“I’ve never come out of the closet because I’ve never been in it,” says Dirk Slater of his openness as a homosexual man. Growing up in California, in the United States of America, Slater says that he was always comfortable and conscious of his gayness and was never pressured to make an effort to conceal it. He was in his teens when the first cases of Karposi’s sarcoma – the first known symptom of what was later to be termed AIDS – were observed among American homosexual men in, 1981. At this time, homosexuality was heavily stigmatised and seen as the cause of this outbreak. “It was a scary time,” confesses Slater, now 44. “There was this gay cancer going around and a lot of people died from it, including my own friends.” Yet even through all that fear and lack of understanding, Slater was able to live openly as a gay man. “If you are in a big city (like California), it’s usually okay,” he says of the prevailingly tolerant environment that large cities offer to people with alternative sexual preferences in the US. “A gay couple can often show public affection and not get into trouble for this, but this is not the same in smaller towns.”

And it is usually not the same in other countries where homosexuality is openly condemned and criminalised. In some parts of the world, penalties against homosexual practice are as extreme as the death penalty. And while efforts have been made to decriminalise homosexuality, globally, same-sex couples do not often enjoy the same rights as heterosexual couples. In many countries, gay partners can neither marry legally nor adopt children.

South Africa, however, shows signs of change and optimism for the homosexual community. In 2006, South Africa became the first African country to give same-sex couples the right to marry. The Civil Union Act – the piece of legislation passed to endorse this – offers gay couples the same rights and recognition as heterosexuals.

But, as Sally-Jean Shackleton, Executive Director of Women’s Net, a South African gender NGO, points out, “There is positive legislation but the negative side of this is that in practice, the lives of those who challenge the binary construct of gender are still very much in danger.”

Along with facing acts of violence, Shackleton feels that lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender and intersexual people (or LGBTI) are often marginalised in HIV programming. “Only LGBTI groups are driving the process,” she states, citing examples of the unavailability of dental dams – for protection during oral sex between women – as a way that the HIV protection needs of lesbians were not being met.  Dental dams are thin, square pieces of latex that are used for oral-vaginal or oral-anal sex and are also usually used in dental procedures, hence their name. “Men can protect themselves with condoms but the same is not true for women.”

Shackleton also states the fact that mainstream healthcare providers are often not places where LGBTI can get information on HIV prevention tools that suit their needs. Also, the double stigma of being termed sexually non-conformist, as well as HIV positive, is noted as a deterrent for many in seeking HIV prevention, treatment, care and support options. “People are afraid to be visible,” adds Slater. “It’s ten times harder to come forward if you are HIV positive and homosexual, at the same time.”

Amy, not her real name, is a 24-year old Lebanese woman who echoes Shackleton’s sentiments. “Society tends to classify LGBTI all the same,” she says. This, she feels generalises the different issues they face individually, and does not adequately address the specific needs and services that they require.

Amy classifies herself as ‘queer’ and says that for herself, there is no such concept as being a man or a woman. As such, she does classify herself, or her sexual preferences, by this dual system.

“People see us as perverts and think that they need to ‘heal’ people like me and others, by correcting us through hormone injections or a sex change,” adds Amy.

Slater mentions that homosexuals also tend to be commodified as ‘wedges’ used in electoral campaigns to either win or lose votes. “(George) Bush used the fact that candidates like (Al)Gore and (John) Kerry were tolerant of homosexual issues as a way to scare away conservatives from voting for them,” he states of the previous US president’s election campaigns.

It is thus respect for different beliefs, as well as enactment and implementation of enabling legislation that Slater, Shackleton and Amy all wish for. “We need to support alternative ideas around masculinity and promote alternative role models as a means of creating an enabling environment for all to freely express themselves,” says Shackleton.

“Governments need to stop being stupid!” states Slater. “And cultures need to stop ostracising people who are different. “

If you are a boss, the next time you catch one of your staff members on Facebook, don’t be too brutal with them.

Facebook is actually not all that bad for your business.

That is, unless, your employees use the social marketing tool merely for catching up with long lost friends and chatting with relatives in the Diaspora about the situation back home in Zimbabwe. That would certainly qualify as gross abuse of office time.

But Facebook and business do actually mix.

Initially, Facebook (or ‘thefacebook’, as it was known then) was created as a tool for students attending Harvard University to keep track of one another. It was founded in 2004 by former Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, and later grew to allow even more educational institutions to be able to access the tool.  In 2005, ‘thefacebook’ was officially launched as Facebook. And in 2006, it was made freely accessible to those who were not members of educational institutions – that is, the global public.

And so what started as a simple university campus project has since sprouted to become one of the biggest global social networking fora. Regardless of nationality and bandwidth allowances, almost everyone is using FB – as it is affectionately known – as a way to stay in touch. And today, tens of millions of people around the world log on to Facebook to share news and information of all kinds.

So how does Facebook help your business?

Well, if many of your business contacts are registered users on Facebook, it can make keeping in touch with them much easier. With Facebook, you don’t need to know email addresses or any other contact details.  Once both you and the other user have confirmed each other as friends on Facebook, you gain easy access to one another – which means that you can compose and send mail which the other person will be notified of via their usual email address, or which they will see upon logging on to their Facebook account. This certainly saves time on trying to guess which email address a person may be using at a certain time.

Secondly, Facebook helps you to get back in touch with important contacts whom you might have lost track of. All you have to do is conduct a search by simply typing in the name of your contact. Facebook then aggregates all of its members that have the same name, or a similar name. Once you have found the right person, you send them a friend request, which is a formal request for that person to become your friend on Facebook. If that person accepts your friend request, you become able to see their details and information, and vice versa.

But even more important is the fact that on Facebook, members can create groups. If you want to, you can create a group for your organisation, company, advocacy campaign or cause. When creating the group, you can give some information about it so that users on Facebook can know whether or not they would like to join it.

So how, you might ask, will people find out about your group.

For me, this is really where the social aspect of Facebook becomes evident. If I join a group which a friend tells me about on Facebook, a notice will appear on my Facebook homepage – which is visible to all of my friends. If one of my friends sees this notice and is interested, they can also join the group. And this information will be visible to all of that person’s friends, who can then also join the group. So, a friend of a friend of a friend can find out something new just by the web of associations that Facebook allows. In addition, the administrator (or creator) of a group can send invitations to Facebook friends to join that group.

Personally, I think that it is a low-cost, efficient way of disseminating information.

And if a person joins a group, they will always receive notices of new information that the group might have posted. For instance, many Zimbabweans, and those around the world, joined a Facebook group called ‘Free Jestina’ in solidarity with the imprisoned human rights activist, Jestina Mukoko. And through this group, they received regular updates on her trial status, as well as any events being held in solidarity with her plight.

And as a fourth point, commercial and non-commercial entities are fast realising the potential that Facebook has to boost their profiles with the public. Just visit popular websites like BBC or the South African Mail and Guardian and scroll down some of the pages on offer. There, you will see the Facebook icon and words to the effect ‘Add to Facebook’, or a bookmark icon that will reveal the FB icon, among others, when clicked on. If you click on that icon and give your Facebook account details when prompted to do so, a small teaser and URL to that particular news story, audio or video clip will be added to your Facebook page.

But in order for your friends to see the whole article or clip, when they click on the same URL, they will be re-transferred to that very page on that particular website. And in effect what you, as the Facebook user, do is stimulate traffic on that website. And this is what any company or organisation with a website would like.

But of course, the utility of Facebook presupposes reliable and constant access to the Internet – something which is not uniform throughout Zimbabwe. And because of this, this social tool tends to skip a large portion of its key targets.

However, for those with regular access to the Internet, Facebook is well worth considering as a tool for effective marketing and communication. And rather than ban employees from using it, think of innovative ways of how they can use it to spread the word of your cause to their many friends around the world, who can then spread the message on to even more people.

You may call Facebook a waste of time. And I do agree that if a person spends the whole morning doing Facebook quizzes titled “What type of cheese are you?” or “Which Russian Princess are you?”, then that is of no use to anybody.  But I am still optimistic about FB and like to think of it as the spark that has the potential to start a good warm fire of information dissemination in our nation.

Back when I was a little girl, in Bulawayo, my sister and I would frequent the Indian grocery store down our road to buy ourselves the cheap fruity sweets that cost only a cent each.

“Warrr you want?” would ask the old Indian storekeeper’s wife, purring away in her broken English. At her question, we would let out a few unrepressed giggles, and then point to the clear jar on the counter, filled with the bright-coloured balls of sweets.

Meanwhile the storekeeper would be carrying on the most laughter-inducing conversations with one or other of his Zimbabwean employees. “You!” he would shout, “Hamba thatha sinkwa, faka lapha.”

In translation, this is an instruction, given in IsiNdebele, for the employee to go to the delivery van parked outside and bring in the loaves of bread ordered for the shop for that day.

But though understandable, the instructions would be given in what is often called ‘chilapalapa’ – language that is neither syntactically correct, nor complete, but which is coherent enough to be understood.

Because we were so young and laughed ruthlessly at the couple’s language gaffes, my sister and I were not the shop owners’ favourite customers at all.

In fact, the storekeeper’s wife eventually took to hiding that jar of one-cent sweets each time she saw us passing outside the shop window, just so we wouldn’t come in.

I often cringe when I think about how rude we were.

But as life would have it, today I find myself in the very same situation. Little children, probably the same age as I was, laugh at me now, each time I try to string together a sentence in German.  Suddenly, I am the foreigner whose thoughts are unintelligible!

What goes around, indeed, comes around!

Having been in Germany for three weeks now, and having taken a short German lesson course during that time, I feel it only right that I should try to blend in with the crowd with a few sentences in the local language.

But alas, my tongue almost always fails me when it comes to all those guttural sounds that one must produce when speaking German.

And this is why the little boys and girls tug at their mothers’ coats and laugh as I try to order a meal or find out how much something costs. Perhaps it’s better that I can’t understand what they will be saying to their mothers as they point at me, giggle then whisper in German!

How degrading it feels when the shoe is on the other foot!

But kids will be kids.

The grown-ups are always quite patient, though, and often willing to try their own shaky English when we can’t seem to click in German. And what ends up ensuing is an informative conversation in pure pidgin. “Where is die … err… die zug, please,” I might say, asking for directions to the train station. ( I always seem to get lost when I meander about on my own!) “Dast ist over ze,” the person might respond, pointing in the direction of the train station. “Ah, dankeschon,” I will respond, giving my thanks in unadulterated German, before scampering off to the station to bother yet another stranger with more of my Ger-nglish!

John 11 verse 35 is the shortest verse in the Christian Bible. And in its conciseness, it describes the pain that Jesus, one of the most prominent figures of history, felt at the death of a much-loved friend, Lazarus.

“Jesus wept,” it reads.

Jesus – a teacher and man of great esteem – was actually humble and unashamed enough to show his emotions.

But today, any man who dares let the floodgates of his innermost emotions fling open is derisively termed a ‘cry baby’ or ‘little girl’.

I got to thinking about this whole topic over the weekend after watching Roger Federer win his first ever French Open tennis title. As the Swiss national anthem played and his nation’s flag was raised, the guy just couldn’t hold back his elation and shed a few tears of release.

But while I enjoyed his show of honest emotion, many others thought he was just being a big baby. “He won so why is he crying?!” asked a perplexed friend. “Besides, it’s really embarrassing for a guy of his age to cry like that!”

I blame such attitudes on gendered socialisation whereby as children, little boys are often told not to cry because, as the saying goes, “Boys don’t cry.”

I remember meeting one little boy walking along the street with his father, bawling as though his life were at an end. “If you keep crying like that, I will buy you a dress and turn you into a girl,” scolded his father. “Would you like that?” The little boy, who couldn’t have been more that five years old, vigorously shook his head and almost instantly stopped crying. The thought of losing his male identity was far too much for him to bear.

See how from an early age, our gender identities are already fixed for us by our elders, leaving little room for adjustment?  And also note how crying is associated with femininity, and therefore weakness? Patriarchy is already at play.

So for a grown man to show open emotion is considered a watering down (excuse the unintended pun!) of his masculinity, and all the connotations of strength and braveness that this entails.

The very few times that I have witnessed men cry is upon the death of someone. And correct me if I am wrong, but more than often, men will only cry at the death of a male someone – that is, a father, brother or male friend.

I have seen men stand strong and firm at the loss of a wife or mother, but lose all composure at the loss of a father or close friend. And perhaps even more bizarrely, break down when their football team loses a cup final, or is relegated to a lower divison!

Once again, I think that our socialisation tells us that it is okay to cry for dad, but to cry for mum – the epitome of feminine gentleness and protection – implies that you are just a big baby. And it’s somehow also okay to cry if Manchester United loses the UEFA Champions’ League final because it’s a clique of guys involved in very masculine activity.

Let’s stop justifying when it’s okay for a man to cry and when it is not. People react differently to situations and it’s really not for anyone to gauge whether or not it’s right to cry at a certain event or time.

But the name-calling has to stop. And men ought to be free to express their emotions in whatever way they please.

First it was the Pope peddling misinformation about condoms. And now, recently, it was the turn of a Swazi Member of Parliament to fuel stigma around HIV and AIDS.

As a measure to avoid the onward transmission of the virus, the MP, Timothy Myeni, suggested that those who have tested positive for HIV be marked on their buttocks with a special insignia to warn possible lovers of their status. This, he was quoted as saying, would assist possible sexual partners in verifying the status of the other person prior to engaging in intercourse.

After much backlash, Myeni later retracted the suggestion claiming that it had been a trap set by the devil to destroy his name.

If anything, it seems to me to me that this was a trap set by Myeni to destroy the name of people living with HIV.

A person’s HIV status is a confidential issue, to be disclosed as and when an individual feels ready to do so. Branding people only helps to peddle the stigma and discrimination that people with HIV already experience. In other words, labelling people living with HIV would only serve to make them feel more ostracised and unwelcomed – as though they were an untouchable and unlovable caste.

And before his utterances, Myeni really should have thought through the process of how this whole operation would be carried out. Would such branding take place soon after an HIV test? And how?

Imagine the scenario of visiting an HIV testing centre, testing positive for HIV and then being told to proceed to another area to have your buttocks stamped with a sign that states your positive status. Would this really encourage more people to get tested? Very unlikely.

Besides, as was noted by an Oxfam representative, Jacob Nanjakululu, at the recent Global Citizens Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, 90% of people living with AIDS do not know their status. Therefore, such practices as branding those who dare to find out their status would only lead to an increase in the number of people who do not know their status.

The consequences of such lack of knowledge could be dire, as more people could potentially, and unknowingly, transmit the virus on to their sexual partners, thereby creating a web of new infections, and a greater burden of need for treatment, care and support services.

Is that we really want or need in a world that should be becoming more tolerant towards people living with HIV? And are we saying that people with HIV cannot and will not disclose their status to their sexual partners, otherwise? Surely, such thinking makes people living with HIV out to be little children who cannot think or act on their own.

While discussing this issue with a colleague, he told me that in Malawi, a certain chief had suggested that people found to be HIV positive should have a permanent scar etched onto their foreheads so as to warn all other villagers of the potential danger these people posed to their health. This is not much different to what Myeni had proposed, and equally hard to understand.

How sad it is that people try to fight stigma with yet even more stigma.

Rather than focusing on branding people, I say it’s time to focus on providing them with treatment and other requisite services. But even more importantly, it’s time to start loving them and respecting them as human beings.

I really still can’t get over the number of times that I have ridden a Mercedes Benz in the last few days. No, I haven’t bought myself one, and no, I haven’t found some rich man to take me on cruises in his Kompressor. The reason for this luxury is that I currently find myself in Germany – the home of the hallowed Merc.

Most taxis here are Mercedes Benz models – sedans, SUVs, station wagons – you name it. And boy, do the drivers know how to step on the gas. The top speed I have experienced thus far is 182km/hr. Now, the roads here are much better than back in beloved Zim; no potholes to avoid and so far, no drivers with a ‘kombi mentality’ ready and willing to swerve and slice their way through traffic. And apparently, there are no speed limits on certain stretches of road. But still, the ease with which the drivers step on the gas makes me whisper short prayers as my stomach ties up in knots.

I have been in Europe now for about 5 days – and my impression of it, thus far, is mostly good. What I especially like about Germany is that the people here have really managed to maintain the essence of their culture, of which I feel that language is a major constituent. Language of instruction within schools and general conversations are carried out in German. And so, almost all TV and radio stations, newspapers and street signs are in German. A classic example of my shock at this was when, at the airport in Munich, I tried to get myself something to read at the bookstore there. ABSOLUTELY nothing in there was in English!

And if you want to find your way around, you must always move around with a German. Not everyone one meets will be conversant in English, and a German speaker must always be at hand to help out.

That really got me thinking about local languages back home. If a person can only speak Shona or Ndebele, we tend to look down upon them as uneducated. Perhaps, this is because the main language of instruction within schools and the workplace remains English. And so, to not be conversant in the language implies that a person has not been to school.

But even more apparent – at least to me – is that many of us have grown to associate English with certain eloquence and status that we feel our own languages cannot offer us. Just think of the extra respect that the village elders get from other village folk if they can speak English, or dress in English-style suits. “He speaks the white man’s language so he must be wise and know a lot about the world,” is the mentality these folk tend to possess.

For me, this reasoning stems from the colonial legacy imbibed into people that makes us believe that expression in local languages cannot be erudite or eloquent.

Imagine if more local authors could publish in the vernacular, and if a market developed for their work. Imagine if there was a more diverse vernacular print media industry in Zimbabwe. Currently, the local language newspapers in Zimbabwe tend to be sensationalist and light-hearted. What if these media were used to raise the political consciousness of the masses, who are generally not so conversant in English and need not only to be entertained, but also to be informed and educated?

Just a few days in, and already a wealth of observations and contemplations on the difference between two fine nations.