The ad for Woolfsons states ” Connoissseur …. hand tailored apparel designed and created by Woolfsons”.
Men’s outfitters which had stores in Durban. One in West Street, Chester House (388 West Street next to T.W. Griggs bookstore) and the other also in West Street but opposite the West street Cemetery (521 West Street). The one opposite the cemetery later years suffered a big fire and was gutted.
There were four other branches. Corner West and Union Street, corner Soldiers Way and Commercial Road, Glenwood Centre in Moore Road/ Hunt Road and at the North Beach Shopping Centre.
There was a rumor that the 388 store was haunted. A tailor had died on site in the sixties and some people working at this store recall the alarm system that on kept going off at night and that the lift was something out of the Bygone days , creaky and slow...
It would seem Woolfsons can trace their heritage back to 1938 when they were operating then as Woolfson Brothers, Outfitters, 34/36 Stamford Hill Road.
Later the Woolfsons name (business) was purchased by Cyril Shevits , he was a male model used by the then Cyril's Wardrobe's owned by Abe and Aaron Brodkin .
Cyril's Wardrobe had totally way out attire catering for the then late sixties/seventies to mid 80's fashion leaning towards the LBGT side of society. ( Lesbian , Gay and Transsexual)
Shevitz was known by many in the city as an owner and face of the very popular and well-known gay owned bar in Melville Oh! Bar , which closed down in 2008.
Read More on the bottom of this blog page about Oh! Bar. A piece I got from Face book here ...
Shevitz played a significant role in South African LGBT history. He was one of the hosts of the infamous 1966 Forest Town gay party in Johannesburg , which was raided by police, making national newspaper headlines.
The subsequent “moral” backlash against the gay community led to the passing of the Immorality Amendment Bill of 1967, which criminalised all gay and lesbian sex in South Africa. In 2005, the Forest Town home of Jacob Zuma, at that time deputy president of South Africa, was raided by the Scorpions in order to obtain documents for his corruption trial.[3] Jacob Zuma, now a former president of South Africa, is currently under investigation for fraud, money laundering, racketeering, and a host of other criminal charges.(2019)
Shevitz also opened a store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, and was reputed to be friends with the likes of international stars such as Rock Hudson, Barbra Streisand and Liberace, who once played the piano at his Greenside home.
In later years, Shevitz’ fortunes declined and he was forced to sell his collection of artwork that included pieces by Picasso, Andy Warhol and David Hockney.
Believed to be in his 80s, he passed away on Saturday 28 November 2015?
About the Token
The Advertising token
Made out of Aluminium with a South African 1946 1/4d Penny in it's center.
The token is 35.4 x 40.9 mm in size and 1.7mm thick.
Hern 1296
The token share a lot of similarities with advertising tokens of the time , the shape is a Horse shoe with the open end facing down so goodluck can go out to it's owner , It also has the four leave plant that most good luck tokens had.
This is very similar in design to the American Swiss Watch token , this also makes for interesting reading with the Foster gang and the killing of Koos dela Rey , all of this with a Watch reseller.. :)
Oh! Bar. (Facebook)
Last Thursday, sick of the University of Witwatersrand residence-hall blues, I decided to take the gay plunge and go out to Oh! Bar, one of the few well-known gay owned bars in Melville, a trendy suburb of Johannesburg. For lack of a good cosmo, Oh! has all the trimmings of what one might find in any hip New York gay bar. To be sure, there are other gay spaces in other parts of Johannesburg. Those other spaces include a range of Black gay spaces near the Heartland in Braamfontein, older gay bars in Hillbrow that have seen their heydays pass, naked gay bars in New Dornfontein (where one removes all of one’s clothes, except shoes, and sits around on a bar stool attempting to seem nonchalant), gay saunas in Randburg, and the all-night ecstasy-popping extravaganza of raves in Boksburg. Oh! Bar is the urban equivalent for a happy-hour pop-in, or a place to chill while one is figuring out how to spend the rest of the evening.
On the ground floor, in the middle of the room, are three floor to ceiling rows of three large television screens (there are 9 in total…think Brady Bunch…). The left and right rows show a film on continuous play of black and white images of nude men posing for their photo shoots, attempting to look profound while camera flashes take shots of their near-perfect bodies in a variety of settings including elegant bathrooms, soccer fields, basketball courts, and swimming pools. Meant to be a depiction of how challenging the world of modeling is, the scenes include shots of the models both ‘in character’ (smiling, posing, etc.) and ‘out of character’ (sitting around naked eating tuna fish sandwiches, and jocularly putting their well-built forearms and hands on the shoulder of the models next to them…). It is films like these that would convince you that commercialized masculine gay men are descended from peacocks. Every now and then the odd aesthetically-challenged, clothed, facially-haired photographer or plaid-wearing cameraman with glasses comes on the set to see if more oil droplets need to be strategically sprayed onto the models abdomens, or if enough hair product has been applied to the models’ eyebrows. Standing by, no doubt, there is an on-call cosmetologist with a pair of tweezers ready to pluck the errant follicle in the event of an emergency.
The models are all White, with a few of them being from ‘spicy’ backgrounds, including White-looking Italian and Latin looking men. There are no Blacks in the film…not even ‘White’ ones (this is less a product of South African film-making than it is endemic of the gay international film industry). Down the middle row of screens are images of gorgeous half-dressed White women doing the catwalk in Milan, New York, and Tokyo, modeling swimsuits, hair, make-up, and clothes, which will never make anyone I know ever look like any of them if they do go ahead and purchase those products, styles, and cosmetics. The ground floor has two bars in opposite corners of the room, and a nice balcony to appreciate the passing flow of traffic on Main Street, the main thoroughfare in this gay oasis of New Melville. Downstairs, a spiral staircase leads to a small dance floor, where Annie Lennox, Madonna, Elton John, Depeche Mode, and all the rest of the old gay gang from the 80′s can be found remixed through a pumping house beat with 90′s overtones. No need to click my ruby slippers, Toto, as Oh! Bar has spared no expense in creating a museum of the gay 1980′s in New York, right here in Johannesburg; the best thing of all: admission is free!! Well, free, that is, if you are White, or do your best to subscribe to all of the outward manifestations that a Gay, White, well-dressed, and economically-empowered culture has to offer.
Knowing that what I saw of the ground floor and dance floor would pale in comparison to what was to come, I headed up another spiral staircase in the far corner to the ‘VIP’ lounge. Feeling important as soon as I ascended the first step, my posture bade farewell to the trailing rhythms of Gloria Gaynor telling me that she would survive. I reached the top of the staircase, feeling, step by step, closer to both God and to whatever lay in wait for me behind the purple velvet curtains camouflaging the entrance to the upstairs lounge. I half expected to be greeted by muscular angels wearing white loincloths, who would ask me politely to wait while Cher finished making my next cocktail. The anticipation was comparable to when protagonists in romantic comedies profess a heterosexually acceptable speech of love to one another in front of a large audience, like at a wedding or just before boarding a plane in a noisy airport, with a whole crowd of onlookers hanging on every word–every action, intended or otherwise, held up to both intra-personal and inter-group harmony and scrutiny, followed by overwhelming approval at the reification of heterosexual love. But being gay, and regardless of what people tell you, the majority of opulence and outrageousness of gay culture the world over seems to operate largely in such closeted and confined theatres. There is no admiring audience, and no crowd of approving onlookers. Admiring the eternally-boyish male physique on TV screens in an overtly sexually desirable fashion, seeing guys holding hands together with the odd kiss, and feeling, as it occurs rarely, that I was one of the ‘majority,’ I felt this was the closest I would ever get to that anticipatory moment, when all of my gay dreams are supposed to come true. If the TV screens on the first floor were any indication, I was but moments away from my encounter with several cast members of the ode to masculinity that I encountered watching the videos upon my arrival. It was the moment just before the climax, that fleeting instant where you think maybe this was the one moment that fate had steered me toward, that I would finally understand what all of those smug, sanctimonious people in those kind of nauseating couples that everyone hates profess to, that by finding my own ‘other-half’ I would somehow finally attempt to define myself, leaving single-hood behind, and the ‘depravity’ of single gay life once and for all.
But, as all dreams are perhaps inevitably shattered, the purple velvet curtains gave way to a few dark couches upon which resident patrons sipped tall drinks and beers in the shadows with hopes that their Mr. Rights would be the next one up the stairs and would somehow pick up on their nonverbal calls for attention. The goal simple: to catch a fish. The bait? Eye-penetrating gazes that look shy yet hungry, hoping that the desolation of loneliness and the fear of rejection will somehow ironically attract those whom they hunt. Oh what a world it would be if ‘lonely’ and ‘desperate’ were turn-ons. I file past the few in the dark foyer and make my way down two more steps to the VIP room itself, a bit more brightly lit, with another bar, another balcony, and more television screens showing the same videos from the ground floor. While not as VIP as I would have hoped, there are more couches and fancy tables here of the type as one might find in any Soho lounge in New York. I sit down and resign myself to watching the models on the VIP TVs from 3 meters away, with my double rum & coke in one hand and a menthol cigarette in the other. Those models think their lives are glamorous…they haven’t seen me sitting alone in Oh! Bar alone on a Thursday night, smearing Vaseline on my teeth for my pearly-white face-shot close-ups of perfection and looking for my emergency tweezers.
South Africa has one of the most liberal constitutions in the world. In October of 2004 a South African lesbian couple challenged the national act which designates marriage as being ‘between a man and a woman’ in the nation’s Constitutional Court, and Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered activists, and their Allies, expect to overturn the outdated law soon, potentially paving the way for gay marriage to be legalized within a year or two. Discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation are prohibited. But as is true of the inevitable gap between policy and implementation of rights and legislation anywhere, most South Africans have yet to incorporate sexual orientation and gender sensitivity into their own personal reconciliation thinkings. There are many cultural reasons for this, and there are just as many ways in which ‘cultural reasons’ are used as justification for refusing to change. For that matter, cross-racial dating exists, yet remains uncommon, much like the US even decades after the civil rights movements of the 1960′s.
I sat there pondering all of this in the dim glow of the mood lights and images of Marco posing for his crotch shots on the TV screens, when I was rescued from the vicissitudes of my single-hood ponderings and second hand smoke by a young drag-queen named Ricky. Stereotypically fashionable and fabulously dressed, Coloured Ricky introduced to me to her White gay friend Wayne, whom (I later learned) she had dragged into the conversation (pun intended) moments before I arrived. After a few minutes of chit chat and me explaining my doctoral thesis on understandings of reconciliation, Ricky assured me that I was on to something. As we were discussing the possibilities of being sexually emancipated in the new ‘discrimination-free South Africa,’ we were joined by two White women, Alex and Nikita. 22 and 23 respectively, and both new mothers (the former 6 months earlier, the latter a year and two months earlier), both had made their way to Oh! Bar in search of a quick Thursday night drink, leaving the kids at home. Alex, having had her baby, was ‘now’ a self-identified lesbian. She seemed confident and happy that the father of her new baby was now, himself, metaphorically and literally, cutting hair close by in a trendy salon up the road. Nikita, less sure of the whole gay scene, though happy to be out with Alex, admitted that while her mom ‘used to be’ a lesbian, that she was not sure how her mom would handle the news of Nikita’s own sexual ambivalence. The five us talked about a range of topics, from gay issues to shark attacks on the beaches in Cape Town, from queer to ‘normal.’ Five strangers brought together by the sheer commonality of the marginality of our sexual orientations.
Queer culture is such that it is one of the few minority-identities that transcends all other criteria of race, class, religion, gender, and ethnicity. We are everyone. Yet it is also unique in the sense that, barring some obvious stereotypical outward signs, that it is a culture that must be self-identified, self-created, and self-sustained. No Black child has to tell his mother he is Black. No Jewish child has to come out to her mother telling her she is Jewish. Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Transgendereds, however, do have to come out. They have to come out to their family members, friends, colleagues, students, and peers in a manner that is never possibly exhaustive as there is always someone who doesn’t seem to know. That, or they choose to not come out, living potentially double lives, schizophrenically balancing between things queer and things not queer. Queer identity is also unique in that it is one of the few identities out there that is brought together not by skin color, not by belief, or creed, but is merely a group of people that are somehow connected and create cultural reinforcement of their values according to, and which suggest, the behavior (and therefore somehow an identity) of how they have sex. If you don’t believe me, when was the last time you, your partner, or your friends had to go to the Missionary Bar for a night out? Or the 69 Club?
I talked with Ricky, Wayne, Alex, and Nikita, and thought for a moment that maybe I had arrived, and arrived gaily, in the New South Africa. Yes, we were all White (except Ricky, who for purposes of Oh! Bar may be considered an ‘honorary White’–Editor’s note: I will not get into meanings of identity surrounding the multiplicity of meanings inherent in the term ‘honorary White’ here…that will be a travelogue for another time…) There I was, gay myself, in conversation with another gay guy, a lesbian, a bisexual, and a transgendered person. And I thought, maybe a part of my gay identity that has been isolating is, in part, self-imposed; that maybe by hanging out in a gay bar, I was guilty of reinforcing sexual orientation apartheid after all. Those thoughts were interwoven with the hope that maybe some day I won’t have to go to a gay bar at all; that maybe someday I’ll be able to walk into an Irish Pub, or a straight club in NY, and simply walk up to a handsome guy and ask him to join me. Or better still, attend a legal wedding in the US, catch the boutonnière, walk up to the cute groomsman I’ve had my eye on all evening, flirt over a drink or two, ask him if he wants to dance, and give him a quick peck on the lips as I profess my love to him. But then everyone watching would probably say ‘awww’ and wipe a tear away, someone else would write up the screenplay, my character would probably just wind up in another one of those lame gay romantic comedies, Hollywood style, and the commodification of gay love would be rendered just as meaningless and bland as Hollywood has made it for most straight viewers. For now I’ll just keep my tweezers handy, and make sure I have a healthy stock of hair products for when gay marriage is legalized. (Originally written May 2005).
*Follow up* As of November 30, 2006, South Africa became the first country in Africa to achieve marriage equality, legalizing gay marriage.
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