Salon Kewpie: The Legacy Project
01.04 - 13.04.2024

The Kewpie Collection, an astonishing archive of some 600 photographs from Kewpie’s personal collection, represents perhaps the most comprehensive and detailed documentation of queer existence in apartheid-era South Africa, and one of the most impactful records of 20th-century African queerness to date. Spanning three decades —1950s to 1980s — the archive offers a fascinating view of how Kewpie, a coloured queer who rejected gender norms and binary classification, resisted apartheid’s discriminatory rules by simply existing in her self-made mythos. Born Eugene Fritz in 1941, Kewpie was a talented dancer and socialite who pursued her passion for hairdressing. She opened her salon, Salon Kewpie, which quickly became a vibrant queer hotspot for the District Six community, frequently hosting charity cabarets and kikis. 

The initial exhibition, Kewpie: Daughter Of District Six (2018), a collaborative project between the District Six Museum and The GALA Queer Archive, was unveiled six years ago. For countless queer, transgender, and gender non-conforming South Africans – it felt like a revelation. At last, here was a hxstory to call our own. More powerful still is how the archive became a mirror, reflecting the present by way of the past. It’s a cinéma vérité of snapshots and candid moments that immortalises the everyday – not unlike a family photo album (or our Instagram feeds). There exists a profound commonality underlying Kewpie’s collection that is otherwise absent from much of the limited documentation of South Africa’s gay histories, humanising the queer body in a way that should be the default, not the exception. The project has since expanded into interventions, comprising workshops, panel discussions, and a ballroom showcase most recently staged by the Salon Kewpie Collective (organised by Nina Milner and CC Vineyard).

The project’s most recent panel discussion unfolded between CC Vineyard, District Six Museum’s Tina Smith, GALA’s Keval Harie, and scholar Ruth Ramsden-Karelse. The cathedral-like auditorium of The District Six Homecoming Centre was illuminated with handpicked images from the archive, gesturing toward the focus theme for 2024: ‘visibility.’ There was Kewpie at the Trafalgar Baths, on the streets of District Six as her drag persona Capucine, with her chosen family of queerdos and outcasts at her adopted palace, ‘The Queen’s Hotel.’ In one arresting image – she appears as a statuesque glamazon draped in leopard print amongst the rubble and debris of a demolished District Six. Essential to Kewpie’s narrative, and running parallel in the archive, is the history of District Six – caught in glimpses of the mise en scene that Kewpie and her ‘girls and gays’ occupy. It’s an intertwining of space, body, and time that affirms what we know of District Six as a diverse and forward-thinking community. It is necessary to recognise the sort of privilege this afforded Kewpie – District Six was a radical haven for queerness (or as it was called then, ‘moffie culture’) to thrive. An image of Kewpie, beaming out at the viewer from an aura of rose blossoms, incited a question from the audience: “but do these photos really show how hard it was for her?”

District Six’s presence is a constant reminder that these images are as much historical artefacts as they are cultural, and are often scrutinised as such in search of “the truth” of Kewpie’s existence. While The Kewpie Archive demonstrates the importance of excavating queer hxstories for the public domain, this visibility subjects the archive to a critical lens informed by history’s heteronormative bias. Through this lens, the queer body has become inextricably synonymous with struggle, its depictions and representations tethered to narratives of suffering and trauma that keep it othered. If not immediately visible, as is the case with the Kewpie Archive, the assumption is made that this conflict must nevertheless exist, for we have been conditioned to believe that “the truth” of the queer experience is suffering. The Kewpie Archive challenges this by contradicting what we’ve been sold as historical fact– that LGBTQIA+ existence in apartheid South Africa, particularly for queer bodies of colour, was sordid. Other documentations of the era support this narrative – Simon Nkoli’s lobbying and arrest, the formulation of gayle as a method of concealment, and testimonies from The Aversion Project (a medical torture programme led by Aubrey Levin to obtain more information about the treatment of homosexual military personnel during the apartheid era). Relegated to secrecy, what little we have outside of Kewpie frames South Africa’s brown queer history in relation to struggle, activism, and conflict. Kewpie’s archive is oppositional  – it highlights the brown queer body in joy and intimacy. Her’s is a deftly phenomenological account of a queerness not immediately at odds with its environment. Here, struggle lacks agency. What becomes visible is Kewpie’s humanity.

In the exhibition notes for Kewpie: Daughter Of District Six, photographer Billy Biggs, who may have taken the majority of Kewpie’s photos in the collection, notes how “Kewpie always wanted me to take her when she’s happy.” Perhaps how the archive should be read, then, is at face value. Why question what Kewpie herself provides us with as fact? In her hand-scribbled notes in the corners of some of her photographs, Kewpie often fabulates spaces away from reality – a friend’s home becomes ‘Las Vegas,’ a motel the lavish ‘The Queen’s Hotel.’ You get a sense of how she curated her reality to match the 1960s movie star pastiche she constructed as her identity. To fill the gaps of Kewpie’s archive with assumptions of conflict and states of suffering is to discredit the subversive prowess of her myth-making, to usurp her narrative. Rather, reading it invites critical fabulation. As called for by cultural historian Saidiya  Hartman, the method of critical fabulation seeks to redress history’s failure to accurately record marginalised narratives, by using presented facts to imagine potentialities. This is not to suggest that the archive be regarded as fictitious, but rather that we examine it with respect to the role that fabulation plays in the construction and performance of queer identity. In his seminal text Cruising Utopia (2009), José Esteban Muñoz argues for queerness as a futurity-bound phenomenon, not so much concerned with the present moment as it is with imagining potential futures beyond it. Fabulation in practice pierces the veil between queerness’s potential utopias and lived reality, challenging the latter by shifting it closer to the former. The archive then, is a case study not only in queer self-idealisation but in how queerness can imagine potential futures that can become hxstorial fact. Kewpie’s hxstory, with all its fabulations and then imagined futures, reclaims the queer narrative away from suffering and toward joy. 

The quiet genius of Kewpie’s collection is how it invites us to continue in her legacy of myth-making, asking us to think more fabulously. Here, the spaces unseen are spaces for us to fabulate a past that might give credence to the present. Try as we might to extract ‘truth’ from these photos, it is the fantasy that is, and has always been, the most impactful. 

The archive showcases mythmaking as an act of survival, a cunning use of the spaces in between to protect the private by performing the public. It’s a known fact amongst queer people that our existence demands a certain level of delusion. This is not, to use language true to the experience, a ‘read’ – it’s essential to how queerness instigates paradigm shifts in practice. Queerness defies absolutes informed by systems that otherwise erase the queer body. Kewpie’s hxstory is that of her own making, and a reminder that often, the most radical thing we can do as queer people, is to celebrate being alive in a world built to kill us.