Given that you’ve had quite a bit of attention on you of late, does that change your experience of touring?

I wish! But no: I go back to my hotel when I’m on tour, or to my place, alone and I deal with my shit. I am still excited by the same things, love the same things, because I have the same friends. My imagined self has nothing to do with fame and money. It’s more to do with joy and happiness—no depression! That’s utopia; when you float down the street.

I’d like to ask you a bit about what led you to who and where you are now. Can you tell me something of your formative years, how you became interested in music, performing, fashion, all these arenas where you are making such an impact?

It was in my early 20s that I really came of age. I was reading all these African authors, all these black writers—Zakes Mda, K. Sello Duiker, James Baldwin—and I discovered myself through my excavation of my blackness and my queerness. Living in the bible belt of Johannesburg, I had this sense that what people were doing was sinful but exciting. In my early childhood, my mum and her sisters, who were all opera singers, and my drama teacher...they all showed me a level of excellence.

I think we’re all looking for signs of gayness or queerness to affirm ourselves when we are growing up. Who was doing that for you?

There were a lot of queer and trans people in my early life. My mum and my dad were in a choir, and those queer people were doing the hair of half the people in the choir; they were an example of otherness.

Given that you were in this very religious community, how did that queerness play out to them?

It was such a complicated thing. There was quite a lot of visible queerness, but it was a particular type of queerness that was allowed. I don’t want to say those people were characters...but, it’s like what you see in movies: the queer best friend. But even then my family would make fun of them; to make themselves look better, to make themselves feel superior. I don’t want to be anyone’s joke, canned laughter, their comic relief. As a sexual being, which I am, and a queer person, which I am, I am not going to convince people to like me by neutering myself.

You mentioned you came out after your first album.

I came out at 17 to my best friends and cousins, and then I was outed to the rest of my family when I was 19, then I went back into the closet until my first album. I was going to gay clubs on Saturday night, kissing boys, and then back to church on Sundays, asking for forgiveness [laughs]. That yo-yo.

I read before our conversation that you’d been subjected to a form of gay conversion therapy. If you can, and want, would you tell me something about that?

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