I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.

The hardest part of letting my son join the Army was knowing that he didn’t take orders very well. The next hardest was knowing I hadn’t spent very much time teaching him to iron and I knew battle fatigues weren’t the easiest to do.

A large part of the problem, is that young people are being born into the world and growing up without much hope. And so, they become murderers, they become suicide bombers.

When people see what I have now, they have no idea of where I came from and how I didn't have anything growing up.

I know growing up as a young gay person how much you hate yourself, how much you already think you're different.