I'm not designed to interact with society.

Traveling is one of few zones of experience where you are not directly plugged into the world around you. You're not part of the society you're passing through.

I long for a South African society that's free of ideological forces - no society can ever really be free of ideological forces - but I wish it was free of power.

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.

What I don’t understand about your type is that you want to emulate the other side. You kick up such a commotion about being different, and all you want is to be the same.

Almost overnight, white people have gone from being very powerful to potentially irrelevant. Their future in South Africa is not what many had envisaged, so it involves a lot of reinvention.