A love letter to the Bishops Old Diocesan Committee, from the queer who first put up that flag

When I was a humble 17-year-old in June of 2021, I arrived at school early with a pride flag folded in my backpack. My mom had helped me order it online and I was then tasked with bringing it to the headmaster’s secretary for a hand-off so that the boarder whose turn it was to hoist the flags would add it to his daily task.

Tucked away by our sports field, away from the school’s classrooms, I had to wait until break time to walk over and see that it had, indeed, been put up there. Barely anyone noticed it that first day.

With the egregious size of the Bishops campus, one flag flapping behind giant trees and expensive buildings was hardly going to draw attention. I don’t think most of us ever even looked at the school’s flags. But it meant a lot to me and the handful of other openly queer students at the school that day. A small victory on a campus that had never felt safe.

Well, eventually somebody noticed, and a vocal faction of boys in the student representative forum decided to kick up a fuss. I was unfazed and unsurprised. They were, ultimately, the exact people who had bullied and discriminated against me so relentlessly for five years that I wanted this flag up in the first place.

Of course, the forum has no power and I had the permission of the headmaster and executive, so the flag stayed up.

Then I matriculated, got into the Ivy League, spent four years learning so many wonderful things (most importantly, that people actually could like me in spite of how gay I was), made movies, wrote, acted, travelled, moved to New York and secured amazing jobs with industry titans living next to some of the best friends I could ever ask for. I even experienced romance.

So you can imagine my shock to learn that, five years later, these boys were still mad about a flag at a school they hadn’t attended in years. I had to chuckle.

But let me not oversell my maturity. Oh dearest Old Diocesans, I am certainly not above getting on your same level of petty. So I thought it might be nice to throw my hat back in the ring and give the two cents of the student who was actually there at the time.

The Old Diocesan Committee (ODC) penned a now-infamous letter in June demanding that the school stop flying the Pride flag for its assigned couple of days, their argument primarily split between three compelling points:

1. The Pride flag is a political symbol, and flying it means that Bishops is taking sides on a “contentious” issue, setting a dangerous precedent for the school needing to take a stance on any and all political debates;
2. A flag is a hollow symbol that does not even do the gay students of Bishops the service of true support, meaning it is an unnecessary distraction; and
3. It will, however, influence and disrupt the normal lives of the heterosexual students who make up the school’s majority.

Immediately, I’m in love. On one hand, we have the ODC taking this radical leftist approach, wherein the material flimsiness of a flag is simply not enough to show the LGBTQ+ population of Bishops that they are truly seen and accepted for who they are! On the other hand, we have the idea that it is such a divisive symbol that two days of it existing on campus will corrupt our young and plunge the school into dire controversy.

It feels somewhat demeaning to even genuinely engage with the ODC’s arguments since the inherent contradictions of their words make it clear they are not making these points from a point of good faith. They hide behind vague descriptions of how the flag represents a “contested matter” so that they don’t have to say that what is “contested” is whether gay people deserve to exist at the school or not. If they did that, they would be contesting our very Constitution, which has protected the rights and representation of queer people since the end of apartheid. They know enough to know that that is a bad look in South Africa in 2026.

But the foundation of the world of Bishops far precedes our young Constitution. These are men, some of them at least, whose memories of the school are from a time where the contested issue was whether black students should be allowed at the school. The political atmosphere of those apartheid days still lingered like sewage when I arrived in 2017. I think there is an underlying “don’t ask, don’t tell” sentiment buried (not too deep, of course) in the backlash to things like the Pride flag.

Why do we have to bring up That Stuff. I wonder what the ODC would say to the fact that I never once during my time at Bishops uttered the words “I am gay”. I never once said “I find you, fellow student, attractive”.

I never expressed interest in any boys or men, never flirted, never talked about gay life. And yet, dearests, I was called slurs upon my first day of school, at a prepubescent 13. Because of the way I naturally sound, naturally walk, naturally act, they all deduced What I Was within seconds and not only asked, but told! I genuinely tried my hardest from that first day to be as normal and fitting for the Bishops environment as possible – what new teenager in high school doesn’t want to just fit in with friends and be liked?

Well, that wasn’t good enough. I was maligned from then onwards, a pariah on my campus for existing, until I finally had had enough and started speaking out about the obvious homophobia that had dominated the school’s culture for years without any backlash or attempts to rectify it.

I had eagerly, desperately tried to keep all aspects of my sexuality as private as possible, but my “Pride” was forced out of me by the active prying of boys conditioned by their environment to attack people like me until we give up on existing.

It was a long and torturous process to finally get some support for queer students in the form of a simple Pride Society and a flag to be flown for two days of a month our entire country proudly recognises.

There is nothing neutral about the South African flag. Our nation is built on pride. And there is certainly nothing neutral about the Bishops school flag, because it was made clear to me from day one that that would never represent me.

So that’s why I did it. I am sorry I cannot offer more sympathy for your current rage. I am sorry your lives are not more eventful or fulfilling. I am sorry you still chase the “glory days” of a school you haven’t attended in years. I am sorry to the current queer students who might have one of their only symbols of support stripped away from them.

But I will never apologise for doing it. Your outrage only reminds me of its necessity.

Love, Paulie. DM