Racial identity and racism in the gay and lesbian community in post-apartheid South Africa 
 
 
Emily Craven 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 
Johannesburg in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in 
Political Studies. 
 
May 2011  
 
i 
 
 
Declaration 
I Emily Craven, declare that this research report is my own work. It is being submitted in partial 
fulfilment for a degree of Master of Arts in Political Studies at the University of the 
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. I further declare that neither this report, nor any part of it, has 
been submitted for any degree or examination at any other university. 
 
_______________________ 
 
 
______________________ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ii 
 
Acknowledgements 
 
I want first to say a huge thank you to my mother and father, Norma and Patrick Craven who 
were willing to take in and support their thirty something daughter when she decided to go 
back to school, without their endless support both financial and emotional this adventure 
would not have been possible. Also, to my dearest friend Simonne Horwitz who always believes 
in me. To my supervisor Antje Schuhmann who first discussed the idea of this work with me 
under a tent on a dusty field in Kwa Thema some years ago and who has seen it through to the 
end, thank you so much for everything. In addition I have to thank all the staff in the Wits 
Political Studies Department, a special thanks to Shireen Hassim for so much help not least for 
staying up all night to proof read my work, also to those people apart from Antje and Shireen 
who taught the coursework elements of my MA, Stephen Louw, Estienne Rodary and Malathi 
De Alwis and finally to Gillian Renshaw who is a superhero. I need to thank the staff at Gay and 
Lesbian Memory in Action who hold the Gay and Lesbian Archive, in particular Gabriel Khan and 
Anthony Manion for all their help and for providing such an amazing and important resource. 
The year spent working on this would have been considerably less fun and sane without my 
supervision support group of Kate Joseph, Dasantha Pillay, Molemo Ramphalile, Nina Partzch, 
Sherona Gani, Lyle Prim and Nicola Cloete, thank you particularly to Nicola for also helping so 
much with proofreading. Also to those people who have helped me through the last few 
months, Donna Powell, Komnas Poriazis, Carrie Shelver, Natasha Vally, Dipika Nath, Phoebe 
Harward, Phumi Mtetwa, Viv and Mike Findley, Oriel Willemse, Tracy Marcus, the Macks, Kate 
Chisholm, Kim Vance, Dawn Cavanaugh, Mpumi Mathabela, the bridge ladies and everyone 
involved in the 1 in 9 campaign, thank you! 
Finally to all my friends and colleagues in the LGBTI and gender sectors, to every woman in 
South Africa with a raised fist and a cry for justice, to Zoliswa, Fezeka, Phindile, Eudy, Thandiswa 
Noxolo, Sizakele, Salome, Girly, Lisa and so many more, this work as with all that I do is 
dedicated to you. 
 
iii 
 
Abstract 
 
The first Johannesburg Pride march took place in 1990 and an event has taken place in the city 
every year since. The history of Johannesburg Pride runs alongside the history of the transition 
to democracy in South Africa. The event has from its very beginnings been the site of multiple 
contestations sometimes bitterly fought out. These conflicts have erupted around issues such 
as the route of the parade, its political content and its commercialisation among others. These 
conflicts it could be argued speak to the generally much fractured nature of gay and lesbian 
community in South Africa. As a result of apartheid policies of identify control, the ongoing 
legacies of the apartheid system and the various ways in which all people have been 
renegotiating their identities within the post-apartheid moment have left a community 
characterised by massive race, class and gender inequalities. Pride is one of the few times and 
spaces in which the various members of this community converge and this speaks to why it has 
become such an important space of contestation. Contestation not just around Pride, but in 
fact around what it means to be gay in post-apartheid South Africa and what it means to claim 
a community defined by this identity. Also importantly, what are the networks of power that 
exist that determine who is able to define and control both gay and lesbian identity and 
community? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
iv 
 
 
Contents 
 
1. Introduction 
1.1 Introduction to topic 
1.2 Structure 
1.3 Methodology 
1.4 A note on terminology 
2. Theoretical overview  
2.1 Queer theory 
2.2 Constructions and contestations of community 
2.3 Pride 
2.4 Race and sexual orientation 
2.5 Identity in post-apartheid South Africa 
3. The history of gay and lesbian community in South Africa 
3.1 The early years and the law reform movement 
3.2 National movement from GASA to GLOW 
3.3 That National Coalition years 
3.4 New era, new challenge 
4. Johannesburg Pride 
4.1 Historical overview 
4.2 City streets to suburban sidewalks 
4.3 It’s all about the money 
4.4 To blend or offend 
4.5 Protest or celebration 
5. Conclusion and Recommendations for future research 
1 
 
Introduction 
 
Introduction to topic 
 
In October 2010 some 15 000 people took part in the annual Joburg Pride Parade (Joburg Pride 
Web site, 4 October 2010). This event, though branded in a variety ways, has taken place each 
year since 1990 when, what was then termed the Lesbian and Gay Pride March first wound its 
way through the streets of Johannesburg. The history of the Johannesburg Pride event runs 
parallel to the history of the transition to democracy in South Africa beginning, as it did, in the 
same year in which Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Its earliest incarnations took 
place during a time that homosexuality remained illegal in South Africa through a variety of 
pieces of legislation stemming from the apartheid regime and earlier.  
 
The march took place each year through the long processes of Constitution writing and 
legislative reform. Its unbroken chain of existence through so many years and so much 
upheaval within society is incredibly impressive. Its continuity however belies the fact that it 
has, as an event, been in crisis for many of those years and there have been a number of 
occasions on which the holding of the event was uncertain till the last moment. It has almost 
since its inception been a space of contestation over multiple issues including its route, themes, 
level of commercialisation and political content. These points of conflict all exist within the 
framework of a conception of gay and lesbian community that is itself wracked with division 
along lines or race, class and gender. These divisions have profoundly influenced the ways in 
which this community developed historically and continue to influence to this day the 
distribution of power and privilege within this community and indeed the very critical question 
of who has the ability to create and define this community. 
 
2 
 
The history of gay and lesbian organising in South Africa from the 1960s onwards is in every 
way underpinned by the apartheid system, both its specific provisions related to homosexuality 
but also its broader policies of racial segregation and purity. Sodomy has been a criminal 
offence since the first settlers arrived in the Cape (Gevisser, 1995) but in addition to this the 
apartheid regime (through a process that will be considered in some detail later) further 
criminalised homosexual activity through amendments to the Immorality Act a piece of 
legislation known most commonly for its prohibition of inter-racial sexual activity. The 
provisions were very much integrated within the apartheid political and moral project of racial 
superiority. For this reason the ways in which the apartheid regime engaged with gay and 
lesbian people of different race groups were different. While not suggesting that the 
government was tolerant of homosexuality in non-white groups, indeed statistics would 
suggest the vast majority of sodomy convictions during these years affected black men, there 
was clearly a particularity to the ways in which the state engaged with white gay and lesbian 
people. In addition to the differentiation in the forms of state oppressions faced by gay and 
lesbian people of differing race groups, the policies of the apartheid regime also created a 
situation which made collective gay and lesbian activism unlikely. This both in terms of the 
physical restrictions it placed on interactions across racial lines but also because of the 
ideological divisions it created within which many people situated in spaces of racial power and 
privilege were unlikely to perceive more opportunity than threat from black gay and lesbian 
people.  
 
Over a number of years the organised gay lesbian sector has developed the discourse and 
indeed the practice of non-racialism and clearly the formal barriers to racial integration within 
the gay and lesbian community have been dismantled. Despite this and in line with many 
aspects of South African society a great deal of segregation remains, this is particularly true in 
social spaces. There are very few times and spaces in the year in which the multiple groupings 
within the gay and lesbian community engage in common activities. Pride parades are 
important because they have the promise of providing one such space. While some parades, 
particularly those staged in townships, are overwhelmingly attended by one racial group, those 
3 
 
staged in major urban centres such as Johannesburg and Cape Town are possibly the most 
mixed spaces in terms of race, class and gender. It is for this reason that they inevitably become 
spaces of conflict around the needs and interests of gay and lesbian people and indeed around 
the very definitions of what it means to be gay and lesbian in South Africa. 
 
This work situates Pride historically and currently within the context of the post-apartheid 
moment as well as the legacy of the apartheid regime in relation to both gay and lesbian 
community and South African society more generally. It tries to avoid suggesting a South 
African exceptionalism which ignores that fact that Pride parades across the world have been 
sites of conflict1 or that academic literature questioning the notion of gay and lesbian 
community is prevalent in many countries. It does however recognise that Apartheid history 
and the post-apartheid project of nation-building have profoundly influenced the creation, 
recreation and daily practice of identities in this country. 
 
The history of gay and lesbian communities in South Africa has been told though such seminal 
works as Gevisser’s (1995) “A different fight for freedom” a section within the book “Defiant 
Desire” edited by Gevisser and Edwin Cameron. The history of Johannesburg Pride has also 
been told in some detail in De Waal and Manion’s excellent 2006 work “Pride: protest and 
celebration.”This latter book provides many of the texts including personal reflections that are 
analysed in this work. It hopes to give texture to many of the conflicts that have plagued pride 
from its earliest years. It hopes to make a contribution to both the queer theory project of 
problematising narrow concepts of gay and lesbian community and in addition to make a 
contribution to the project of understanding identity and specifically race in the post-apartheid 
period. 
 
 
                                                          
1
 See for example the controversy around the participation of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in Toronto Pride in 
2010 and the refusal of Judith Butler to accept an award at Berlin Pride in the same year. 
4 
 
 
Structure 
 
This introduction serves to define the scope of the work undertaken in this research report, to 
provide information on methodology and also to clarify some of the terminology used 
throughout the rest of the work. Chapter two outlines the theoretical ideas that underpin this 
work, including the influence of queer theory, the critical consideration of the idea of gay and 
lesbian community and the intersection of identities particularly those related to race in both 
South Africa and internationally. Chapter three situates the history of the gay and lesbian 
community in South Africa, it shows the ways in which the history of gay and lesbian 
community developed from the 1960s and the very clear racialised and gendered ways in which 
this occurred, as a result both of the deep physical and ideological segregation created by the 
apartheid system and the differing ways in which oppression of all forms was perpetrated 
against different groups. Chapter four considers a brief history of Johannesburg Pride and then 
goes on to consider a number of the areas of contestation that have come to the fore 
throughout the history of Pride, in doing so it attempts to recognise the multiple layers of 
contestation. 
 
Methodology 
 
This work is based on the study of texts related to Pride from 1990 to the present day as well as 
those related to the gay and lesbian community more generally. These include memoirs of 
people who worked on and attended Pride events, official brochures, posters and advertising 
around events, news coverage in both the gay and lesbian press and in mainstream media and 
the minutes and correspondence of the organisers of Pride. For much of this information I am 
indebted to Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action the keepers of the only gay and lesbian archive 
in South Africa. While drawing on this archival material I am aware of the fact that there are a 
5 
 
number of issues related to the process of archiving including those related to what is archived 
and the process through which this takes place. Particularly in the case of South Africa, 
questions around which histories tend to make it into archives and which do not cannot be 
ignored. There is not scope within this work to fully explore these issues however it is important 
to be cognisant of them. 
 
In addition to the archived material memoir style recollections of prominent individuals who 
have interacted in one way or another with Pride are used extensively. In doing so I draw on the 
work of Nuttall (2001) on the “Subjectivities of whiteness”, in this work Nuttall analyses 
representations of whiteness within the autobiographical work of white South Africans. The 
short memoir pieces used in this work clearly do not represent an exhaustive set of opinions on 
the Pride event, nor are they necessarily comparable to one another given that each is written 
given the various foci and priorities of the writers. What they do allow for however is the 
unpacking of layers of meaning that can be found in such memoir style writing and also gives 
more scope for interpreting the ways in which issues of race, class and gender feed these 
memoirs both overtly and implicitly In doing this of course it needs to be acknowledged that in 
the process of writing about themselves and their experiences they will inevitably tend to 
represent themselves in a positive light. For this reason it is important to maintain a level of 
critique. The other materials used in the work, for example the correspondence, minutes, news 
stories etc reflect only a certain range of perspectives. The idea is not to argue that for example 
the correspondence quoted represents the only or even the dominant view but rather that it 
provides a certain discourse that can be interrogated to understand its meanings and impacts. 
There are no direct interviews in this work, there are two main reasons for this, the first is my 
own positionality and my relationships with many of the people related to Pride, this is 
expanded on below. The second reason is that there was a particular interest in the reading and 
interpreting of texts and the particular perspective this provides. 
 
6 
 
I draw to a great extent on a Cultural Studies Methodologies in this work. The concept of 
Cultural Studies is a complex and contested one. I draw on Stuart Hall’s (1997: 6) definition of 
Cultural Studies as, “a cluster (or formation) of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways 
of talking about, forms of knowledge and conduct associated with, a particular topic, social 
activity or institutional site in society”. This work is trans-disciplinary in nature, it draws on 
theoretical ideas and works across the fields of Politics, Sociology, and Geography among 
others, it is reflexive and self-conscious. It recognizes texts of many forms and does not 
dissociate those texts from the subjects they analyse. It recognises the complexity of the 
multiple systems of power both current and historical within which the subject of the work is 
situated. This approach assists me to recognise that the relationship between the gay and 
lesbian community in South Africa and the annual Pride event is complex. Each historically and 
to this day serves to create and recreate the other in ways determined through the circulations 
of power within the social movement and in its relationship to broader society. In turn, the 
texts that exist around the event both construct and are constructed by these same relations of 
power. 
 
This work is not principally grounded within Social Movement Theory. This is both due to its 
specific focus on identity and the fact that the identification of gay and lesbian organising in 
South Africa as a social movement is deeply contestable. It cannot however deny the 
importance of this work and does draw on work on social movements both locally and 
international work (for example, Giugni, 1999; McAdam et al 1996; Tilly, 1978) and specifically 
that work such as Scott (1985) which attempts to integrate Social Movement Theory with 
identity based movements (also see Della Porta and Diani, 1999; Tarrow, 1994). 
 
Johannesburg Pride is used as the case study for this work for a number of reasons. There are 
other parades across the country and each has its own interesting history and contestations. 
There is not space within this work to consider all the events to the level they might deserve 
although several are touched upon at various points. Johannesburg Pride makes a good case 
7 
 
because it was the first parade and has therefore the longest history and its history runs parallel 
to the history of the post-apartheid era, it is also by far the biggest Pride event in the country 
with very diverse attendees, this makes it an excellent space to consider each of the forms of 
contestation considered here. 
 
Reflection 
 
All academic work requires a level of self reflection and positioning. In relation to this work, it is 
important to recognise my positionality as a white, lesbian woman in South Africa. I have also 
worked in the organised LGBTI sector over a number of years. The debates around 
Johannesburg Pride are ones in which I often took part as an active participant, at times from a 
position of some influence. The work takes full cognisance of this and acknowledges that my 
own reading of situations and memories of both my own and other people’s roles in debates in 
which I participated constitute in some ways just another text as ingrained within the networks 
of power and requiring of interrogation as any others. 
As the work unfolded the limitations of the stated title became very clear. While race is 
probably the single most recognised and studied societal fault line in post-apartheid South 
Africa, it is clear that contestation around Johannesburg Pride is far more complex. Issues 
around race, gender, class, gender identity, sexual orientation and the multiple intersections 
between these identities are all key to understanding the contestations around Pride. The work 
therefore necessarily diverges from the title and this is acknowledged. The complexity that was 
revealed throughout the research could also not be fully captured given the word restrictions of 
this work and as a result certain aspects could only be flagged and not fully explored. 
 
 
 
 
8 
 
A note on terminology 
 
In recent years the acronym LGBTI which stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and 
Intersex has become the title of choice for most organisations in the sector and is increasingly 
used in the media, at times the “I” is left off, occasionally an “A” for asexual is added. The 
acronym is not used without a level of contestation; the question of representation and claims 
to representation is critical. Bisexual visibility is occasionally raised as an issue but more 
commonly the question of Transgender and Intersex representation is a point of conflict 
specifically related to the extent to which groups using the “T” and the “I” actually represent 
people identified as such.  
 
Recently there have been some discussions around the use of a more broadly inclusive term 
such as queer, a move that would not only ease the problem of the ever enlarging and unwieldy 
acronym but also politically allow space for a different way of understanding identity that 
questions the need to assign essentialist identities and allow for a multiplicity of ways of being 
to be represented (Seidman, 1996:13). While the term queer is occasionally used colloquially in 
South Africa it is not embraced formally or used in a political sense. For this reason, though this 
work is firmly located within queer theory (expanded on in the following chapter) the term is 
not used to identify the subjects of this work. 
 
While Johannesburg Pride has in the last few years used the LGBTI acronym in various contexts 
it has for most of its history defined itself as either a ‘Gay and Lesbian’ or ‘Lesbian and Gay’ 
event. The decision around whether to foreground the word gay or lesbian is not unconsidered. 
A number of groups, including at some points Johannesburg Pride, have chosen to use the term 
Lesbian and Gay in order to give “affirmative priority to ‘lesbian’” as De Waal and Manion 
(2006: 9) put it, in the light of the marginalisation of women within the community as well as in 
society more generally.   
9 
 
 
Throughout the research report, I use the phrase “gay and lesbian” to identify subject 
populations but fully recognise the limitations related to these indicators. Its use is in large part 
because this term, or its reverse, is used in the texts about Johannesburg Pride and also 
because it is the construction of the notion of a gay and lesbian community in South Africa that 
is the interest of this work. I specifically do not use the term LGBTI (except when making 
specific reference to organisations or events that use this acronym) as there is not space within 
this paper to begin to scratch the surface of issues related to the interaction of Transgender or 
Intersex people with Pride and indeed with their interaction with gay and lesbian people. The 
term LGBTI is often used too carelessly and this work is cognisant of this. 
 
The Johannesburg Pride event has throughout its history been referred to as the Lesbian and 
Gay Pride March, the Gay and Lesbian Pride March, the Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade, the 
Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade, the Gay and Lesbian Parade and Festival and Joburg Pride. This 
work at times, and in order to be able to refer to issues that cut across the years, uses the 
phrases Johannesburg Pride or simply Pride to define its subject. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
10 
 
Theoretical Overview 
 
Queer Theory 
 
Seidman (1996) situates the foundations of queer theory within America in the 1980s. Ironically 
it was as attempts were made to strengthen the gay and lesbian movement in the face of the 
AIDS epidemic that the foundational assumptions of gay and lesbian community came under 
great challenge; “social differences within the gay and lesbian communities erupted into public 
conflict around the issues of race and sex” (Seidman, 1996: 10). Both feminist lesbians and non-
white gay and lesbian people began to question the notion of community and argued that 
where a form of gay and lesbian community could be defined, it almost always represented the 
experiences of white gay men. 
 
One way in which gay and lesbian activists responded to this crisis was to reaffirm even more 
strongly the biological foundations of a gay and lesbian community, following the assumption 
that as Irvine (1996: 226) puts it; “essentialism is a precondition for legitimacy”. Within the 
academic community however some did the opposite. Heavily influenced by poststructuralist 
theory, questioning stable identities and recognising the fluidity and multiplicity of peoples 
identities, they began to dispute the natural theory of homosexuality an indeed of sex in favour 
of one based on social constructionism, and they began to promote a “radical politics of 
difference” (Seidman, 1996: 11). As Steyn and Van Zyl (2009: 7) put it “critical queer scholarship 
has unearthed a variety of cultural permutations of sexual and (trans) gender subjectivities and 
identities that perform as dissident sexualities beyond the boundaries of normativity”. 
 
Queer theory and indeed the word queer has come to have multiple meanings, at times being 
used as no more than a less cumbersome way of referring to the same constituency covered by 
the LGBTI acronym in all its forms. It is however about something much more than that. It 
11 
 
recognises that there is a vast multiplicity of ways of being that may include identifying as gay 
or lesbian or simply practicing a form of sexual expression that falls outside of heteronormative 
expectations, and that the attempt to homogenise this multiplicity of experiences into a united 
community is not only dangerous but at times counterproductive to the struggles that unity is 
an attempt to undertake. As Seidman (1996: 11) puts it  
“Identities are always multiple or at best composites with literally an infinite number of 
ways in which identity components (e.g., sexual orientation, race, class, nationality, 
gender, age, able-ness) can intersect or combine. Any specific identity construction, 
moreover, is arbitrary, unstable and exclusionary.” 
This work is clearly situated within queer theory. As was indicated in the introduction the term 
queer is rarely used. This is because to do so would be an inaccurate identification of the 
subject group, given that historically and indeed to this day the term queer has never been one 
generally used in the discourses around the community in South Africa nor is a term that very 
many people would use in self identification. The work is however still within the ambit of 
queer theory in so much as it recognises that much of the contestation around Johannesburg 
Pride is profoundly linked to questions of identity politics and specifically the creations and uses 
of the idea of a gay and lesbian community against the backdrop of severe race, class and 
gender inequalities. 
 
Construction and contestations of community 
 
It has been pointed out that conceptions of gay identity and ‘community’ went through a 
substantial change in the 1970s (Epstein, 1998). There was of course a notion of homosexuality 
and the existence of a deviant subculture of mostly homosexual men much earlier. Foucault 
(1976 and considered in Namaste, 1996) traces the construction of the category of homosexual 
to a more general interest in and increase in discourses around sexuality during the Victorian 
era. In 1956 Leznoff and Westley, in a paper entitled “The Homosexual Community” (reprinted 
1998 in an edited collection) noted: 
12 
 
“the homosexual group provides on the only social context in which homosexuality is 
normal, deviant practices moral, and homosexual responses rewarded, the homosexual 
develops a deep emotional involvement with his (sic) group.” (Leznoff and Westley, 
1998: 5). 
 
It was only in the 1970s in developed countries that the notion of a positive community began 
to emerge (Epstein, 1998). This idea of a community was very different from (though in most 
cases inclusive of) the very limited vision of Leznoff and Westley of community as social and 
support networks.  This new approach to community was a political act; as the struggle for gay 
and lesbian rights increased in visibility and ferocity there was an attempt to tap into struggles 
for minority rights by firmly identifying gay and lesbian people as what Stephen Murray (1998: 
207) refers to as a “quasi-ethnic community”. Murray uses the example of the area in Toronto, 
Canada around Church and Wellesley streets to argue that it is possible to see examples of gay 
and lesbian community that mirror those of other minority groups in the city through the 
existence of certain indicators such as territorial location, shared values and norms and 
collective group action and solidarity (Murray, 1998). Levine (1998) considers many of the same 
issues in his work on Gay Ghetto’s across America. While both works do attempt to define 
community as something more than mere geographical locality they do still tend to revolve 
around a physical locality. The work relied on what Davis (1995: 286) calls “inflexible notions of 
identity” which used the same forms of methodology as were used to study other ethnic 
communities. This is clearly a very limiting understanding of community and does not really 
speak to the way in which the term is used in everyday language which is to mean any gay or 
lesbian person, usage that is both broad and limiting. It is broad in the sense that it covers all 
gay and lesbian people regardless of whether they themselves make any form of self 
identification with this community but it is also limiting in that it requires an essentialist 
labelling process in which membership of the community is based on all people being 
identifiable as either homosexual or heterosexual. The more modern usage of the acronym 
LGBTI and all its variants expand the number of people included within the community but 
maintain the same principles of inclusion and exclusion. 
13 
 
 
The idea that the mere sharing of a sexual orientation is enough to create community is a 
controversial and very problematic one. If a community is thought of as a group who have some 
level of shared experience, at times shared oppression and a set of collective needs and 
interests then it is very hard to identify such community. South Africa provides an interesting 
case in this regard. The level of socio-economic inequality is among the highest in the world; it 
remains even fifteen years after the formal end of Apartheid a country characterised by racial 
segregation and gender inequality. In this context we would have to question to what extent a 
black lesbian woman living in a township or rural area and a white gay man living in urban 
suburbia could possibly be considered to share any form of community. Indeed even a black 
lesbian woman living in an urban setting and a black lesbian woman living in a rural area may 
experience their identity in vastly different ways. Even when a certain number of shared 
oppressions and struggles can be discerned the impacts of the oppression and priorities for 
change may be entirely different. The use of term community given these issues becomes not 
just factually questionable but also extremely dangerous because in a context of severe power 
imbalances within those people defined as being part of the community, some people 
inevitably have greater power to define the needs and interests of the community, which then 
become the stated needs and interests of the whole, including potentially large numbers of 
people whose real needs and interests may be entirely different. 
 
For all the contestation around the concept of a gay and lesbian community however its 
rhetoric, as Woodhead puts it, can clearly be located:  
“published in the gay press, broadcast by other gay media, espoused in the language of 
reclamation politics and histories, promoted in the rhetoric of Pride, called upon in gay 
male-targeted HIV health promotion literature, and, of course talked about by many 
lesbian and gay men themselves” (Woodhead, 1995: 237).  
 
14 
 
To refuse to use the term therefore is unsatisfactory in that it creates a fissure between the 
theoretical recognition of its limitations and the reality of its use, day and in day out. The 
solution to this problem can be found in a reconsideration of the concept of community. 
Benedict Anderson in his work Imagined Communities speaking specifically of nations 
introduces the idea of the imagined community, imagined in the sense that “the members of 
even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even 
hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 1983: 
15). He does not limit this notion to nations but considers all communities larger than those 
characterised by constant physical closeness and contact to be imagined. Following Anderson’s 
thinking on this issue allows us to critically analyse the idea of a gay and lesbian community 
without ultimately having to deny its existence. As Anderson goes on to say “Communities are 
to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are 
imagined” (Anderson, 1983: 15). 
 
This opens up two very critical questions that this paper hopes to tackle in relation to gay and 
lesbian community in South Africa, the first being how can the same community be imagined 
differently and the second being what is the price of this imagining of community. The first 
question inevitably speaks to questions of power in that the ability to define gay and lesbian 
community is linked to resources, those people within the community who have the greatest 
access to the media, both gay and mainstream, and the most powerful political platforms are 
those whose imaging will come to define the community. The second relates to what is lost 
when we try to fit a multiplicity of experiences into something definable as a community.  It can 
serve to homogenise, suppress internal differences and create exclusionary boundaries 
(Woodhead, 1995: 237). A final important question around community is whether it is 
necessary. A strong argument could be made (and often is) that in the face of an 
overwhelmingly  heterosexual and heteronormative society and any number of forms of 
discrimination only a strong community with a united face can possibly hope to protect and 
promote the needs of gay and lesbian people. This is however not universally accepted. As 
Butler (1991: 15) puts it: “Is ‘unity’ necessary for effective political action? Is the premature 
15 
 
insistence on the goal of unity precisely the cause of an ever more bitter fragmentations among 
the ranks?” 
 
Perhaps the biggest questions within the gay and lesbian community (indeed around many 
identity communities) are around how to reconcile the need for unity with the appreciation of 
difference and specifically in relation to groups who face high levels of discrimination. How do 
you mobilise your community to struggle? In other words “social movements seem strong 
when they pivot around a unitary (racial, gender or sexual) identity but this heightened 
solidarity is purchased at the cost of increased internal repression” (Seidman, 1996: 22). The 
key problem around the need to suppress internal conflict in the interests of ‘strategic’ 
objectives is that it serves to entrench structures of power and privilege. 
 
Pride 
 
There is a distinct lack of academic study around Pride events, an extensive literature search 
turns up only a small number of works theorising Pride, more common are studies which use 
Pride events as a case studies of broader questions. An exception to this is Namaste’s (1992) 
work on Montreal Pride, considered further by Bell and Valentine (1995). Bell and Valentine are 
geographers and situate their thinking around Pride within the scope of work on sexuality and 
space it is perhaps not surprising given the spatial element that much of the work that does 
exist about Pride parades is situated within the discipline of geography. Clearly any analysis of 
Pride does need to take into account this body of work as the use of space, the claiming of 
space and the reconstitution of space is fundamental to all Pride events whether this is 
intentional on the part of their organisers or not. Early geographic work on gay and lesbian 
space was (as we have already seen) fixated on the identification and study of gay residential, 
commercial and/or social communities. This work was however very limiting and as Plummer 
(quoted in Bell and Valentine, 1995, Pg 8) puts it, geographical work has shifted toward “a 
concern with identity politics” in which they go on t say it “mirrors the general cultural and 
16 
 
postmodern theoretical turn within human geography as a whole”. Pride events provide a 
fascinating subject for this form of geographic inquiry, involving as they do the simultaneous 
contestation of literal and theoretical space. 
 
The issues that Namaste raised in relation to Montreal Pride as ones that as we shall see are 
very pertinent to Johannesburg Pride as well. They relate to the conflict that engulfed the event 
in 1991 and 1992. The 1991 event saw a rejection of the official parade which travelled only 
through the city’s gay village and an unofficial march through the streets of the city (Bell and 
Valentine, 1995: 14). The official parade with its routing through safe, gay populated areas 
hoped to affirm these spaces but in doing so it also did not encroach on the city’s 
heteronormativity. What marches through contested spaces, particularly those in city centres 
do is, as Bell and Valentine (1995) put it: 
“by coming out into straight space, inevitably queered the streets; indeed queered the 
whole city. Important in this process in that the presence of queer bodies in particularly 
locations forces people to realise (by the juxtaposition ‘queer’ and ‘street’ or ‘queer’ 
and ‘city’) that the space around them, the landscape of Montreal (or wherever), the 
city streets, the males and motels, have been produces as (ambiently) heterosexual, 
heterosexist and heteronormative” (Bell and Valentine, 1995: 18) 
 
The following year conflict erupted around an official set of regulations set out by the 
organisers which read: 
“there was to be no cross-dressing, no exposure of breasts or buttocks, no displays 
deemed too vulgar or erotic, and no flags. As if the outlawing of extravagant fashion 
weren’t enough, it was suggested that the preferred attire of the parade participants be 
blue jeans and a white T-shirt” (Namaste, 1992: 8). 
 
17 
 
The response was a drive to dress and act as ‘outrageously’ as possible on the part of 
opponents of the regulations who began asking searching questions around Pride like, “Who 
was it for? Who felt the pride, and what were they proud of?” (Bell and Valentine, 1995: 14). 
These are questions that perennially hang around pride events in many areas. Reddy (2001) 
makes the important point that disquiet around flamboyance at Pride events is not the sole 
prerogative of the socially conservative, even people who would consider themselves politically 
radical can feed that the over sexualisation of the parade may position it as a site of erotic 
voyeurism that distracts from its political message. 
 
Theme and content are also common areas of conflict around Pride, Gamson (1995) writes 
about the immense conflict that broke out in San Francisco around the decision in 1993 to give 
the Pride parade that year the theme “The year of the Queer” (Gamson, 1995: 395). The 
conflicting opinions around the theme which Gamson suggests often divided along age lines 
related to among other things a debate between assimilationinsts who feared using politically 
provocative terms like queer and separatists who wanted to not only assert a non 
heteronormative sexuality but also contest the identity constructions that that underpinned the 
heterosexual/homosexual binary. 
 
Another interesting theory which links Pride specifically to questions around community is 
McClintock’s (1997) work on Commodity Spectacle or fetish spectacle as she also terms it. 
McClintock’s work is around the creation of nationalisms. She follows Andersons thinking 
around the imagined nature of community but suggests that the main way nationalism is 
created is through the “capacity to organize a sense of popular, collective unity through the 
management of mass, national, commodity spectacle” (McClintock, 1997: 102). In her 1997 
work McClintock speaks about the creation of Afrikaner identity in South Africa and the use of 
fetish spectacle in this process, specifically she relates the story of the Tweede Trek in 1938 and 
its profound impact in the creation of a strong Afrikaner nationalism and community despite 
the lack of any real substantive foundations for such community. While clearly there is danger 
18 
 
in simply transplanting a theory based around one form of community on to another there is a 
clear resonance within McClintock’s work with the creations of identity based communities 
other than national communities. Within this Pride events can be seen as relevant spaces of 
commodity spectacle.  
 
Race and Sexual orientation  
 
Among the many identity conflicts that exist within the gay and lesbian community the most 
commonly written about involve gender and race. In debates about the intersection of gender 
and sexual identities, there is attention to the ways in which lesbian women experience not 
only particular forms of discrimination and violation, but are also often face discrimination of 
gay men. The intersection of race and sexual orientation is one that gay and lesbian people of 
colour have to balance constantly, particularly in contexts in which there is a need to engage in 
struggles against both racial and sexual discrimination. Although there is an endless multiplicity 
of identities that an individual may carry and inhabit, it is most often the intersection of race, 
gender and sexual orientation that has been the subject of written work. As Hayfield (1995) 
puts it in relation to black lesbian women in Great Britain “in any examination of the 
discrimination that Black lesbians experience in Britain, we must examine the racism that exists 
against all Black people, the sexism against all women and the homophobia against all lesbians 
and gay men”.  
 
While there is clearly a powerful argument and indeed general acceptance that people have 
multiple identities and that they cannot but be at all times some combination of each of these, 
it is not at all uncommon for people to be called upon at various times to choose to give 
preeminence to one identity over another. This often occurs in relation to race and sexual 
orientation. Gregory Conerly suggests that the question which embodies the conflict for many 
African Americans is “Are you black first or are you queer?” (Conerly, 2001: Pg 7). The decision 
to give preeminence to one identity over another may be a matter of personal choice but can 
19 
 
also be forced upon people who in many cases are choosing not only a preeminent identity but 
also a preeminent struggle. This choice in many instances involves not only choosing to identify 
primarily within one identity group but also to suppress or turn a blind eye to discrimination 
based on another. This is often defended on the basis of a strategic necessity, a need for a 
united face. To give this united face it is expected that racism in gay and lesbian communities 
should be hidden or be tolerated and similarly that homophobia within black communities 
should not be openly challenged.  
 
A number of academics, activists and writers have strongly contested the idea that they should 
be forced to choose between their many identities, pointing out not only the impossibility of 
doing so but also that their oppression is often a consequence of the intersections of multiple 
identities. Audre Lorde perhaps summed this up best when she says: 
“As a black, lesbian, feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my 
identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I 
am constantly being encouraged to pluck out one aspect of myself and present this as 
the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self” (Lorde, 1995: 289). 
Simon Nkoli the former head of GLOW and one of the leading figures behind the first 
Johannesburg Pride march also spoke to this issue within specifically the context of the 
apartheid regime when he said: 
“I am black and I am gay. I cannot separate the two parts of me into secondary or 
primary struggles. In South Africa I am oppressed because I am a black man, and I am 
oppressed because I am gay. So when I fight for my freedom I must fight against both 
oppressions.” (Simon Nkoli quoted in Ditsie's account of Pride in De Waal and Manion, 
1996: 19). 
 
 
 
20 
 
Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa 
 
The Apartheid state was structured around the ordering and controlling of identities, 
particularly racial identities, in fact race became the pivot around which society was ordered 
“the apartheid state posited racial identities as paramount, defined and classified all people on 
the basis of them and arranged society accordingly.” (MacDonald, 2006:92). Ingrained in its 
racial project however was the need to control other forms of identity and behaviour as Gunkel 
states while the main thrust of the apartheid regime was to regulate racial identity it 
simultaneously “introduced laws that regulated the apparatus of race through sexuality by 
linking sexuality directly to race” she further states that “sexuality, within the apartheid project, 
was the biopolitical interface between the individual body and the population body.” (Gunkel, 
2010: 29). Class identity was also ordered around the requirements of the regime as “the racial 
state gave economic expression to the disparities between the political experiences of 
belonging and not belonging (MacDonald, 2006: 4). The strict defining and process of ordering 
multiple identities was a fundamental project of the apartheid system. A project whose impacts 
are still being felt profoundly in post-apartheid South Africa. 
 
MacDonald (2006) makes the very important point however that the apartheid state did not 
merely attempt to order pre-existing identities it also served to create them. He explains his 
core thesis as follows, that: 
“South Africa’s races originated in political experiences as well as cultural similarities, 
they the white supremacist state made communities of ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ by 
conferring citizenship on one and denying it to the other” (MacDonald, 2006” 3). 
In addition to this the idea of ‘races’ within the apartheid state as MacDonald (2006: 2) puts it is 
“conceived relationally as mutually constituting and constituted”. My research also defines race 
primarily as a construction or set of constructions which assign meaning and power to certain 
groups of people. Summed up by Walker (2005:41) definition of race as “a complicated 
multiplicity of identifications producing, reproducing and transforming identities under 
21 
 
changing social and historical circumstances”. The notion of the construction of specific forms 
of whiteness and blackness by the apartheid system and by extension the construction of all the 
intersecting identities required to sustain the racial project is extremely important in 
understanding why identity is such a fundamental site of contestation in South Africa today. 
 
The post-apartheid era has forced all South Africans into a process of renegotiating their 
identities. As Steyn (2001) puts it: 
“South Africans, willingly or unwillingly, successfully or unsuccessfully, are engaged in 
one of the most profound collective psychological adjustments happening in the 
contemporary world....they are selecting, editing and borrowing from the cultural 
resources available to them to reinterpret old selves in the light of new knowledge and 
possibilities while yet retaining a sense of personal congruence. 
 
In the immediate post-apartheid era there was an attempt to create discourses and national 
projects that promoted unity and emphasize the value in diversity rather than its negative 
possibilities. This is perhaps epitomized by the concept of the Rainbow Nation. The idea of the 
rainbow nation is one that was most prominent in the immediate post-apartheid era but 
continues to be pulled out when politically necessary. Fuelled by a need to engender a notion 
of collective South Africaness in the face of the deep and ongoing legacy of apartheid it was 
considered a way to pull people together in a way that recognised diversity and suggested that 
there was room for all people to coexist. As Cock (2003) puts it: 
“The ‘rainbow’ emerged (and remains) a strong collectivist and inclusive symbol defining 
unity among the diverse peoples of South Africa and a source of national pride” 
The notion was however also very problematic in large part because it served to become a 
blanket under which any number of ongoing inequalities, discriminations and abuses could be 
hidden, it does not deny difference but does downplay the importance of difference. More 
specifically as Gqola (2001: 99) states it involves “the inherent contradiction contained in a 
22 
 
label which superficially emphasises difference but prevents its discussion is enabled”. The 
deafening silence around issues of identity (racial but also gender, class and sexual among 
others) whether motivated by a real buy in to the ideal of the rainbow nation or a deep seated 
fear of the possible consequences of not doing so means that for at least the first decade or so 
of democracy real discussion around identity politics was suppressed or at least pushed out of 
the public sphere. This has changed somewhat in the last few years as a little more space has 
opened for such discussion and in part this has opened the space for positive discussion around 
real ongoing inequalities and discriminations. It has however also opened the way for more 
questionable discourses a prominent one of these is around the perceived new oppression of 
white people at the hands of the black majority. An idea that Steyn in her analysis of narratives 
of whiteness in the new South Africa considers under the title of “This shouldn’t happen to a 
white” (2001). This set of ideas around the persecution of white people politically and 
economically in South Africa today has become extremely powerful within white communities 
even though at least in the case of the latter it flies in face of all research which would seem to 
suggest as MacDonald states that “wealth is still distributed extremely unequally and economic 
inequality is still expressed racially” (MacDonald, 2006: 4) and indeed of common sense. Still, 
notions of white persecution have become very important in the ways in which white people 
understand their place in the new South Africa while clearly the very real ongoing inequalities 
faced by the majority of the population profoundly influence their identity formations. 
 
The process of renegotiating identities has been particularly interesting for gay and lesbian 
people and particularly white gay and lesbian people for whom the transition has been a deeply 
contradictory process. This is not to suggest that it has not been so for black gay and lesbian 
people given that the transition to democracy has opened the space for the foregrounding of 
sexual identities which may well have previously been subsumed within the broader anti-
Apartheid struggle but the situation for white gay and lesbian people is more contradictory. The 
apartheid system assigned great power and privilege to whiteness but also perpetuated a deep 
persecution of gay and lesbian people. The transition has forced white gay and lesbian people 
to engage simultaneously with the gain of great sexual freedom and the loss (at least formally) 
23 
 
of enormous racial power and privilege. Not all people of course will have experienced this 
transition in the same way. The priority given to differing identities and the different ways in 
which people experience both their whiteness and their gayness would all have an impact. The 
fact that it is considerably easier to hide one’s homosexuality than one’s whiteness of course 
also impacts the ways in which people would have interacted with both the apartheid and post-
apartheid moments. As Gunkel (2010) states the various pieces of legislation used to criminalise 
homosexuality placed white gay and lesbian people on the margins of apartheid society but a 
margin that has its own complexities linked to, among other things, the ability to pass for 
straight which allowed access to racial privilege something denied to black gay and lesbian 
people. The ways in which both white and black gay and lesbian people have reinterpreted 
their identities within the post-apartheid era alongside the constructions of these identities 
which are a legacy of the apartheid system are fundamentally important to any analysis of how 
community is created, understood and contested in South Africa today. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
24 
 
 Gay and Lesbian community and organising in South Africa 
 
The early years and the Law Reform Movement 
 
Homosexuality was criminalised both before and during the Apartheid regime through a 
number of pieces of legislation. Until the 1960s the primary legal mechanism used to 
criminalise homosexuality was the common law crime of sodomy2 which continued to operate 
until it was declared unconstitutional in 1997 (Berger, 2008: 17) and formally struck off the 
books in 1998 by the ruling of the Constitutional Court in National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian 
Equality and another v Minister of Justice and others (Reddy, 2011). In addition to this the 1927 
Immorality act and its amendments3, while not expressly referring to homosexuality, had 
provisions related to ‘unlawful carnal intercourse’ that were considered to include public 
homosexual acts (Hoad, 2005: 16). The laws targeted only men and were based on the 
criminalisation of certain behaviours rather than identity. It was in the mid to late 1960s that 
the state began to explore legislative options that would serve to dramatically change the way 
in which the law engaged with gay and lesbian people, not only through a shift to the 
criminalisation of gay identity as opposed to gay sex but also through bringing lesbian women 
into the gaze of the law for the first time. 
 
The Forest Town raid of 1966 was a turning point in the way in which the state engaged with 
homosexuality as a criminal offence and the ways in which gay and lesbian people mobilised in 
opposition to the state. Until the date of the raid there was a general disinterest on the part of 
the state in clamping down on homosexuality and with much homosexual socialising occurring 
in private there was a limit to what the system could do. Even in the months leading up to the 
                                                          
2
 The South African common law crime of sodomy was inherited from the Roman Dutch law brought to the country 
by the Dutch East India Company. While initially covering a number of sexual acts it was eventually refined to refer 
only to anal sex between men. 
3
 The act was first passed as the Immorality Act No. 5 of 1927, it was amended in 1950, 1957, 1967 and 1969. The 
act was rescinded in 1985 (Ratele, 2009: 295). 
25 
 
police raid there was no obvious increase in anti-gay activity or warning signs that there had 
been a change of policy from the police services of the regime more generally (Gevisser, 1995: 
30). 
 
On 20 January 1966 however everything about the systems of interaction between gay and 
lesbian people and the law changed. A private party in the affluent suburb of Forest Town, 
attended by a large number of largely well-heeled white gay men, was raided by the police 
(Gunkel, 2010: 52). The raid itself had limited consequences. It was not illegal for gay men to 
hold private parties and no alcohol was being sold. Nine men were arrested for “masquerading 
as a woman” while one was charged with indecent assault of a minor (Hoad, 2005: 16).The 
existing provisions in the Immorality Act could only be applied to public activities and therefore 
could not be applied to what was clearly a private party. The fall out following the raid was 
however immense. The press coverage of the raid expressed shock and disgust at the goings on 
and particularly at the identity of the participants. Indeed a great deal of the response 
appeared to be motivated by shock  that such activity could have been taking place in such a 
respectable area and by implication involving such seemingly respectable men (Gevisser, 
1995:30). The state responded almost instantly through the tabling of a piece of legislation 
which would greatly extend the criminalization of homosexuality in South Africa. 
 
The Anti-Homosexuality Bill tabled in 1967 sought to criminalise homosexual identity (where 
previously only the act of sodomy was a criminal act). It also brought lesbian women into the 
ambit of legislation for the first time by providing for a standardised punishment of three years 
imprisonment for both men and women found guilty of homosexuality (Gevisser, 1995: 31). The 
bill was deferred until the following year, at which time it was reintroduced this time as an 
amendment to the Immorality Act. (Gevisser, 1995: 31). This fact is extremely significant. The 
Immorality act was the piece of legislation through which the Apartheid state legislated against 
inter-racial relationships and other forms of sexual ‘immorality’, as it included the policing of 
sexuality along the lines of race and sexual identity in one act. While homosexual acts had 
26 
 
previously been implicitly accepted as part of its provisions on unlawful carnal acts this would 
be the first time homosexuality was explicitly named within this Act.  
 
The Act was a key part of the broader Apartheid project of racial purity and Christian morality. 
The decision to encompass the anti-homosexuality provisions into this particular piece of 
legislation speaks to the fact that the oppression of homosexuals was an integral part of that 
project. Retief (1995) in his paper ‘Keeping Sodom out of the laager’ expands on this point, 
showing how within the context of a regime representing a minority population fighting against 
an ever more powerful resistance movement, the need to grow and protect the purity of the 
white South African population became an urgent priority. South Africa was, as he put it “a 
country under siege and can only survive if it maintains its sexual purity and moral solidarity” 
(Retief, 1995: 109). Elder (1995), considering the targeting of white gay men specifically by the 
Act, makes the point that this issue is skewed somewhat by the fact that the history of the gay 
and lesbian community in South Africa is written largely by and from the perspective of white 
gay men. Nonetheless, like Retief he recognised that there was a specificity in the ways in which 
white male homosexuality (and to an extent white female homosexuality) threatened the 
Apartheid state and was therefore within the gaze of this new legislation in a way that 
homosexuality in non-white community may not have been. This is not to say that homosexual 
activity among non-white people was accepted by the state. As Elder points out, between July 
1966 and June 1967, the period immediately after the raid 147 of the 162 sodomy cases heard 
in South African courts involved black men (Elder, 1995: 62). When differentiating homosexual 
activity from homosexual identity however it is clear that it was the homosexuality of white 
people, particularly men, was a threat to the ‘moral basis of the populace’ (Elder, 1995: 62). 
This differentiation had a great impact on how gay and lesbian community and activism 
developed, as Elder puts it; 
“The differential consequences of homosexual activity, depending on racial classification 
and class position amongst other things, has made itself felt in present imposed 
essential notions that inform current sexuality studies in South Africa”. (Elder, 1995: 58) 
27 
 
There was an immediate response to the proposed bill from gay and lesbian people who were 
rocked by the provisions contained within it, including the threat of prison sentences for those 
found guilty of homosexuality and the threat of the removal of the distinction between public 
and private space. The movement which sprang up following the Forest Town raid became 
known as the Law Reform Movement (Gevisser, 1995: 32) and was the first organized gay and 
lesbian political initiative in South Africa. Its primary goal was to raise funds in order to retain a 
firm of attorneys to fight the proposed legislation. The Law Reform Movement was almost 
entirely constituted by white, gay, middle class men (Gevisser, 1995: 32). While there is ample 
evidence that gay and lesbian social organising was taking place within various race and class 
groups (see Zackie Achmat’s Apostles of Civilised Vice, for some such stories) it was specifically 
white gay men who were both the initial targets of police activity and the resistance to this 
activity. Ultimately the vast majority of the provisions mooted as amendments to the 
Immorality Act were dropped and only three were adopted. The first was an increase in the age 
of consent for homosexual activity, the second was the very contentious ‘three men at a party’ 
clause which stated that any homosexual activity taking place in a place at which more than 
two men were present constituted a crime, and thirdly a ban was placed on dildos.4 
 
The outcome was viewed as a great victory for the Law Reform Movement and indeed given 
the harshness of the bill as it was first mooted the ultimately passed provisions could be viewed 
as far less punitive. Those provisions were however profoundly important for a number of 
reasons. One is that for the first time the government had been seen to act against identity 
rather than behaviour. Another is that for the first time anti-homosexuality provisions were 
explicitly brought into the legal frameworks of the broader Apartheid system. In doing so it 
made explicit within the apartheid project of identity control the links between race and 
sexuality and the need to police both simultaneously. It also served to further blur the 
distinction between the public and the private around sexuality.  All of these facts would come 
                                                          
4
 The banning of dildos by the Immorality Act is probably the least considered of the three amendments eventually 
adopted, often considered as little more than amusing evidence of the bizarre nature of the Apartheid state, 
Gunkel (2010, 57) however offers a very interesting analysis of why this provision was one of those retained. 
28 
 
to have a profound impact on the ways in which the gay rights struggle was able to situate itself 
within the anti-Apartheid struggle in years to come. 
 
The immediate aftermath of the passing of the bill however saw the rapid collapse of the Law 
Reform Movement, created with the goal of achieving a single objective. Apparently satisfied 
with the, albeit still problematic outcome, the organization melted away as its members 
returned to their largely hidden existences. It was not until the 1980s that organized political 
activity would again be seen around issues of gay and lesbian rights. 
 
From the earliest attempts at organisation within gay and lesbian communities there has been 
a tension between the social function of such organization and its political voice. (Gevisser, 
1995) this tension was never more apparent than in the 1980s. It was during this time that gay 
organizations began to spring up that challenged the state. Inevitably, in the process of defining 
this new activism, divisions within gay communities began to become clear and the 
disconnection between the needs and expectations of various groups came to the fore. 
 
National movements from GASA to GLOW 
 
The Gay Association of South Africa was formed in April 1982 (Gevisser, 1995: 48). It followed a 
number of attempts to start small scale groups in various parts of the country. Most of these 
groups were based around providing social support for gay and lesbian people and specifically 
white gay and lesbian people and indeed this was GASA’s initial intention. From its earliest 
stage GASA struggled to negotiate the issue of its political positioning within the Apartheid 
system, a negotiation it never entirely resolved and that would turn out to be much of the 
reason for its ultimate demise. GASA had an explicit policy of being apolitical. For them this 
meant as Gevisser (1995: 51) puts it “firstly remaining non-aligned in broader South African 
politics, and secondly, following a moderate, non-confrontational and accomodationist 
29 
 
strategy.” Or as their mission statement read they were the “non-militant, non-political answer 
to gay needs” (Croucher, 2002: 318). Despite this claim to be apolitical there were clearly 
aspects of GASA’s stated aims that were deeply political and could potentially have put them on 
a collision course with the Nationalist government if they had chosen to push them. GASA 
however, consistently failed over a period of time to step up on issues that would require a 
critique of the state. For example, in 1982 a situation arose in which a number of white lesbian 
women were fired from their jobs with the South African Railway Police. GASA initially refused 
to do anything and even when heavily pressured did nothing beyond writing a letter of 
complaint. The organisation’s reasoning behind their failure to act was essentially that they 
were too small to change the situation and their work would be compromised by getting into 
conflict with the government (Gevisser, 1995: 51). This failure would set the tone of what was 
to come; it was the failure of GASA to speak out against the racist policies of the apartheid state 
(even when they pertained to black gay and lesbian people) that sealed their fate. 
 
GASA did not bar black gay and lesbian people from joining the organization and indeed a 
number did. Prominent among them was Simon Nkoli who not only joined but also created a 
support group within GASA for members who were not white. From the earliest stages it was 
clear that the organization was unwilling to speak out in defence of black members. When a 
function was organized at a venue that turned out to be a whites-only venue, white members 
continued with the event even though a number of non-white members in attendance were 
forced to remain outside. The issue came to a head however when in 1985 Nkoli was charged 
with treason along with a number of United Democratic Front activists and tried in the Delmas 
Treason Trial. GASA repeatedly refused to support Nkoli, a refusal that not only alienated black 
members of the organization but also had far broader ramifications. Among the most profound 
of these was GASA’s expulsion from the International Gay and Lesbian Association (ILGA) in 
1987 due to their ongoing unwillingness to openly condemn the Apartheid regime (Cock, 2003). 
Once again the reasons given by the GASA for this failure were all related to a fear of being 
seen to rock the boat, a feeling that they were too small and vulnerable to challenge the state 
and their commitment to their apolitical ideal. Underlying these arguments however was the 
30 
 
very real issue of racism and conservatism within the white gay and lesbian community. As 
Gevisser (1995: 45) put it, given “the level of political oppression in South Africa: any talk of 
‘rights’ was regarded with suspicion not only by the authorities but also by the conservative 
white gay community itself, which eschewed any identification with the broader liberation 
struggle.” White gay men in particular had a great deal to lose through the attainment of the 
goals of the anti-apartheid struggle. While the state did discriminate greatly against them on 
the basis of their sexual orientation a level of discretion could buy access to all the power and 
privilege that went with being white and male in Apartheid South Africa, power and privilege 
that would be endangered with the end of the regime. GASA’s supposed policy of remaining 
apolitical was in fact a very clear political project of accommodation in which there was a 
decision to negotiate space within the apartheid regime and not oppose it.  
 
This was never seen more clearly than during the 1987 white parliamentary elections. GASA 
ignored a call from the anti-apartheid movement to boycott the elections and instead 
encouraged gay voters to vote for candidates with pro-gay policies regardless of their party 
affiliation. In Hillbrow, an area of Johannesburg with a large gay population, a National Party 
candidate with pro-gay policies won the seat from the incumbent PFP candidate. The result was 
lauded as an example of the power of the gay community. The implication was clear: to GASA 
the fact that the National Party candidate supported gay rights mattered more than the fact 
that he represented a party engaged in perpetrating one of the worst systems of violent racial 
discrimination the world had ever seen. Far from being apolitical GASA had in fact shown 
clearly that they would actively support racial repression if it was in the interests of white gay 
people (Gevisser, 1995: 61) 
 
It was the inability and/or unwillingness of GASA to connect their struggle with the broader 
struggle for human rights in South Africa, along with a great deal of internal conflict, that led to 
the eventual collapse of GASA. Even before this however new organizations had begun to 
appear within South Africa for whom the connection was obvious and desirable and it was 
31 
 
these organisations which took the political space that GASA was unwilling to take. The Gay and 
Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand was formed in 1988 by Simon Nkoli upon his release 
from prison and in response to the abject unwillingness of GASA to support him in any way 
during his trial and imprisonment. The GLOW membership was mostly black and was drawn 
particularly from gay and lesbian communities in Soweto and KwaThema (Gunkel, 2010: 66), as 
well as a number of progressive white activists who were equally disenchanted with GASA. 
GLOW was an overtly political organisation that situated itself squarely within the broader anti-
apartheid struggle and recognised the indivisibility of human rights. At around the same time as 
GLOW was working on the Witwatersrand like-minded organisations were being set up in other 
parts of the country, specifically in the Cape Province where the Lesbian and Gay Organisation 
(LAGO) and then the Organisation of Lesbian and Gay Activists OLGA were set up by a small 
group of lesbian and gay activists who though mostly white middle class intellectuals had strong 
struggle credentials and were increasingly disillusioned with GASA (Croucher, 2002: 319). OLGA 
joined the United Democratic Front and began caucusing within that organisation around the 
role of gay and lesbian rights within the new power dispensation that was clearly now 
inevitable (Sunday’s Women Newsletter, October 1990). GLOW was undertaking similar work in 
the Witwatersrand and perhaps their most important single action and the one of most 
importance to this work is that in 1990 they organised the first gay and lesbian pride march in 
South Africa through the streets of Johannesburg. 
 
The National Coalition years 
 
The National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (NCGLE) was formed in 1994 (Reddy, 2001: 
178). It was a coalition of gay and lesbian organisations created for one specific purpose, that 
being campaigning for the inclusion of sexual orientation in the new Constitution for the 
Republic of South Africa which was in the process of being drafted. The actual size of the 
coalition is a deeply contentious issue; at one time there was a claim that over 70 organisations 
were members of the coalition though the real number of actual functioning members was far 
32 
 
lower. The NCGLE was successful in its attempts and sexual orientation was included in the 
extensive list of grounds in the equality clause in the bill of rights in the Constitution.  
 
Following this victory the coalition turned its attention to using the equality clause to overturn 
a series of pieces of legislation that discriminated against gay and lesbian people. Using what it 
referred to as its ‘shopping list’ (Berger, 2008: 18) they set about an ambitious litigation 
strategy through which they were able to change the law on any number of issues from 
adoption, to access to medical insurance and concluding with gay marriage. This litigation 
strategy was very successful and case after case was won, the crowning moment being the 
passing of the Civil Union Bill in 2006 that legalised marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples. 
During this time the Coalition had formalised itself into a non-governmental organisation called 
the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project. A new structure the Joint Working Group was set up in 
2003 to replace in some part the role that the coalition had played in bringing together the 
diverse groups working within the organised gay and lesbian (or LGBTI as it became commonly 
known) sector (Kraak, 2008: 279). 
 
The struggle around the constitution and the subsequent litigation process provided a common 
goal for those people working on gay and lesbian issues and created for a number of years an 
impression of unity within which all of the gay and lesbian community appeared to be pulling 
together for a common cause. Of course this impression was not necessarily a reflection of the 
reality, Cock makes the point that: 
“the unity of the gay rights movement should not be overemphasized...the movement 
was fragmented, splintered politically and divided along race, gender, class and 
ideological lines” (Cock, 2003: 36). 
The NCGLE nonetheless was extremely successful in achieving its stated objectives, not only 
securing the protection of sexual orientation in the final Constitution but also winning a series 
of stunning victories through the legal system. It was able to do this in part by setting very 
specific goals and trying to achieve them in the least controversial manner, there was a 
33 
 
deliberate decision not to use the language of gay rights but instead to focus on equality and 
the uniformity of all discriminations in a way that spoke to the broader process of removing 
legislated inequality more broadly (Cock, 2003; 40). The very specific nature of the demands 
being made was a large part of the ability to maintain cohesion within the coalition, not unlike 
the Law Reform Movement in 1968 the single issue focus of the NCGLE facilitated broad 
participation.  
 
Despite this clear focus and its influence on the cohesion the unity within the community still 
required a certain level of engineering. Beverly Ditsie (a well known activist during the NCGLE 
years) makes the point in her discussion with Gunkel (2010: 71) that the common cause was 
not simply the result of an obvious strategy to achieve an obvious goal that was commonly 
understood, it was in fact engineered by the NCGLE who actively played down differences and 
structured its operations in such a way as to give the least possibility for internal conflict. One 
example of this pointed out by Ditsie was that in areas were organisations were known to differ 
from the coalition policy the NCGLE would simply start a new organisation even if it only had a 
few members and then give that organisation membership of the coalition (Gunkel, 2010). This 
not only significantly bumped up the number of member organisations that the coalition could 
claim but also ensured that all its members were pulling toward a common political vision while 
marginalising any groups with differing views. Oswin (2007) expands on this idea suggesting 
that while the National Coalition appeared to be a coalition of independent organisations in 
practice control fed from the coalition to its members and not the other way round. A 
quotation from anonymous founder member of the coalition in Oswin's paper states “the 
community was made through the National Coalition...or the idea of a community was made by 
this idea of an umbrella body” in other words “the NCGLE performatively constitutes the very 
community on the behalf of which it claims to be acting” (Oswin, 2007: 49).  
 
This insight is key to understanding the state of gay and lesbian activism from the mid-1990s 
until perhaps the mid 2000s. The coalition provided the appearance of a strong, united 
34 
 
community fighting for its collective interests when in fact there was a relatively small number 
of people undertaking what was a fairly conservative project of legislative reform within which 
the mobilisation of a mass movement was deliberately not undertaken. The limited scope of 
the work undertaken did not allow for any real interrogation of fissures within the community 
and the lack of real mass participation allowed little space for debate on these fissures to take 
place. As Oswin (2007:) puts it: 
“when the NCGLE came into being, it opted to pursue a politics of strategic essentialism 
that ignored the ways in which class, race and gender issues are inevitably intertwined 
with sexuality. Thus, it deepened community schisms along these lines and made its 
self-imposed task of building a strong, cohesive gay and lesbian movement in the post-
apartheid era that much more difficult” 
 
During these years there were limited spaces in which these contestations around race, class 
and gender within the broader community could play themselves out. Pride was one of these 
spaces and as will be shown it remained an important space of contestation throughout these 
years.  
 
New era, new challenges 
 
In the years since the passing of the Civil Unions Act the organised gay and lesbian sector has 
had to rethink and reposition itself to face a new set of issues and concerns. Many of these 
relate to the very divergent ways in which gay and lesbian people have been able to access and 
gain full benefit from the legal rights won during the 1990s and early 2000s. Specifically the 
issue of rising levels of hate crime5 have caused a fundamental shift in the sector and its work. 
While no one is immune to violence based on their sexual orientation a very definite trend has 
                                                          
5
 Whether levels of hate crime are rising or not is a controversial topic, there is an argument that this is merely 
assumption given that there is a lack of any information on levels of homophobic violence in non-white 
communities who were rarely if ever the focus of work within the sector prior to the earl 2000s. 
35 
 
emerged around the targeting of black lesbian women for assault, rape and murder. In 2000 a 
group of lesbian women were gang-raped after leaving the Johannesburg Pride after-party 
(Dirsuweit, 2006: 325). Since then there have been numerous reports of rapes from all over the 
country in which the sexual orientation of the victim was known or strongly suspected to be the 
motive for the attack. There have also been a number of very brutal murders such as that of 
Zoliswa Nkonyana in 2006, Eudy Simelane in 2008 and Noxolo Nogwaza in 2011 to name but a 
few.  
 
This new challenge has not only caused a shift in focus within the organised sector but indeed a 
fundamental shift in the makeup of the sector with organisations like the Forum for the 
Empowerment of Women and numerous township based CBOs (Community Based 
Organisations) being set up to deal specifically with these issues. This has inevitably led to a 
shifting of and contestation over power between the white gay men who traditionally 
constituted the leadership of LGBTI organisations and the black lesbian women often with a 
strong background in feminist politics and the liberation struggle who entered the sector. This 
has also engendered something of a disconnection between the sector and the spaces of social 
activity, pink consumption and gay and lesbian media which are in most cases still controlled by 
white gay men. 
 
Another issue influencing the community greatly relates to the relationship between gay and 
lesbian communities and the political system. In the early days of Johannesburg Pride and 
earlier, when GLOW was prominent, there was a very definite connection between the struggle 
for gay and lesbian rights and the ANC. While not without some internal discussion the ANC 
honoured this connection by giving prominence to gay and lesbian issues and were largely 
responsible for the ultimate inclusion of the sexual orientation clause in the interim and then 
final Constitutions. While there has always been deep suspicion toward the ANC from many 
segments of the gay and lesbian population, Gevisser (1991) points out that from the earliest 
days of Johannesburg Pride many people were troubled by the connection to the ANC. 
36 
 
However, even the most anti-ANC of gay people probably had some sense that their best hope 
for equality and protection lay with that party. This remained true to an extent right up until 
2005 when the Civil Unions Bill was passed through Parliament in large part due to the ANC 
forcing its MPs to vote yes (BBC report, November 2006). For many white gay people the 
Democratic Alliance, with its overtly pro-gay agenda, has become the party to support. For 
many black gay and lesbian people with strong historical links to the ANC either personal or 
familial, and who still perceive the ANC as the party that represents their interests, the DA 
however offers very little. This has created a division not absolutely based on race but which 
very often fissures along race lines around attitudes to the ANC and indeed to the state. 
 
While the sector retains a level of cohesion this is tested as organisations look to their own 
constituencies and realise that the needs and expectations are not the same. Kraak (2008: 280) 
in his reflections on the Civil Union Act states “I believe that in South Africa today we have a 
genuinely non-racial gay and lesbian movement, which has struck roots in townships and rural 
areas. It is a movement in which there is increasingly a commitment to poor and black LGBTI 
people”. This statement is interesting on a number of levels, not least the fact that the 
comment about increasing commitment to poor and black LGBTI people implies that the 
default position of the sector from which it is moving remains a commitment to rich and white 
LGBTI people. Also interesting is that later on the same page Kraak comments that “the 
community remains divided and the fault-lines of race, class and gender persist. In the world of 
the commercialised club scene, patronised by a mainly white and male clientele, there is little 
notion of solidarity or common experience with those seeking to find safe spaces in township or 
rural areas”. What this speaks to either a highly romanticised view of collectivity within the 
organised sector or a profound disconnect between the sector and the community it seeks to 
represent. 
 
 
 
37 
 
Johannesburg Pride  
 
Historical Overview 
 
The first Gay and Lesbian Pride march held in South Africa (and indeed in Africa) took place on 
October 13, 1990. This was a time of great political turmoil in South Africa, Nelson Mandela was 
released from prison in that year and the transition to democracy had begun, but the first 
democratic elections and the Constitution with its protections for gay and lesbian people were 
still many years away. There may be multiple reasons related to the political context in the 
country generally which explain why 1990 was the year selected for the first march. Lurink 
(1998) quotes Simon Nkoli and suggesting that the release of Nelson Mandela and the 
unbanning of the ANC had encouraged a belief that the time was right. Another important 
reason for the march taking place when it did was that in 1988 the ANC in exile had produced a 
set of draft Constitutional guidelines, this document did not include any reference to gay and 
lesbian rights. Organisation such as OLGA and GLOW were well aware that they probably had a 
fairly small window of opportunity to get gay and lesbian rights on to the agenda for the 
political transformation that now appeared inevitable and undertook a number of strategies to 
achieve this aim. One of the key strategies employed particularly by GLOW was related to 
creating visibility and within this the 1990 gay and lesbian pride march was a vitally important 
event (Gunkel, 2010). 
 
The march was organized by GLOW and was overtly political in nature. Gevisser (1995) 
describes the parade as the flagship for the new form of gay and lesbian activism that 
disavowed the previous focus on single issue activism and reflected the new movement to 
situate gay and lesbian issues within the broader struggle for rights in South Africa. The theme 
of the march that year was “Unity in the Community” (De Waal and Manion, 2006: 13), an 
interesting choice since in the midst of great political upheaval, the message of that first Pride 
was aimed clearly at its own fractured constituency. The organisers also called on heterosexual 
38 
 
South Africans to join in; the Manifesto for the first march included “A call to all South Africans 
who are committed to a non-racist, non-sexist, non-discriminatory democratic future: Join us in 
the first lesbian and gay pride march”. (De Waal and Manion, 2006: 15). The march attracted a 
diverse crowd, some of whom famously chose to march with paper bags covering their faces 
due to fear of the legal and social consequences of being seen at the march. An OLGA activist 
who travelled to Johannesburg for the march describes the crowd in attendance as follows: 
“There was a fascinating cross-section of lesbian and gay people there, a really motley 
assortment including very heavily butch-femme lesbian couples a few flamboyant 
‘queens’ whom the press of course chose to function heavily, lots of very conventional 
looking people and the bar types through to the left wing types.” (OLGA News, Feb 
1991). 
The march succeeding in pushing the dual messages of the demand for the rights of gay and 
lesbian people and the need for an end to the Apartheid regime. Placards and slogans at the 
rally carried such messages as ‘Dykes for Democracy’, ‘Lesbians and Gays Against Apartheid”, 
and “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re everywhere”, “hey hey hey, ho ho ho, homophobia’s got 
to go” (Sundays Woman Newsletter, November 1990).  
 
Though relatively small compared to the large parades of later years, the success of the 1990 
march encouraged activists to push ahead with efforts to make the march an annual event. The 
1991 Pride March went ahead on 12 October 1991. Over 500 marchers took part and despite 
the fact that homosexuality remained as criminalised as it had been the year before, paper bags 
were largely done away with. The theme that year was “March for Equality” a shift from the 
previous year’s call for internal unity to an outward demand. This was matched in 1992 when 
the theme of Pride was “Marching for our rights”. The linked themes of rights and equality 
speak to the process ongoing in South Africa at the time of negotiating the principles that 
would underpin the new South Africa and particularly its new Constitution. Through these years 
Pride continued to be organised by a small number of dedicated activists mainly affiliated to 
GLOW, such as Simon Nkoli, Donne Rundle and Beverly Ditsie, Roy Shepherd among others. 
39 
 
1993 was an interesting year in part because it marked the first pride march in Cape Town, 
organized by a group of activists who had travelled to Johannesburg the year before to take 
part in the march it was the first march to be inspired by the Johannesburg event and while the 
Cape Town Pride took place only intermittently in those early years it has since also become a 
regular annual event.  
 
The Johannesburg event that year was also special in that it took place literally days after the 
political negotiations for a new dispensation in South Africa had approved a section of the 
interim Constitution related to the protection of fundamental human rights. This section 
included fourteen grounds on which discrimination would be expressly prohibited, including 
sexual orientation (Edwin’s Speech). This ground breaking achievement, unprecedented 
anywhere in the world, lent an immense sense of celebration to the march that year. 
Underneath this euphoria however tensions were simmering. The attendance that year was 
poor and there were questions within the gay and lesbian community about the leadership of 
the event. The following year would see great upheaval within the organizing of the pride with 
both a change in leadership and in focus. 
 
In 1994 Paul Stobbs a gay man dismayed with the poor turnout of the previous year’s march 
took over the chairmanship of the Johannesburg Pride. His perspective was radically divergent 
to that of the previous organisers and his political positioning was also entirely different. Stobbs 
was involved in Pride for a number of years in a variety of capacities including chairing the 
event from 1994 to 1995.These years saw a vast growth in the scale of the event and with this 
the growth of commercial interest. In 1998 there was another major shift in the running of 
Pride. Sharon Cooper became the co-chair of pride with Ian McMahon in 1998 and Carrie 
Shelver in 1999. (De Waal and Manion, 2006: 109). There was a gender transformation on the 
committee in these years that saw a large number of lesbian women joining the organising 
committee. This created a level of tension. As Cooper quoted in De Waal and Manion (2006: 
108) put it “Pride was a private boys’ club when we came on board in 1998. Some of the guys 
40 
 
were upset that they were no longer able to make unilateral decisions, and responded by not 
offering their resources or connections”. Gary Bath who was on the organising committee of 
Pride for a number of years is quoted in De Waal and Manion (2006: 163) on this issue. He says 
that there appeared to be such a clash between the men and women on the committee that a 
vote was held at which the name of the event was changed from the “Gay and Lesbian Pride 
Parade” to the “Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade.”This statement is curious in that it is clear from 
looking at all the branding materials from the early years of pride that the name of the event 
for its first few years was the “Lesbian and Gay Pride March.” The precedence of Gay over 
Lesbian came about only during the Stobbs era and at the same time that the word Parade was 
substituted for march. The decision to officially name the parade as the Lesbian and Gay Pride 
Parade which actually took place earlier than Bath suggests (De Waal and Manion, 2006: 9) 
therefore constituted only a return to the original name of the event with parade substituted 
for march after only a couple of years of the use of the name Gay and Lesbian. 
 
The board in 1998 and 1999, infused with a strong feminist discourse, tried to bring a political 
consciousness back to the annual Pride event, particularly in relation to what they saw as an 
absence of lesbian women and engagement with the needs of lesbian women in the parade. 
But issues related to race continued to simmer. While the parades continued to be relatively 
successful in terms of organisation and attendance there were clear problems, the organising 
committee was riven with internal conflicts and the parade was beginning to regularly run at a 
financial loss. In 1999 the parade made a loss of R60 000 (De Waal and Manion, 2006: 109). 
Although this amount is not huge for an event of its size, it is indicative of the ways in which 
pride had changed so radically that within 10 years it had gone from being organised on a 
shoestring budget to being able to operate at a loss of R60 000. The following few years would 
be particularly bleak for the event with ongoing financial losses and deep division and conflict 
over organisational issues.  
 
41 
 
In 2001 following crisis talks involving a number of gay and lesbian organisations and individuals 
to stop an alternative Pride event being organised by activists deeply angry at what they 
considered the growing racial exclusivity of the event, a committee chaired by Daniel Somerville 
and Donna Smith and supported by the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project did manage to put 
together a pride event. It was fairly successful and managed to avoid the massive debts of 
earlier years but by the end of that year Pride was in crisis. Successive organisers had been 
worn down by the strain of organising the parade and negotiating the multiple conflicts it 
involved, there was a massive debt crisis created by years of running the event at a financial 
loss and there was huge disagreement on a way forward. At this time Gary Bath stepped in 
once again, this time through his company Pride Communications CC (Joburgnews.co.za, 2003). 
His plan was to take over the running of the annual pride event as a private company and run it 
as a commercial venture. This was a deeply controversial idea and many activists were appalled 
at the idea of the event being run by a private company and particularly at the idea that the 
name of Pride could be trademarked and used then exclusively by this company. Nonetheless 
Bath stepped into a vacuum and there was a lack of a concerted capacity to challenge him or 
offer a sustainable alternative on the part of the organised sector.  
 
The first Pride Parade organised by Bath was in 2002 and in this year the long debated decision 
was finally taken to move the event away from the inner city and to Zoo Lake in Rosebank. It 
remained there until 2005. The Bath years saw big commercial events being staged but with 
continued heavy financial losses. Writing in De Waal and Manion’s (2006) book Bath attributed 
this to the very large debt inherited by Pride which made it hard to raise money because the 
reputation of the event for financial accountability was nonexistent. The fact is though that 
Pride continued to lose money all through his tenure. The most embarrassing incident being 
when R210 000 raised at the 2004 event for Nkosi’s Haven, a charity working with children 
infected with HIV was never paid despite a large cheque being handed over (Mambaonline 
article, 11 May 2006). 
 
42 
 
In 2004 there was a decision for the first time to charge an entrance fee to attend the Pride 
festivities, this was deeply controversial as many people believed that Pride was a community 
event and should be open to all members of the community. It was not until 2005 that a 
decision was made by Bath to take the route of Pride back through the streets of the city to 
conclude at the Heartlands, a relatively short-lived geographic concentration of gay clubs in 
Braamfontein. The event was marred however by the serious injury of a participant who was hit 
by a bottle thrown from a building on the route. The woman’s life was saved due to the quick 
action of other marchers and paramedics but the incident cast a shadow over the day. It soon 
became used as further proof that it was not safe to march through this part of the city and 
further justification for the eventual permanent move to Zoo Lake. This was an irony given that 
the injured woman was participating with the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), 
an organisation that has consistently supported a city march and objected to the de-
politicisation of the event. It was FEW who in 2004 had initiated the Soweto Pride event. The 
Soweto march has never been billed overtly as an alternative to Johannesburg Pride. Indeed its 
placement a week before was intended to bracket the activities that traditionally took place in 
the week leading up to Johannesburg Pride. It is however an overtly political march which 
attempts to speak to the violation of rights and violence that continued to affect LGBTI people 
and specifically black lesbian women. 
 
2006 represented possibly the darkest moment in the history of Pride. No one seemed willing 
to step forward and organise the event and it was unclear for a great deal of the year whether 
there would be a pride event or not. The Lesbian and Gay Equality Project which had for many 
years provided a certain level of consistent support to the various organisers of Pride collapsed 
that year following stunning accusations of financial mismanagement against its then director, 
leaving a massive void in the organised gay and lesbian sector and in the running of pride. The 
previous year’s chairperson Paul Tilly was unwilling to carry on in that capacity and while both 
Gary Bath (despite his deeply controversial status) and Bruce Walker (a prominent club owner) 
expressed some interest in organising the event there appeared to be no unifying force that 
could facilitate the project (Mambaonline article, 11 May 2006). Ultimately Bath did take on the 
43 
 
event which took place in September 2006 but the late planning, lack of any communication 
and general unhappiness that had marred its organisation ensured that the event would be 
highly problematic. Perhaps the most significant legacy of the 2006 event was the decision to 
move the parade back to Zoo Lake where it has remained to this day. During 2006 negotiations 
began between prominent gay individuals, LGBTI organisations and the LGBTI media around 
what would become a new structure set up to take over the organisation of Johannesburg Pride 
 
In 2007, following years of conflict and a series of pride events which, while well attended, 
were financially disastrous, a group of concerned individuals came together to create a new 
structure to run pride, this group are defined on the Johannesburg Pride web site as 
“organisers, all with considerable skills and experiences in relevant fields and not linked to 
troubled events” (Joburg Pride Web site). A Section 21 not for profit company was created 
under the name of the Joburg gay pride festival company (Wells, 2007). The structure was very 
much based on the model of Cape Town Pride which had formed itself some years earlier into a 
Section 21 company with a board drawn from prominent members of the gay and lesbian 
community in Cape Town. Indeed the first Chairperson of the new Johannesburg board, Tracey 
Sandilands, had previously worked on Cape Town Pride (Mambaonline news article, 2006). The 
event this new structure created became branded and known simply as “Joburg Pride.”The 
removal of the words gay and lesbian from the name may have allowed the new structure to 
dodge the controversial question of which to place before the other but it has also led to 
accusations that both the board and its sponsorship partners deliberately understate the gay 
and lesbian aspect of the event to make it more attractive and less threatening to 
heterosexuals. This accusation is questionable given that the identity of the event is very overt 
despite the absence of the words from the name but it is nonetheless another chapter in the 
story of the naming of Pride that had been unfolding ever since 1990. Since 2007 a number of 
very successful, large and financially sound Pride events have been held in what has almost 
certainly been the most stable period in the tumultuous history of Pride. Despite this however, 
controversy continues to abound both in relation to the structure that runs Pride (specifically its 
racial composition) and the long standing points of conflict around the route, political content 
44 
 
and commercialisation of Pride. These conflicts have played out through a number of specific 
incidents, among these being the Bring it to Soweto campaign in 2007 and the controversy 
around the organisation of an official after party in 2010. I will address these below. 
 
Johannesburg Pride has changed immensely through its two decade long history. The massive, 
commercially marketed and slickly run events of the last few years seem a million miles away 
from the iconic images of the few hundred people, many covering their faces with paper bags, 
who took part in the first march in 1990. What is clear however, is that through its tumultuous 
history, through changes in leadership and in focus one of the few consistencies around pride is 
to be found in the conflicts that have surrounded the event. Some of these will be fleshed out 
in the coming sections.  
 
 
City streets to suburban sidewalks 
 
Until 2002 the annual Pride parade always took place in and around the inner city of 
Johannesburg. Although neither the route of the march nor the start and end points were the 
same in all years there were certain areas that the parade regularly traversed: the CBD, 
Braamfontein, Newtown, Hillbrow and Yeoville. All are central to the city and many have 
important significance to the history of gay and lesbian organising in the city. Almost from the 
start however there were questions asked around other possible locations, particularly the idea 
of moving the march out of the city and into the suburbs. However it was not until the mid 
1990s that these questions were asked openly. The 1996 pride parade drew a large crowd and 
was considered a great success by the organisers but it was also a year in which a number of 
the simmering conflicts related to pride came to the forefront, and perhaps the most important 
of these was around the route with previous questions around a possible change in location 
spilling into open conflict. While Soweto, Sandton and Pretoria have all been suggested at 
45 
 
various times as possible locations for Pride, it is Zoo Lake in the suburb of Rosebank that has 
consistently been the preferred location of those who want to move away from the inner city.  
 
Rosebank is located in the Northern suburbs of Johannesburg, the area is known to be trendy 
and very gay friendly and Zoo Lake itself is a large park located close to the Johannesburg Zoo 
from which it takes its name. The park has a long association with the gay community in 
Johannesburg, being for many years a popular cruising zone (De Waal and Manion, 2006: 8) it 
also was one of the few spaces in Johannesburg that was non-racial during the apartheid years, 
a specific requirement set by its donor. The suburb of Rosebank however was in the mid 1990s 
almost exclusively white and indeed remains largely so to this day. It is also not serviced by 
public transport networks in the same way as the city centre is and this makes it less accessible 
to people who lack their own transport. While there are commercial and retail areas within the 
suburb a great deal of its space is dominated by large homes often surrounded by high walls. 
 
While the decision was ultimately made to keep the parade in the city centre in 1996 this was 
not universally agreed and there were threats of to boycott the event by those who wanted it 
to move (as indeed there were threats to boycott if it did move as well). Correspondence to the 
pride board at this time showed the depth of unhappiness. Many activists were disturbed both 
by the possibility of the move and by the fact that discussions seemed to be taking place within 
the structures of the pride board and with no community consultation. GLOW activists 
communicated to Pride their deep concerns around the proposal to move the parade away 
from the city and to a predominantly (indeed in 1996 almost exclusively) white suburb. Other 
people were upset at the ultimate decision to stay in town as the following correspondence 
from a person who had previously volunteered to help with the event displays: 
“I would like to express my dismay at the decision taken to stage the parade in the CBD 
and to emphasise how strongly I feel about this, I am withdrawing my attendance and 
support for this year’s Pride celebrations” (LP Botes, Private correspondence). 
46 
 
Within the board itself there were opposing views on the subject. Richard Holden the secretary 
of Pride wrote the following in a letter to Paul Stobbs: 
“My reservations with regard to the Johannesburg CBD routes relate specifically to the 
safety and security for individuals in view of the nature of crime which takes place on 
the streets, if adequate security in the form of considerably improved police and traffic 
police presence, can be improved, I am convinced that the Johannesburg CBD is the best 
option” (Holden, Private correspondence, 12 June 1996). 
 
He goes on to state that while Zoo Lake certainly had a number of advantages particularly in 
terms of the post parade events there were also a number of drawbacks. He mentions 
specifically the accessibility of the location for non-white participants. He also mentions that 
the decentralisation of the parade would inevitably lead to people in other areas starting their 
own parades and subsequently to a dispersion of the messaging of the event. He also makes an 
interesting political argument when he says: 
 
“a perception could be created that the parade has been moved to predominantly white 
‘turf’ now that the gender discrimination clause has been included in the Constitution, it 
could appear as if the black gay community has been utilised in a somewhat cynical 
manner for the attainment of a political objective, only to be ‘dumped’ thereafter” 
(Holden, Personal correspondence, 12 June 1996) 
 
In both his prediction of the possible political ramification of the suggested move and the 
possibility of the creation of alternative events Holden proved to be very insightful given the 
subsequent events which would unfold when a decade later the parade did make its permanent 
move to Zoo Lake. During the 1996 parade a survey was conducted to gauge the opinion of 
attendees on a number of subjects, one of which was the preferred route for future marches. 
There are many methodological questions that could be asked about this survey not least the 
47 
 
fact that it involved a very small number of people (141) given the overall attendance of over 15 
000 that year (De Waal and Manion, 2006). The fact that the interviewers spoke to 123 men 
and only 18 women is also problematic. Despite these concerns, the results remain interesting. 
Of those questioned 62 voted to move the parade to Rosebank while 74 wanted the parade to 
stay in the CBD with small numbers supporting a shift to Soweto or Pretoria6. It is clear that 
while the majority vote still supported the status quo there were a large number of people 
supporting a move to the suburbs. The survey offers no information on the race of those people 
surveyed but it is easy to comprehend why the debate around the route so often appeared 
linked to race. A move to Rosebank would clearly be perceived as an attempt to encourage 
attendance from white people while making accessibility to the event for non-white people 
difficult other than through outreach transport programmes. 
 
The debate around the route of pride and its ultimate destination continued to be an annual 
feature of the organising of the event. In 1998 three possible routes were considered. One of 
these was a Zoo Lake based event, while the other two remained largely within the traditional 
area. After much debate a decision was taken to hold the event at Pieter Roos Park in 
Braamfontein and take the parade through the inner city and the suburbs of Berea and Yeoville. 
While the debate around the location of pride remained alive, this was the last time that a 
change of location was seriously considered until 2002. In that year Gary Bath who had taken 
over the running of pride first moved the event to Rosebank, and the march started and ended 
at Zoo Lake. Arguments in favour of the move were largely twofold: first, that Zoo Lake can 
handle the ever increasing numbers attending pride and has the infrastructure to hold large 
after-march events and second that the inner city had become an unpleasant space in which 
there was a strong perception of grime and crime. The fact that the inner city and the suburbs 
of Yeoville, Hillbrow and Berea through which the parade moved had become increasingly and 
eventually almost exclusively black as white residents had moved out and into the suburbs was 
not openly discussed. The short-lived decision to move the parade back into the city in 2005 
                                                          
6
 The full results were Pretoria – 17, Rosebank – 62, CBD – 74, Soweto – 10. This means 163 total votes cast while 
the survey incites that only 141 people were surveyed clearly another methodological question mark. 
48 
 
was perhaps in part motivated by the increased involvement of the Lesbian and Gay Equality 
Project in the event but was also certainly about supporting the Heartlands development. A 
number of gay and lesbian clubs had opened at an intersection in Braamfontein with the 
intention of providing a safe gay area in the city. The Heartlands hosted the event that year and 
was where the official after party took place. The following year however the event moved back 
to Zoo Lake where it remains to this day.  
 
The new organisation that took over the running of Pride in 2007 made the decision to keep the 
event at Zoo Lake despite demands from the organised LGBTI sector for a return to the city 
which they believed to constitute contested space and to have far greater symbolic meaning 
than the leafy gay friendly suburbs. The board has however indicated that the event will remain 
in Rosebank for the foreseeable future. The movement to Zoo Lake represents far more than a 
mere shift in location. It was a political statement that speaks to the very meaning of Pride. The 
arguments around the push for a change of venue have always gone hand in hand with the 
debates around whether Pride is supposed to be a political march or a celebratory parade, the 
choice to walk in areas that are generally gay friendly and non-threatening contrasts with the 
notion of Pride as an attempt to claim contested space. As the late Peter Busse put it: 
 
“Today it seems that people on the sidewalks don’t count. It’s a march for the marcher’s 
sake, rather than for any possible impact on the people who happen to see it. In those 
early days it always went by choice through densely populated urban areas, to that as 
many people as possible would see it. More recently the Pride March has strolled 
around the oak-lined avenues of Rosebank, and it doesn’t have the same impact” (De 
Waal and Manion, 2006: 39). 
 
Debates around the route of Pride have also constantly been racialised, as Richard Holden had 
predicted they would be some 10 years before the parade made its final move to Zoo Lake. 
Gerald Kraak in his 2006 reflections upon the state of the gay and lesbian community considers 
49 
 
the ongoing inequality and lack of social engagement between white and black LGBTI people 
says the following; 
“The differing aspirations of these two communities is replicated every year in the 
debate over the nature of the Pride parade, what its message should be and where it 
should take place. The re-routing of Pride from the Johannesburg city centre to the 
wealthy northern suburbs of Johannesburg demonstrates this continued divide and the 
predominance of the interests of a privileged minority, at least in determining this part 
of the annual gay and lesbian agenda” (Kraak, 2006: 281). 
 
 
It’s all about the money 
 
The early pride events were organised with little money and with no expectation or for that 
matter capacity to make money. It did not however take long for the potential for pride to 
make money to be realised by people within the sector. At times such as the Bath years this 
clearly involved individual financial gain (or rather the possibility thereof given that the event 
consistently ran at a loss). At other times it has revolved around the notion that Pride must be 
self sustaining. While not controversial in theory, this concept becomes so when the scale of 
the event escalates, requiring an exponential escalation in the level of commercialisation 
required merely to sustain the event. Class exclusion seems an inevitable result. In 1995 a 
decision was taken for the first time to organise an official after party. The event, a rave held at 
the Electric Warehouse in Newtown, was marketed aggressively as an integral part of the day’s 
festivities. Pride after-parties have consistently been a point of bitter contention specifically 
between the organisers of pride and the club owners in the Province. The days around Pride 
and the night itself constitute one of the most lucrative times for gay clubs who traditionally all 
organise an after-party. The organisation of an official after-party inevitably eats into this 
profitability. Pride organisers realised very early the money making potential of an official after 
party and began to question why the club owners made money from an event that they did not 
50 
 
financially contribute to when this money could contribute to the cost of pride itself. This 
conflict continues to the present day.  
 
In 2010 the Pride board made the decision to host an official after party for the first time in 
many years. The reason for this was to try and generate some income to offset the costs 
associated with the event. The after party was heavily advertised and headlined by Sonique, a 
well known British artist. Almost immediately conflict erupted with the owners of a number of 
gay clubs in Gauteng for whom an official after party would almost certainly cause a loss of 
income. Almost immediately rumours began to spread that members of the Pride board stood 
to benefit from the after party, rumours that the board denied in a press release stating that 
“No board member stands to financially benefit from the hosting of the official after-party - all 
profit generated will go towards Joburg Pride” (Mambaonline article, 13 August 2010). 
 
The decision that the organisers of pride should get involved directly with the organisation of 
an income generating event changed profoundly the nature of Pride and the mandate of its 
organisers. This led Gavin Hayward, the editor of Exit magazine, to question in 1996 whether it 
was appropriate that pride should ask for the free advertising and editorial space given to it in 
the past when it clearly had shifted toward being an income generating event (Hayward, 
Personal letter). In the early to mid 1990s Pride was funded largely by donations from donors 
and individuals. Donor funding remains important and in recent years has been used to 
specifically fund the outreach programmes associated with Pride for example the transport 
provided from Townships. However as the event grew in size and scale and the infrastructure 
required to support it increased, organisers looked at new ways to generate revenue. One of 
these was sponsorship, the other was to make money out of participants. One way to doing this 
was through an official after party, another was the sale of food and drink at the end venue of 
the parade. In 2004 a very controversial decision was made to charge an entrance fee to get 
into the part of Zoo Lake in which the post march festivities would take place. The decision 
51 
 
greatly angered many people who considered it exclusionary. Thuli Madi, the director of Behind 
the Mask, recalls it as follows: 
 
“The section of Zoo Lake where the festivities took place was fenced off and the public 
was required to pay a R40 entrance fee. It didn’t apply to the march itself but the 
entrance fee meant that many black people struggling with poverty and unemployment 
could not take part in the broader festivities, having already spent their money on 
transport from the townships. It made me furious. I wasn’t prepared to go inside while 
others were excluded.” (De Waal and Manion, 2006: 153) 
 
So controversial was the decision to charge an entry fee that it has never been revisited and 
subsequent organisers have had to find more subtle ways in which to raise money. In 2010 the 
Pride board made the decision to prohibit people from bringing food or drink into the pride 
venue. They argued that the bar and the revenue from food outlets was fundamental to their 
ability to make the event cover its costs. The problem is however that both the food and drink 
for sale is prohibitively expensive for many participants. While not overtly exclusionary in the 
way in which an entry fee would be the effect is similar for people who cannot afford to eat or 
drink once there. 
 
To blend or offend 
 
As early as 1994, in response to an invitation from the organisers to take part in the parade the 
Gay Christian Community responded negatively. They stated: 
 
“The previous marches and stances taken at the ‘park celebrations’, failed to convey any 
dignity upon gay people, rather we believe that the public was compelled to see all gay 
people as disreputable and obscene, and so their anti-gay opinions were reinforced. We 
52 
 
know that there are millions of gay people leading decorous lifestyles, and who are 
affronted by the portrayal of gay persons as utterly depraved” (Maxwell, 1994). 
 
As was shown in the earlier discussion around Montreal pride the question of what behaviour, 
dress, forms of demonstration are considered appropriate is not unique; it is one that surfaces 
repeatedly in relation to pride events. Paul Stobbs says that he received a number of requests 
from various organisations over the years to ban drag queens from taking part in the parade, 
requests he refused to entertain. While the ‘fabulous’ nature of gay and lesbian people is often 
a feature of parades, and drag queens are prominent features there remains a level of 
contestation around the idea that gays and lesbians should blend and not offend in the 
projection of their community to the outside world. 
 
In 1996 artist Steven Cohen marched in the parade carrying a large banner which read “Give us 
your children what we can’t fuck we eat”. The banner elicited strong responses from both 
people watching the event and those taking part. The organisers were inundated with 
complaints from other participants who were appalled at the idea. Cohen of course fully 
anticipated such a response. His banner, while clearly intended to mock stereotypes and the 
prejudices of the general society, was also intended to send a message to his fellow marchers. 
Responding in the Exit Newspaper to the outcry caused by his banner Cohen says:  
 
“Some gays are so surprised to be out there that they have to saccharine their image-
they buy into the demands that heterosexual society makes of us freaks – they try to be 
better than straights, beyond reproach” (De Waal and Manion, 2006:28) 
 
He goes on to say that so many gay people appear to have “become what we despise: 
judgemental moralists and finger-pointing accusers”. Cohen’s statement is a clear disavowal of 
the idea that the key to acceptability from the broader society is to pander to their prejudices 
53 
 
and try to allay their fears by asserting the ‘normalness’ of gay and lesbian people. This idea 
relates back to Gamsons (1996) work on San Fransisco’s 1993 Pride event and the furore 
around the theme of “The year of the Queer”. Gamson points to the fact that there is a clear 
tension between those people who want to assert difference and those who want to assert 
sameness, this latter group including in Gamson’s thinking civil rights strategists for whom “at 
least the appearance of normality is central to the gaining of political ‘room” he goes on to say 
that “rights are gained, according to this logic, by demonstrating similarity (to heterosexual 
people, to other minority groups) in a non-threatening manor” (Gamson, 1996: 402). Cohen’s 
actions in 1996 clearly represented a form of subversion to the idea that the key to the 
protection of gay and lesbian people lay in being an unthreatening to straight people as 
possible. 
 
Drag queens have often been the targets of reactionary attacks from gay and lesbian people. In 
2004 the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, an alleged gay political party, announced that they would 
attempt to have drag queens taking part in the Pride March that year arrested. While the 
ramblings of the GLA (generally accepted to in fact be one person) could not be considered 
representative of the general feeling of gay and lesbian people, they nonetheless express an 
opinion that is not particularly rare, a sense that the gender bending nature of drag queens 
(and at times of particularly effeminate men) is a bad reflection on the community generally 
most of whom are ‘perfectly normal’. This internal conflict around gender nonconforming 
individuals has also manifested in more recent years in relation to the place of Transgender 
people in Pride events given that the LGBTI acronym is now so generally used. There is almost 
every year an outcry from gay and lesbian people that the media tend to feature pictures of 
people in drag or in some ways outrageously dressed. Gevisser writing in 1992 addressed this 
issue when he asks “would South Africa gay pride attract more participants if both drag queens 
and radical politics were outlawed. And if so, at what price? (Glowletter, October 1992). 
 
54 
 
In 2009 the question of the “gayness” of the Pride event came to the fore. That year the media 
partner for the event was once again 94.7 Highveld Stereo, a number of adverts were flighted 
on the station all of which used the name Joburg Pride but not the words Gay or Lesbian. A 
furore erupted in the gay media and across various social networking sites following an email 
questioning this omission, which accused Pride of "selling out the gay community for corporate 
sponsorship" (Mambaonline article, 25 September 2009). 
 
Protest or celebration 
 
One of the questions that has surrounded Pride from the very start is a fundamental one 
around what it is that the march is meant to be. Is it a political protest or is it a day of 
celebration? Most people concede that it is part both, but in what proportion and why? 
Gevisser points out in a 1992 article that in the previous two marches: 
“many people were made profoundly uncomfortable by the political militancy of the 
march, and the way it aligned itself with the larger South African liberation struggle. 
‘Why can’t gay Pride live up to its name and be pride’, one man complained, ‘who needs 
the political sloganeering? Let’s just be Proud’” (Gevisser, 1992).  
There is no doubt that the first march was intended to be a serious political protest. The clear 
need to add or perhaps to strengthen the voice of gay and lesbian people within the debates 
around the nature of a new society which were gaining momentum at the time required it to be 
so. The organizers certainly chose to address much of the messaging of the march to the newly 
unbanned ANC and in turn received messages of support from its structures. A letter from the 
PWV regional office of the ANC was delivered and read to the crowd which said among other 
things: 
 
“we believe that the struggle for gay rights is a fundamental part of the struggle for 
human rights and dignity of all oppressed peoples. As such it is a wing of the liberation 
55 
 
struggle in South Africa and we commend the organizers of this occasion for putting the 
issue of gay rights firmly on the agenda for a new South Africa.” (ANC PWV Press 
Statement, 1990) 
A message of support was also received from Albie Sachs who was at that time a member of 
the ANC National Executive Committee. He said “many of us in the ANC would like to see a new 
Constitution in South Africa that guarantees members of the lesbian and gay community full 
protection against any form of discrimination, harassment of abuse” (De Waal and Manion, 
2006: 14) This focus on the Constitution and what provisions it may ultimately make towards 
the rights of gay and lesbian people would come to be a major focus of each of the first few 
marches as the Constitution writing process unfolded over a period of years. 
 
While the theme of the first Pride event as stated earlier was fairly inward looking in the 
following years the themes were clearly more of an outward projection. In 1991 it was ‘March 
for Equality,’ and in 1992 ‘Marching for our Rights.’ The imagery employed in 1992 was more 
overtly radical than in previous years. The official poster showed a black fist smashing through a 
triangle (De Waal and Manion, 2006: 57). This was still a time of negotiation within the country 
as a whole, its future direction was by no means clear and it was vital for gay and lesbian 
activists that their message remained strong and constant so that it would not be lost within 
the bigger political upheavals of transition. When Paul Stobbs took over as the chair of the 
Pride organising committee in 1994 he brought a vastly different political position to the table. 
He made clear his belief that Pride was too political and that this was at least in part the cause 
of its declining numbers. 
 
One of the most profound changes brought in by Stobbs was the change of the name of the 
event from a ‘march’ to a ‘parade’ (De Waal and Manion, 2006: 85). This change was 
controversial at the time, angering a number of GLOW activists, and the branding of the event 
as a parade rather than a march remains controversial to this day. The reason for the shift was 
56 
 
clearly that Stobbs believed the event to be too political or perhaps rather that it was perceived 
as too political and that a shift in terminology could make it more accessible. He states: 
“The march at the time was too political and this was preventing people from coming. 
White gay boys want to have fun, they want to drink. This is what GLOW didn’t 
understand” (De Waal and Manion, 2006: 85) 
The fact that Stobbs states that people were not coming and then relates this directly to what 
would attract white gay men implies clearly that ‘people’ in this instance means white gay men 
and that the indicator of the success or failure of pride is the attendance of this specific 
demographic. Gevisser writing shortly after the 1992 states that his research undertaken in 
social spaces frequented by white gay men indicated that many did not want to take part in the 
annual parade, the reasons given for this were that they found it “too political, too closely 
aligned to the ANC and put plainly, too black”. This as Gevisser points out is curious given that 
at least 75% of those people who took part in the 1992 march were white (Gevisser, 1992). The 
second very troubling aspect of Stobbs’ comment about the need to change Pride to appeal to 
white gay men is that it asserted that if people (however that was meant or is understood) 
could not engage with the political nature of the event then it was the event rather than the 
people that needed to change, a problematic idea given the very real battles that clearly still 
needed to be fought in the mid-1990s.  
 
Depolitisisation within South African social movements in the mid to late 1990s is a well 
recognised phenomenon; Ballard et al (2006) in their introduction to Voices of Protest discuss 
this in some detail. The reasons for this relate to the honeymoon period in which civil society 
and government appeared to be working together rather than in opposition to one another, to 
the leadership of many of the movements being subsumed into the structures of government 
and to the professionalization of many social movements into NGOs. While the depoliticisation 
of Pride cannot be removed from this context it clearly does not entirely fit the pattern either.  
 
It is important to problematise the concept of depoliticisation and question whether in fact this 
57 
 
actually means repoliticisation. More concretely in this specific context, did making Pride less 
political merely mean the removal of ANC politics from the event? Stobbs himself says that the 
biggest problem he had with Pride in its early years was that it was run by communists (De 
Waal and Manion, 2006: 85). Whether or not the organisers of the original events did identify 
as communists is questionable and not clearly indicated anywhere. However they did engage 
with the politics of the ANC, a politics that clearly was deeply threatening too many white gay 
and lesbian people. In 1995 the then leader of the Democratic Party Tony Leon was invited to 
speak at Pride. He was unable to do so as he was travelling at the time. In response to his 
declining the invitation Stobbs wrote to Leon saying among other things: 
“as a fervent Democratic Party supporter and in view of the forthcoming elections I 
would suggest that you send a letter of support to the gay and lesbian community to be 
read out on the day.” (Personal Correspondence, 27 July 1995) 
This seems to stand in stark contrast to the assertion that Pride needed to be made less 
political. The question seems then to be not whether Pride is political or not but rather in what 
ways it is political and whose politics can claim the platform it offers. As Gevisser pointed out as 
early as 1992, Pride is always political, its existence is so, even if tries not to be. (Glowletter, 
October 1992). Through the Stobbs years however the parades continued to have themes 
which spoke to the needs of the community within the context of the ongoing transition to 
democracy and the unfolding process of law reform being undertaken by the NCGLE. The 
theme in 2005 was “Gay by nature, proud by choice” (Pride marketing materials, 2005). A 
theme which very much spoke to the strategy of the coalition as discussed earlier which was to 
use the notion of the naturalness of homosexuality to justify its demands for equality. The shift 
from protest to celebration though is highlighted in the following quote from the 1996 Pride 
information pack, in answer to the question of why we need a Pride parade: 
“The nation celebrated when rugby and soccer teams won their campaigns and victory 
tours celebrating their wins were held through the streets of Johannesburg. When the 
Pope came to SA in 1995 thousand of Catholics flocked to celebrate their religion. The 
Pride parade is the same thing. Gays and Lesbians flocking to celebrate their Gayness of 
*sic+ lesbianess”. (Pride information pack, 1996). 
58 
 
The comparison of gay and lesbian people to a religion is fascinating and certainly worthy of a 
study in and of itself, for our purposes however there are a number of parts of this statement 
that are interesting. One of these is the very clear indication that Pride is a space of celebration 
and not of protest, the comparison to sports victory parades shows this. The second is the 
implication that there is an essential gayness or lesbianess that people would flock to celebrate. 
 
The 1998/1999 committees did attempt to bring Pride back to its roots as a political protest but 
always with the need to maintain a balance with the celebratory aspects that people had 
become used to and even in 1998 there was affirmation of the fact that it was a Parade and not 
a March and should always be described as such. The 2001 event made a real attempt to bring 
the parade back to its political roots. That year’s event was the product of negotiations 
between the existing organisers of Pride and supporters of a rival event termed African Pride. 
This movement within which Donna Smith was the most prominent voice argued that 
Johannesburg Pride did not cater for black gays and lesbians (Report to Pride AGM, 2001). 
Eventually an organising committee was put together under the leadership of Smith to organise 
the 2001 event. African Pride was the first suggested alternative Pride event born out of 
dissatisfaction with the increasingly commercial and depoliticised nature of Johannesburg 
Pride. Although the idea of an alternative Pride event was shelved in 2001 following the 
negotiations it was only three years later that Soweto Pride was held for the first time to be 
followed some years later by Ekhurelheni Pride in the township of Kwa Thema to the east of 
Johannesburg. The return of overt politics to Johannesburg Pride was short lived with the 
takeover by Gary Bath taking place the following year.  
 
In 2007 after the new dispensation took over the running of Pride there were attempts to 
engage with the organisations in the gay and lesbian sector and a series of themes have been 
selected that are political in nature, the board has however steadfastly attempted to keep itself 
separate from politics, choosing instead to view itself as a platform through which political 
organisations can operate. This has not however spared them the same conflicts around the 
59 
 
role of Pride as a space of protest, the increase in concern around hate crimes over the last few 
years has increased this. In July 2007 two lesbian women Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Masooa 
were murdered in Meadowlands Soweto, there was an immediate outcry from the community 
and a great level of mobilisation. At Soweto Pride of that year (held one week before 
Johannesburg Pride) the murders were still incredibly raw, at that event Carrie Shelver offering 
a message of solidarity from People Opposing Woman Abuse publically questioned why 
Johannesburg Pride was not taking place in Soweto that year. This question reflecting the view 
that following the murders in July it was Soweto that represented the front line of the struggle 
for the rights of gay and lesbian people. Following her statement Shelver was accosted by a 
number of members of the Johannesburg Pride board demanding to know why she had asked 
the question in such a public forum and accusing her of creating disunity within the community. 
In response to this a number of activists decided to stage a protest the following week during 
the Johannesburg Pride Parade, wearing t-shirts, badges, and carrying banners branded “Bring 
it to Soweto” (Shelver, Pers. Com). The protest within the parade was stunted somewhat by the 
fact that the parade was largely washed out that year by torrential rain and as such the 
numbers attending were far smaller than in all the years since. Nonetheless it shows clearly 
how in the face of the ‘new’ tide of violence affecting the LGBTI community, particularly black 
lesbian women, people looked to Pride to be a site of protest. 
 
The question of contestation within the gay and lesbian community is one that is controversial, 
it is often suggested that in fighting over almost any issue serves to weaken our capacity to 
fight against the many external threats. Johannesburg Pride has used this argument to silence 
dissent on more than one occasion, in 2009 in relation to the dispute over the lack of the word 
‘gay’ on adverts for the Pride event the co-chairs of that year’s event made the following 
statement "If we give up on and boycott our own community events and spaces and are a 
house divided, it makes it all the more easier for Jacob Zuma and Ray McCauley to shut down 
and close those events and spaces" (Mambaonline article, 25 September 2009). In 2007 in 
relation to the incident at Soweto Pride the argument was similar, that it was detrimental to air 
internal issues on public platforms. This speaks to the questions raised earlier related to the 
60 
 
construction of community and the purchasing of strengthened community at the price of what 
Seidman (1996:22) calls “increased internal repression”. 
 
 A strong argument could be made that given the high levels of homophobia that exist within 
South African society and the increasingly violent manifestation of that homophobia there is a 
need for a unified face and voice to gay and lesbian community. The silencing of dissidence in 
the service of ensuring strength in unity is however equally problematic. To do so serves only to 
silence those peoples with the least access to the means of the production of community, it 
entrenches power inequalities by blocking any means to their contestation. It appears that 
much of the contestation around Pride that is immediately related to its route, 
commercialization, political nature etc also speaks to broader conflict within the community 
around what different groups want, need and expect from an event like Pride. In his analysis of 
the ongoing conflict around Pride, particularly its route Gerald Kraak says that “it dispels the 
notion that people are united by the common experience of their homosexuality; class, race 
and gender remain greater imperatives” (Kraak, 2006: 281). Bev Ditsie quoted in Gunkel (2010: 
74) speaks to the issue of differing needs, specifically linked to race, when she says: “So then 
they may want to celebrate and have a Mardi Gras but actually we are still marching. For us it’s 
still about visibility, for us it’s still about your basic human rights on the ground which we’re not 
getting you know.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
61 
 
Conclusions and recommendations for further research 
 
Johannesburg Pride is without question the most overt, public and powerful special expression 
of gay and lesbian identity in the city and perhaps in the country given its scale is so much 
greater than any other pride event. Its history runs chronologically side by side with the history 
of democracy in South Africa. It is an event located squarely within the space of the post-
apartheid moment and yet also affected profoundly by the history of gay and lesbian activism 
and creations of community under the apartheid regime. From its origins in the relatively small 
number of people marching through the city streets in 1990 to the thousands parading through 
the suburbs in 2011 it is an event marked by a certain level of consistency and a great deal of 
change. Its consistencies include the fact that it has always been surrounded by great 
controversy, organising it has rarely been an entirely pleasant activity and yet despite this it has 
taken place every years since 1990. Its contestations are multiple and multilayered. This work 
has attempted to tease out a number of these contestations. Many can be traced back through 
the history of Pride each surfacing at certain times, being dormant at others, each interesting at 
times with one another and each a speaking to broader issues within the community. 
 
It must be acknowledged that contestations around creations of gay and lesbian community are 
not unique to South Africa (indeed contestations around specific identity based community are 
not unique to gay and lesbian people). Indeed the question of how community and struggles 
are constructed around specific identities and the advantages and costs of such constructions is 
one of the most important ongoing debates within current and particularly post-structuralist 
academia. What does make South Africa particularly interesting however is the placing of this 
debate within the context of the apartheid regime and the post-apartheid era. The brutal 
segregation that characterised the apartheid system both physical and ideological and its 
associated regulation of sexuality and of gender, the legacy of segregation again both literal and 
ideological and the vast socio-economic inequalities left by the apartheid regime create the 
setting on which attempts are and indeed have for decades been made to create and sustain a 
62 
 
notion of gay and lesbian community. The success or failure of this project is not only 
interesting as a study of how gay and lesbian community is created within this context but also 
how a set of people are negotiating and renegotiating their identities and forms of community 
in the post-apartheid moment. 
 
The contestations within Pride identified in this work are all interesting in and of themselves 
particularly when traced over a period of time, each however also speaks to a set of core 
problems related to identity and specifically how gay and lesbian identity is constructed. The 
initial theory of this work related to exploring race and racism within the gay and lesbian 
community and using Johannesburg Pride as a case study of how this racism plays itself out. 
Indeed it is clear that race is a major factor underlying much of the conflict within the gay and 
lesbian community, it could hardly not be given South Africa’s history of systemic legislated 
racial oppression and the fact that so many other forms of repression such of those around 
class, gender and sexuality were so intrinsically tied up with the apartheid racial project. What 
is apparent however is that there a deep level of complexity to the contestations that exist 
within the gay and lesbian community and which reveal themselves so compellingly in a space 
like Johannesburg Pride.  
 
There is clearly space for a great deal more work stemming from many of the questions raised 
by this work. For one thing there is a clear need for a greater theorizing around pride events. 
While pride parades are often used as case studies in explorations into gay and lesbian 
community they are in many ways a unique phenomena, located within a particular space at a 
particular time they are both a powerful outward projection of gay identity and a site of 
internal struggle. In other words they simultaneously represent the greatest expression of an 
essential homosexual identity and bring to the fore the deeply problematic and contested 
nature of that identity. There is also space for a comparative project that seeks to research how 
pride events around the world are similar and differ in the nature of their activities and of their 
63 
 
conflicts and in this way to be able to evaluate what the impact of South Africa’s history and 
legacy of apartheid has had on the development of pride and of gay and lesbian community. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
64 
 
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Web References 
  
http://www.joburgpride.org/sitenews/joburg-pride-celebrates-21st-birthday-style (Information 
on 2010 Pride event, 4 October 2010) 
 
http://www.joburgnews.co.za/2003/sept/sep16_parade.stm (Report on Pride 2003, 16 
September 2003) 
 
www.joburgpride.org/sitenews/joburg-pride-2010-real-facts (De Barros, L (2010), Joburg Pride 
2010: The real facts) 
 
www.few.org.za/index/php (Mathabela, M, FEW history of Soweto Pride) 
 
www.mambaonline.com/article.asp?artd=325 (Joburg Pride Chaos 11 May 2006) 
 
www.mambaonline.com/article.asp?artd=497 (Joburg Pride: What is at stake) 
 
71 
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6147010.stm (S Africa approves same sex unions, 14 November 
2006) 
 
 
Archival Documentation 
 
AM 2910, Paul Stobbs (Pride Papers) Collection, 1994-1999, Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action 
 B.2 Policy and planning documents 1996 – Pride Information Pack 
 B.2 Policy and planning documents 1996 – Survey results 1996 
 G.1 Promotional material 1994-1998 – theme for 1995 event 
 E.3 Correspondence in 1994-1995 – Fax to Tony Leon from Paul Stobbs, 27 July 1995 
 E.3 Correspondence in 1994-1995 – Letter from Gay Christian Community, 17 July 1994 
 E.5 Correspondence in 1996 – Letter from Gavin Hayward 
 E.5 Correspondence in 1996 – Letter from LP Botes 
 E.5 Correspondence in 1996 – Letter from Richard Holden, 12 June 1996 
 
AM 3185, Daniel Somerville Collection, 2001, Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action 
 A.1 Lesbian and Gay Equality Project: Memorandum Agreement and report 
 
AM 2799, Donne Rundle Collection, 1990, Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action 
 1 Scrapbook on 1st Pride Parade – Message of support from ANC PWV region 
 
AM 2805, Lee Randall Collection, 1983 -1993, Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action 
 B.1.3.1 Glowletter, February 1992 – Background to first Pride march 
 B.1.3.1 Glowletter, October 1992 – Article by Gevisser, Pride and prejudice 
 B.1.1.1 Sunday’s Woman Newsletter November 1990 – Report on Pride 1990 
 B.1.2.1 OLGA News Feb 1991 – Report on Pride 1990 
 
Personal Communication 
 
Carrie Shelver, former co-chair of Johannesburg Pride, May 2011. 
 
 
 
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