This is not particular to South Africa. According to Jasbir Puar (2002) and Visser (2008), while North American and European gay spaces disrupt heterosexual norms, they keep racial, gender and class disparities in place. Hence, this article shows how mainstream homosexual cultures in South Africa's preoccupation with west-centric, hetero-masculine images that exclude Black and poor folk (Chappell 2015) ties with homonormalisation and the whitewashing of the global Pink Economy (Disemelo 2015).
According to Posel (2001), race is among the many paradoxes of South Africa's transition from apartheid. Without conflating race with class, this article shows how class, like race, produces an economy of gay men online that either marginalises page 04 of 23 Black and poor gay men or, alternatively, conforms Black gay men to rubrics of whiteness (in the way they are styled, dressed, presented, and so forth). Anne McClintock (1995) argues that no social category exists in isolation, but that each category is brought to life in relation to another and that this could be in contradictory ways. Therefore, race and class both influence the politics of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary gay communities. According to Reygan (2016:86), 'in the postapartheid context, ongoing structural inequalities and racial tensions persist in gay "communities"'. In Reygan's (2016) (2009) found that not only was there an overrepresentation of white homomasculinity, but also, and more significantly, an underrepresentation of Black homomasculinity. This article therefore seeks to contribute to this existing body of knowledge by adding the criterion of "class" to establish the nuances of gay visibility politics. The article works with the intersections of race and class and how they both inform inclusion and exclusion in QueerLife.
Although the rhetoric in post-apartheid South Africa is that of freedom and equality, the legacy of apartheid and forms of racial and economic division it enforced still informs South Africans' daily lives (Swarr 2004), as it has not changed dramatically in terms of its structural application. This division, which is further entrenched by neoliberalism via the commodification of identities, results in "neat" and "consumable" categories into which gay identities are made to fit. Ashley Tellis (2012) posits that the neo-liberal economy has turned gay people into consumers who play by the rules of the market. These consumption practices, which follow those of the corporate world, means that a certain kind of gay man is reproduced and "colonised" by the market in his role as investor and consumer (Brown 2009). This is not limited to South Africa alone. Pushpesh Kumar (2018) also found that in India, the modern gay identity class is imbricated in the formation of gay media consumerism(s). Gay online magazines thus conform to stereotypes that reinforce a culture promoting a desirability informed by exceptional taste. The modern gay identity becomes conflated with class, affluence and access to resources (Reygan 2016). Katherine Sender (2001), in a study of The Advocate magazine, found that gayness in images, discourses and practices, more page 05 of 23 Number 35, 2021 ISSN 2617-3255 often than not, becomes a signifier of consumption. This article concurs with these ideas, suggesting an intersectional analysis of the dynamic relationship between class and race.
In the next section, I give a brief description of QueerLife, followed by an outline of the methodology. The section thereafter provides an analysis of findings. Findings are divided into two themes, namely the exclusion of Black men through seemingly inclusive narratives, and the construction of the ideal gay man through a lense of exceptionalism. These are followed by some concluding remarks.

Brief background of QueerLife
QueerLife is an online magazine that offers writers a space to share their stories.
While QueerLife has a 4men and a 4women section, this article focuses on the representation of gay men in the 4men section, which has the subsections "Man Fun", "Man Health", "Man Opinions", "Man Relationships" and "Man Style". QueerLife claims to be 'South Africa's leading LGBTI destination', 1 hence it is an ideal space to purposively select texts with which to study representations of gay identities. "Gay" is used in this article to refer to men who are sexually attracted to other men, meaning that this article does not focus on lesbian, bisexual, trans and intersex persons.
QueerLife's 4men section is an interesting site of such analysis because, besides earlier research by myself (Vanyoro 2020) articles, however, proved to hold thick data from which two broad themes for this paper were drawn.
The corpus of data was analysed using a Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) framework. (2015), brings our attention to the complex nature of power and its establishment within diverse societies. While Steyn (2015) states that one can use CDL to read through prevailing social relations as one would a text, in this article, CDL is used to read online media texts as testaments of prevailing social relations in the gay community. The online media texts are drawn and analysed to demonstrate how articles in gay magazines subtly exclude poor and/ or Black gay men.

CDL, a tradition propounded by Melissa Steyn
The three criteria of CDL used in this analysis include, first, an understanding of the role of power in constructing differences that make a difference (Steyn 2015). This speaks to how texts that construct categories of people are complicit in creating the illusion that difference is natural. This is despite the fact that '[a]ll of our categories of thinking about difference are socially constructed within unequal power relations' (Steyn 2015:381). This means that while gay people may have different skin colours, tastes or classes, an author's use of these differences to create different types of people, styles and fetishes is political and bears testimony to unequal power relations that determine who has the power to re-present themselves and the "Other." Using CDL, the social construction of gay identity through different texts on gay men was read as complicity in the construction of 'differences that make a difference' (Hall 1997;Steyn 2015:381). This also includes an endorsement of certain gays', characteristics or behaviours that create a false binary where the one who possesses them has more social currency.
Another CDL criterion is a recognition of the unequal symbolic and material value of different social locations. This includes acknowledging hegemonic positionalities page 07 of 23 and concomitant identities, such as whiteness, masculinity, middle-classness, and so forth, and how these dominant orders position those in non-hegemonic spaces (Steyn 2015:382). This CDL criterion facilitates an analysis of the promotion of a certain category of gay, which then dispossesses of another category of gay through representation, as powerful forms of centred positionalities have the ability to define the outside "Other" so that they retain their own psychological and material comfort (Steyn 2015). Hence, this article shows how the construction of a particular kind of white homomasculinity informs the enduring objectification of Black homomasculinity. Last, the article employs a CDL analysis of how systems of oppression intersect, interlock, co-construct and constitute each other, and how they are reproduced, resisted and reframed (Steyn 2015). This criterion houses the theory of intersectionality, in which Patricia Hill Collins (1993) argues that dominant formations are not experienced singly in peoples' lives. The analysis therefore acknowledges the intersections that exist between race, class, gender, sexuality and nation-building. bad. On the other hand, being white in South Africa, has, and continues to, mean the 'repudiation of the sexual desire with [sexual] "others"' (Ratele 2009:170). Black sexuality has always been constructed as the other, evidenced through the policing of miscegenation through the Immorality Act of 1927. The act criminalised sex between a Black and a white person. As the meaning of a text does not reside in the text itself only, but in the context in which the text is produced and decoded (Gill & Gill 2007), this depiction and its headline matters. The context of this text is that of a postapartheid South African nation that is still confronted by politics of good versus bad sexual citizenship within the gay community (Milani 2015). Further down, the anonymous author of the article writes that '[b]ad boys usually lack mental and emotional security; which is why they try to seek out others to fill in for them. They're not men yet, hence the word boys'.
Using CDL, this conflation of particular groups of gay men with boyhood is also read as historically informed by power. to carry out in order to get one themselves. Through the way the author uses the Black man's body as an example of a sexy butt, the exhibited Black man becomes the epitome of sexiness and athleticism. While this article seems innocuous at face value, it may be argued that it has undertones of objectification and sexual racism because the Black man in the image becomes the figure of sexy and an object in the moment. Defined by Mary Dianne Plummer (2007) as non-blatant or non-violent, but more subtle, sexual racism takes the form of unconscious biases in attractions, racial fetishization, and reproductions of ethnosexual stereotypes in pornography. For Disemelo (2015:48), 'Black masculinities and black bodies only hold a minimal (and downright derogatory) place within the Pink Economy as commodified sexual objects whose sole purpose is to sate the desires of white gay men'. Plummer (2007) refers to these as ethnosexual stereotypes, which reflect the historical, political and sociopolitical frameworks in which they are rooted. This means that even when Black masculinities appear to be innocently exercising, the messages to readers might be communicating sexual innuendos.
The image of this Black man exercising also fulfils racial stereotypes of Black athletic exceptionalism. The role of these stereotypes is to hold the Pink Economy together by assigning fixed roles to races in order to establish fixed ways of understanding racialised bodies. This is also evident in another article, titled '[w]hy you need a gym buddy'. 5 The article has an image of a white man with his hand around a Black man's shoulder while staring at and having a conversation with him ( Figure 1).  The author states, 'I woke one Sunday morning with a beer-to-blood ratio that was not conducive to running. It was -2 outside with sideways-flying bullet rain, but I knew I was supposed to meet Peter, one of my more masochistic friends, for a run'. The author's reference to Peter as a "masochistic friend" suggests that he wants us to know that his athletic ability is an important subject in the article. While it is hard to determine who Peter is in the article image, it can still be argued that it is not a coincidence that in one of the few images where a Black man is featured in QueerLife, there is a yet again a discourse of physicality and athleticism. CDL alerts us to the fact that some of these social fault lines established along axes of difference are enduring (Steyn 2015). The recurring association of Black men with fitness-related articles is not innocuous. Laura Azzarito and Louis Harrison's (2008:347)   The article's second paragraph associates this Black man with receptivity by outlining the pros of receiving. It goes on to advise the receiver (of sex), [t]ry to remember some of the most memorable sex you've had, the horny highlights that stick in your mind. Those experiences probably stand out because you were able to fully receive pleasure and give yourself 100 per cent to those sensations. You weren't trying to give and receive at the same time. Instead, you were able to completely accept what was offered, and in doing so, the experience became much more pleasurable and intense.
The author's reference to how the receiver was able to 'fully receive pleasure' and 'accept what was offered' speaks to bottoming in gay male sex (Vanyoro 2020). It Consequently, an orientalist moment is disguised as a moment of freedom to conceal the fact that the Black man appears for the amusement of white readers. The image of the Black man lying on the grass is a recreation of oriental discourses that construct both women and Black people as closer to nature. Chong-suk Han (2007:53) posits that 'Gay men of colour, whether found within western borders or conveniently waiting for white arrival in the far-off corners of the globe, are nothing more than commodities for consumption'. Their representation in sexual narratives obfuscates the way through which racist power operates because, in any given context, power does not name itself as such (Steyn 2015). It is only after assuming a critical reading of texts that these racist undertones become clear.
In an article titled '[i]t's all about the mouth' 7 there is an image header of a Black man staring directly into the camera (Figure 3). The headline of the article infers that the mouth is all-important for the topic the writer is about to discuss. The article then describes ideal oral sex between men. The author of the article also offers the following warning, '[t]here can be issues of control, or of the feeling of loss of control, with which the man on the receiving end needs to be comfortable'. By referring to a discourse of "control" and the "loss of control" that takes place during oral sex, the author is page 13 of 23 This text about the mouth can also be interpreted as a text about a system of a racialised gay pornographic culture that creates neat categories of gay sexual performativity. This is more so in a context where it has been observed that pornography is one of the few spaces in which Black gay men's images are featured as erotic (Mercer & Julien 1995). In other words, the appearance of a Black man in an article with erotic discourse is not innocuous. Rather, it informs a wider sexual politics that associates Black people with sexual adventure. At the same time, the article assumes a seemingly innocent narrative that is written as an everyday account to feed into the depoliticised culture of the mainstream gay scene (Mercer & Julien 1995). Its silence on issues of race and how it is associated with particular sexual roles and positions confirms Steyn's (2015) observation that blindness and distortions tend to infuse the spaces of racial privilege. In other words, narratives that exist in racially charged spaces attempt to be silent on the racial undertones found in such forms of representation.  are eight men and one woman playing rugby at the seaside. The men in the picture are portrayed as ideal gay men, because, as the author writes, '[t]here is that lingering, irrational notion ingrained in South Africa's traditionally sports orientated psyche that the rugby guy is better in bed than his nerdy friends'. Besides being associated with desirable masculinity and sexuality, in South Africa, rugby also mobilises race and class politics. Rugby has been a medium for national identity formation in Wales, New Zealand and South Africa, where it is a central element in the shaping of middleclass, male-dominated hegemony (Nauright & Chandler 1996). The sport has also been a lucrative site for the demonstration of white superiority. In South Africa, rugby has historically been exclusive in terms of gender, class and race (Bolsmann & Parker 2007). It can therefore be argued that the "rugby guy", who is considered "better in bed", is a symbol of a white and/or affluent gay man. This is also evident in the assertion the author makes that, The author states that '[t]he more exclusively labelled [underwear] will, of course, shout money, which is certainly sexy (house labels are clearly out -especially Pep stores and Mr Price ones)'. The author suggests here that more expensive underwear demonstrates "good taste" and increases the attraction of a gay man, while the ones from Pep stores and Mr Price are seen as cheap, non-desirable underwear. Innocent as the categories of "bad" and "good" might seem at face value, they confer or withhold rewards such as inclusion, belonging and acceptance, resulting in eventual exclusion and censure of others (Steyn 2012 Therefore, a "Mr Right" category constructed without an acknowledgement of how gay men in different contexts, such as rural spaces, experience challenges coming out, invokes both class and race privilege. Moreover, an article that commodifies coming out without acknowledging that people do not have the same access to the economic and cultural safety nets that exist for many white or middle-class lesbians and gays, is irresponsible (King 2017). This article, through its suggestion that "Mr Right" is one who has comfort with masculinity, also reinforces hegemonic masculinity.
It makes it sound as if a gay person who presents as feminine cannot be a "Mr Right".
The downside of this discourse is that it is complicit with hetero/cis/normative ideas that expect lesbians to be feminine and gays to be masculine. This shapes gay desirability in QueerLife in a way that suggests that masculine presenting gay men are more desirable than their feminine presenting counterparts (see Vanyoro 2020

Conclusion
This article has demonstrated how race and class generally construct one another in the representation of gay men in QueerLife. It showed how Black people are represented as sexual objects, athletic or well-built. These racial stereotypes lubricate the machinery of the Pink Economy that thrives on the consumption of races.
Representation of white people in QueerLife constructs them as the epitome of gay masculinity. This subtly sustains hegemonic white masculinity as a figure of normalcy in South Africa. The article showed how race is not the singular identity marker that influences the representation of gay men, but that it intersects with other identity markers, such as class. Overall, the analysis in this article shows the importance of holding race and class together, and analysis. It also shows that there is a need to examine seemingly innocent online texts and the underlying aesthetics of power that they have. While such research has been carried out on online magazines such as The Advocate, Gay Pages and QueerLife, there is also a need for research that investigates identity markers such as disability, age and ethnicity. Overall, QueerLife is simply an online carnival for the exhibition of how Black and white gay lives negotiate power relations that were primarily created through the whitewashing of the gay identity offline.