Since its transition from apartheid in 1993, South Africa has presented itself as one of the most liberal and progressive democracies in the world. Even in 2014, as it celebrates 20 years of democracy, South Africa garners the attention of scholars, NGO activists, and political refugees---all of whom are captivated by the expanse of minority and human rights enshrined in its constitution. With such attention, Cape Town earns the proud moniker " The Gay Capital of Africa"---whose vibrant nightlife makes it an (inter, trans)national epitome of "LGBT" equality.

I ask: what are the terms of such equality? How do gay men seek, acquire, and maintain visibility in Capetonian nightlife? What does such visibility mean, and what does the South African state gain from its documentation in LGBT tourism media? Through participant observation and interviews, I explore what admission standards at nightlife venues in De Waterkant---Cape Town's "Gay Village---say about being a (post-apartheid) gay man. Juxtaposing gay nightlife with a post-apartheid democracy, I show how nightclubs are regulatory institutions that produce subjects whose clothed bodies signify gay and racial equality. I read the performative dimensions of clothing as homonationalist projects that harness gay Capetonians' impulses for equality as "gay (human) capital" to evidence successful purveyance of democracy and unfettered access to the market.

Such impulses are implicated in struggles over race and space that reveal persistent class divisions among black and coloured-identified gay men. I, therefore, commit my research to participants' significant and agentic strategies to achieve visibility and participate in "The Gay Capital of Africa"---through which they upset the terms of effort and construct more capacious ways of being a gay man. Drawing from Michel Foucault, Jasbir Puar, Jose Munoz, and Roland Barthes' notion of "Vestimentary Systems," I conclude that clothing is a performance of post-apartheid modernity and strategy for surviving persistent structural constraints in Cape Town.