It is inhumane and unAfrican. People must interrogate themselves and their reasons for being cruel to the gay community
LGBT
Posted inEquality
Dear people with stupid gay questions
Over the holiest weekends of the year (holy for the four days of rest) I encountered questions that left me tired. From the age of about five or six I have been subject to such questions. Sometimes, they came from friends, sometimes from adults and sometimes these questions were not questions, they were rhetorical accusations […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, News/Politics
Beyond 2015: Setting an inclusive and pro-LGBTIQA development agenda
I recently read an interesting article titled “Why gay rights is a development issue in Africa, and aid agencies should speak up” by Hannah Stoddart. Stoddart, concerned with the very high rise in state-sanctioned homophobia in Africa, shows how homosexuality in some African countries is often accompanied by a life sentence or up to 20 […]
Posted inEquality, General
Of birth rights and gay rights
By Steven Hussey “Nobody is born gay” reads the headline of a billboard by a so-called “pro-ex-gay” non-profit in the United States. The ad shows identical twin brothers with the revelation, “One gay. One not.” Profound. Ironically, the openly gay South African model featured in the ad, who has no twin brother and whose image […]
Posted inEquality, General, News/Politics
A queer understanding of community?
By Matthew Clayton* & Thorne Godinho** It should come as no surprise that South Africa’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex community is stratified along similar race and class lines as the rest of South African society. The big umbrella that is the LGBTI term actually falls short of being big enough to cover white […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Your homophobia is un-African
The average gay African is no stranger to torture, rape, prison or terror. Thirty-eight countries in Africa now oppress LGBT individuals in one way or another, and although a recent wave of anti-gay legislation is gaining massive media traction, the dignity of these people has never really been embraced in all corners of the continent. […]
Posted inGender violence
This is ‘corrective rape’. These are its rules
Early last week, the newspapers reported the discovery of another dead and mutilated lesbian body. Yet another poor, black, landless, queer body with a vagina has been killed and the story, we’re told, is because she was gay. As the routine letters of condemnation from state, public and political officials came in their multitudes, and […]
Posted inGeneral
Gay Pride is political
“I’m queer, too, you stupid f**k,” screamed the Joburg Pride board chair, Tanya Harford, as she lunged at me. Her attack was in response to my colleagues and me telling her that we were part of the LGBT community. She was trying forcibly to remove us from the road where about 20 of us (almost […]