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of mental space and possibility. I remember feeling terrifically happy. People think of promiscuity as something lonely and unsatisfying, but my experience of it, at least then, right at the beginning of my adult life, was overwhelmingly positive. I was intoxicated by human existence, by the city, by racial and cultural diversity. I had an affair with a Muslim in an eighteenth~century Cape Malay bedroom decorated with a tapestry of the Ka'ba. He left me to attend midday prayers at the mosque across the street. I spent a night in an African township hostel, a house of horror and danger in the mythology of my youth, where the neighbors sang tribal hunting songs before they went to bed. Sex was my passport to my own country, and I traveled volup~ tuously, soaking it all up as enthusiastically as any awestruck American on the Champs Elysees. At that point, the last thing I thought of was that I would ever get married. Marriage was, in the prevailing view in my social circles, bourgeois and antiquated, a sexist relic unsuitable for our brave new world of fraternity and rebellion. Marriage and the nuclear family provided warmth, it was true, but we disliked the way that it kept that warmth within itself, closed and tight, like a roasted chestnut. In a way, I had neatly flipped my adolescent concept: marriage was still something distant and "other," but this time married people, with their neurotic co-dependencies, and their oppressive gender roles which maimed and stunted them, were the ones who were abnormal and pathological. I had nothing but contempt for gay and lesbian people who wanted to marry-sad imitation heterosexuals in their suburban houses, with washing machines and matching butch-femme outfits and cats and dogs to compensate for their conspicuous biological in~ ability to have children. In my own life I felt energized, complete. I had people with whom to have lunch, share a joke, and talk gender-bending philosophy. I even felt loved and cherished: I had people I could talk to when I got depressed, and when I got tick~bite fever or the flu, I had friends who would make me chicken soup and rooibos tea. At age twenty-two, in short, I already felt that I had got hold of the most important things in life-sex, work, a sense of purpose, and support and affection-and it was hard for me to imagine, in anything more than the broadest outlines, a time when my needs might be different. Of course I was wrong; we are always, at some level, wrong-the human condition is that of being wrong. Among all my memories of that time, there is one in particular that sums up for me how short~ sighted I was. At a Pride March in Johannesburg, a mild-mannered man, middle~aged, balding, wearing a black business suit and tie despite the blistering heat, asked me to sign a petition to allow the legal Winter 200i-05
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