“Everything we do is constantly performative. I think we're all performing constantly.”
Hearing that can be both an indictment but also a reassurance. It speaks to the universality about how people - men especially - show up in the world.
While at the Open Book Festival, which took place 4–6 September 2026 in Cape Town, authors from various parts of South Africa and world, gathered to not only discuss their books, but also examine some of the deeply introspective themes they layered into their books. Whether it was intentional or not.
One of the first panels at the festival, “Writing Queer Masculinity”, saw author Riley Herbert-Henry lead fellow writers Zubayr Charles, Preven Reddy and Wesley Roodt in a discussion about creating space for vulnerability.
- Charles is a playwright, poet and author of the book “Haram”. He is currently an English teacher at a high school in Cape Town.
- Reddy is an award-winning comedian, actor and digital creator based in Johannesburg. His debut book “Qualified Disappointment” is adapted from his one-man show, ‘Prev Reddy is a Triple Threat’, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2024 and was performed in London in 2025.
- Roodt is a Chevening scholar with an MA in Film, Television and the Moving Image from the University of Westminster. The son of two former SABC news correspondents, he is a scriptwriter and “All the Saints” is his debut novel.
Herbert-Henry did not ease the writers into such a discussion, and instead presented the authors with a challenge in unpacking what masculinity is, what does it look like, and also how does queerness fit into it?
It is not an easy conversation to find your way into, but definitely a discussion that speaks to the novels that the three authors themselves had to contend with throughout their writing process.
Herbert-Henry started the discussion with the authors reading excerpts from their book, before kicking off the discussion: “There comes with growing up, with going through boyhood, a moment where we realise what it means to be a man. What masculinity is supposed to look like… I wonder if each of you could just say when you realise that being a man was a certain conception, and what your initial feeling was towards that?”
Charles shared that in how he grew up, being surrounded by a lot of women, “my idea on masculinity was framed through a lot of femininity”.
“It might sound like a contradiction, but I only learned about masculinity outside of the home when I went to school, and I was taught that men can't behave a certain way or, (asked) why are you acting like that? At school, you kind of feel like you don't fit the mold.
“The masculinity I learned was from school structures and the broader community, and growing up in a very strict religious community, masculinity was also tied in faith and culture,” Charles said.
“It became this weird kind of boiling pot, where do I fit in? Who am I? How do I see the world? Because of course, society, community, culture, and religion tells you to be a certain way, and (when) you don't fit in, it can kind of, really damage you, and really affect your self-esteem in the way you, not only see yourself, but see the world.”
Reddy offered a counter-experience sharing that coming from a very conservative family in Durban, and where his family had a lot of cousins, it was the family interaction where he first understood masculinity.
“I would see those cousins almost every weekend, and the boys would play thunee (a fast-paced, traditional trick-taking card game that originated within Indian community in Durban) or just job shadowing so that when they become of age, they then tap into play thunee with the uncles.
“And I had zero interest in that, and the conversations that would happen during those games were about cars and turbos and I really could not be bothered. Inside the house were the aunties and my female cousins who were just cooking up a storm, gossiping up a storm, and that was where my interest was,” Reddy said.
“So whenever I would try and be a part of that, I would always get pushed outside, and told, ‘go to the boys’, And it wasn't until I started to perform with my cousins.
“My cousins would do little concerts at the braais, and it was like, the moment I performed or did anything that was remotely entertaining, then the fear of queerness kind of disappeared from my family's eyes. It was just, ‘He's probably outspoken’ or ‘Oh, he just wants to perform’,” he said.
“I knew that in order to avoid being outside with the men, I had to dance… But I think it was those early years of seeing the physical segregation, the literal segregation of male and female, and the boys are outside and that's who you are supposed to be… It was drilled in us.
“And so I think that's really when I identified what masculinity is from my lens and from my cultural lens,” Reddy said.
Roodt, who went to an all-boys school, shared that for him, the experience was very bodily as he distinctly remembered being about 12 or 13 and suddenly having a crush.
“You realised that your best friend that you sit next to, you actually, (don’t see as) just your best friend, you just really wanted it close to him. I distinctly remember the first time somebody told me I ran gay… It was like in PT (physical education) I'd run and my wrist would…whatever (limp).
“I remember making a conscious decision then to just hide that. I was so ashamed of that. I used to practice standing up straight and walking with my head up. I always said, I had a carrot up my arse, which is not a very good thing,” Roodt joked. “It's the opposite of what I was going for. So for me, it was very bodily.
“It was this thing, even my (sibilant) ‘s’, I became so aware of lisp-ing because I would lisp. It’s taken a really long time to get over that.
“So to me, the shame was at school. It was to hide the physical markers, that was the difficult thing. The masculinity at a school that I went to, was very much hyper-masculinity, ‘the machismo’,” Roodt said.
Herbert-Henry highlighted that the body, especially within queer literature, the queer body is often a topic of discussion.
“We're always wondering what's happening to the queer body and what it means when we start sharing it with each other, and these sorts of very intimate things, and lots of intimate things, of course, happen across all three of these novels, but what struck me the most was the queer body and performance, right?
“We've always got this sense of we've constantly got to be ‘on’.... The boys in your books are performing for each other. They're performing this form of masculinity,” Herbert-Henry said.
Roodt said that while he is not a psychologist, “It's performative, isn't it? Everything we do is constantly performative. I think we're all performing constantly.”
Charles added that when looking at his formative years, he was super effeminate, and when he got to high school, “not out of choice, but I became more in tune with my masculinity, and I found that there was beauty in that - the duality between the two existed within me”.
Later in the discussion, Herbert-Henry asked, what softness may look like and what may that feel like when they are writing queer characters?
Charles said that there wasn’t a softness in terms of writing “Haram” because he finds it to be a difficult and “quite intense” read.
“I haven't read it yet in its print form, can you believe that? It is a difficult piece for me to read, but the softness comes in for giving myself grace and also being kind to myself.
“I know it's not me in the story, but when I wrote the characters or, when I devised the plot or when I went through the process, it was important for me to separate myself from the story completely from my own sanity.
“Secondly, to also be kind to myself as the writer,” Charles said.
Roodt said: “It is an interesting word, ‘softness’. Because it's used as an insult. Softie. I distinctly remember being called sensitive or overly sensitive, and I actually get told that all the time.”
They said that over the years they have had to learn acceptance, be it through writing or conversation, but that there is no clear-cut answer on how to show up for oneself.
Roodt said: “I mean, it's a lot of therapy and self-acceptance and learning to like yourself. It takes a long time. You write a book and you talk about it. But no, I don't have the answers.
“I wish I had the answers.”
theolin.tembo@nationalmg.co.za