Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
A month dedicated to Gay Pride
Social gatherings and celebrations will take place virtually, amid the Covid-19 lockdown
JUNE is dedicated to Gay Pride globally and Pride celebrations are going virtual.
People like Beverly Palesa Ditsie and the late Simon Nkoli paved the way, during apartheid, for the queer community in South Africa to ensure that LGBTI rights were recognised in the Constitution. In 1993, the ANC endorsed the legal recognition of samesex marriages in the Bill of Rights, and the interim Constitution prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
South Africa became the first nation in the world to prohibit, in its constitution, discrimination based on sexual orientation.
According to the World Economic Forum, in 73 countries homosexuality is a criminal offence. In eight of these countries, including Nigeria and Somalia, sexual activity between consenting adults of the same sex is punishable by death. In countries like Nigeria, Sudan, Egypt, Uganda and Tanzania, homosexuality is still illegal. In contrast, in Cape Town and Johannesburg more queer spaces have sprung up over the past few years.
The Weekend Argus spoke to some of the founders of these spaces, Dani Kyengo O’Neill from the Queer Salon and Janine Adams, an organiser for the Unofficial Pink Party, which place at The Botanik Social House every month.
“My partner Kelly Smith and I started the Unofficial Pink Party, to create an inclusive queer safe space,” said Adams. “The kind of space we long for and that was lacking in our city. March was our last event before the lockdown and we miss those nights immensely. The digital realm is just not able to simulate the connectivity of our live events. We hope to reconnect with our community again in the future.”
“As the LGBTQI community of South Africa, we are not all free. We need more than the heartless commercialised, segregated gatherings currently being hosted. So many of us are disconnected from the LGBTQI communities beyond our frames. Our humanity is lacking in so many ways.
“I am grateful for all our organisations and allies, who continue to do incredible much-needed work,” said Adams.
O’Neill said: “It’s an everyday conversation with myself. To me, Pride is a deeply personal thing and it calls on my individual responsibility to re-assess what collective resistance looks like, feels like, sounds like – within myself and the matrix of black and queer resistances, histories, hauntings, entanglements, and what my role is in it all.
“And if I don’t have a role to play on certain days, that’s okay too”.