Tash Pride: Queering up the moustache
Tash Pride: Queering up the moustache
One of my earliest memories of a moustache is of my father — a man filled with love, but for whom understanding a queer child in a fractured home was never going to be simple. Spoiler alert: he is now a strong ally.
The photo albums of my early childhood are full of thick, juicy moustaches — that glorious hallmark of the 80s. My father’s and my uncle’s magnificent tashes became symbols of a masculinity that wasn’t mine. Looking back now, I laugh: those moustaches were often paired with flamboyantly queer short shorts in bright yellows, pinks, and oranges — the sort of thing you’d now find in a contemporary Addicted Collection. I own a pair, perhaps unsurprisingly.
When I started medical school in 2008, moustaches made a comeback in my life. The Movember Movement — founded in 2003 in Australia — was sweeping through campus. I remember standing on UCT’s lower campus, surrounded by men growing fresh foliage in solidarity for men’s health. I found myself on the outside. The behaviours, the jokes, the camaraderie — it all felt like a “dude-bro” community that wasn’t made for me. It was at that time that an entirely different community took me in. I was welcomed into the colourful world of queerness, and it was good.
My mother asked me this morning about a particular aspect of the queer experience — one I’ve revisited with my family over the years. For me, queerness has become a place of safety — a lens through which I’ve questioned the world. Yet, despite all the studying, thinking, and living within it, I am still sometimes left without clear answers. My mother’s question was simple: why is the queer experience so sexualised?
From Trauma to Joy
Growing up queer meant that attraction was linked to concealment, deceit, rejection, and for those of us who came to adolescence during the height of the HIV epidemic in South Africa, deep-seated fear. Many well-meaning loved ones responded from this place of fear — fear for safety, health, and survival. But in that fear, they forget that sexuality is also about connection, joy, play, and love. How many partnerships have been formed around attraction? How many family stories are framed around love?
For queer people, community forms around these experiences of sexual desire and play — community spaces where we can finally move away from shame and secrecy, and toward connection and healing. This transformation — from trauma to joy — is what queerness has done for me. It is healing. This is what Pride is about.
So, when my mother asked again why queerness seems so sexualised, I realised that what she sees as hypersexuality is just visibility – a reclaiming of what was hidden. The act of being seen can look loud. When a community is forming around this (s)experience, how can it not be visible – lest we retreat to the place we came from.
A Familiar Silence
The prostate, as part of the genitourinary system, is difficult to access — both physically and emotionally. Screening for prostate problems, the way they present, the way they are investigated and treated — all of it involves vulnerability. Prostate problems and most issues relating to male sexual organs carry a sense of shame that prostate owners may not understand themselves. We are not taught to understand these issues.
Just in the last week, I saw two young men in their early twenties with completely benign problems related to their genitals. Both consultations were filled with shame. Creating a space of relative safety allowed them to speak — and in doing so, allowed me to reassure one that a straightforward procedure could resolve years of recurring issues, and to reassure the other that what he was seeing was simply normal anatomy.
Is it any wonder that people with prostates struggle to seek help? But the silence around these organs —a similar silence to that which surrounds queerness — is what keeps us unwell.
And this brings me back to the moustache.
There is a quiet brilliance to Movember: it has united an extraordinarily diverse group of people — from the older Afrikaans man in the Free State, to the flamboyantly queer twenty-something in Zer021 in District Six.
I stood in the shower this evening, shaving off the beard I’d so deliberately grown to feel comfortable. To feel handsome. To feel my masculine and to demonstrate it. I realised I was doing it to join a community that has space for me now. For years, it was a symbol of masculinity that excluded me. Now, it’s a symbol I wear with Pride.
Few things could unite such a broad community — but a moustache, somehow, does.
In a time when we are divided, Movember feels like a small, hairy rebellion. Partners everywhere may roll their eyes at the scratchy look, but that growth sparks conversations. And importantly for me, it connects. Through Whiskers, we’ve created a way to talk about bodies, about health, and divert around Shame Boulevard.
When people comment on my (ho)mo, I get to redirect that attention toward conversations about prostate health — conversations that too often remain hard to talk about because of similar issues that many queer persons have sat with and understand. I get to use that experience.
So yes — Tash Pride will be my call this Movember. Join me and talk about prostate cancer with all those who have a prostate or who may be affected by one.