Rainbow Women: 10 Years of Safety and Prejudice

Photographer Julia Gunther made the portraits on this story 10 years aside for her impartial documentary mission, Rainbow Women. She wished to know what, if something, had modified for these South African lesbian ladies over a decade that, on paper, promised large positive factors for LGBTQ rights.

Within the autumn of 2012, photographer Julia Gunther was working in South Africa, researching a documentary mission about activism inside LGBTQ communities in and round Cape City.

Gunther was notably thinking about making portraits of people advocating within the difficult environments of the town’s many townships.

By probability, throughout a gathering with Professor Zethu Matebeni, on the time a senior researcher on the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) on the College of Cape City, a fax arrived inviting Matebeni to evaluate a lesbian magnificence pageant within the township of Khayelitsha a couple of days later. She recommended that Gunther attend, as it will be a very good alternative to satisfy different LGBTQ advocates.

The pageant, known as Miss Lesbian, was organized by Free Gender, a lesbian rights group based in 2008 by neighborhood activist Funeka Soldaat and primarily based in Khayelitsha.

That yr’s version of the pageant could be held on Dec. 1 (World AIDS Day) within the Andile Msizi city corridor. When Gunther known as Free Gender to ask for permission to take images, she ended up talking to Siya Mcuta, a volunteer, who instructed her that everybody was welcome.

Gunther spent all the day making portraits of the contestants, together with Mcuta and Velisa “Vee” Jara, for whom this was her third pageant.

Jara can keep in mind how excited she was. “We don’t often have events like Miss Lesbian in our community.”

“I could see the girls were nervous about presenting themselves in their hometown,” Gunther recollects. “But they had such a strong sisterhood that they got through the day together.”

The pictures Gunther made on the pageant would later kind the core of her mission, Rainbow Women — a collection of portraits of lesbian activists, filmmakers and odd ladies celebrating and advocating for LGBTQ rights in Cape City.

The mission’s identify referenced the “Rainbow Nation,” a time period coined in 1994 by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to explain post-apartheid South Africa.

“Rainbow Nation” symbolized multicultural unity and hope in a rustic as soon as outlined by strict racial divisions below apartheid.

But, regardless of South Africa adopting the world’s first structure prohibiting discrimination primarily based on sexual orientation, life for a lot of LGBTQ people remained harmful and unequal.

Gunther met with Mcuta and Jara a couple of days after the pageant to debate the way forward for LGBTQ rights in South Africa. They defined that pageants like Miss Lesbian helped sensitize historically illiberal communities.

“The Miss Lesbian beauty pageant is our way of having fun, being happy and expressing ourselves,” Mcuta defined in 2012. “We are doing this for the younger generations to see.”

Over time, Gunther stored in contact with Mcuta, Jara and others, assembly them each time she was photographing in South Africa. “We’d bump into each other at political rallies, demonstrations, or at a party.”

Meanwhile, Rainbow Girls, Gunther’s project, began to be published internationally and in South Africa. In 2015, a selection of images was featured in Cape Town’s GRID photo festival, held at the Castle of Good Hope.

“The girls could see their portraits in their hometown and show them to friends and family,” Gunther says.

Safety and prejudice

Within the guide Gender Violence, the Regulation, and Society, psychologist Deepesh Dayal describes LGBTQ communities in South Africa as present in a paradox of constitutional safety and prejudice.

On paper, South Africa has made some advances within the safety of LGBTQ folks since 2012, passing the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Act in 2023. That very same yr, the nation’s Minister of Social Growth on the time, Ms Lindiwe Zulu, led a stroll in opposition to LGBTQ-based violence in Pretoria.

However South Africa’s lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex communities nonetheless face important challenges, notably by way of discrimination and hate crime. The protections assured by the nation’s progressive structure have but to ship the security and acceptance they promise.

South Africa has one of many highest murder charges on Earth — there have been greater than 7,700 murders recorded within the third quarter of 2023 alone.

Journalists from MambaOnline.com documented not less than 24 LGBTQ people killed in 2021. When Phelokazi Mqathana, a 24-year-old lesbian, was murdered in Khayelitsha, it was the eighth identified killing in lower than three months. The true variety of murders and rapes is probably going far greater, as tens of hundreds of instances have gone unsolved since 2019.

Lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex communities are disproportionately the goal of violent crimes. The risks of residing overtly as a black lesbian in South Africa had been all too acquainted to Jara and lots of the different ladies featured on this story.

Up to now decade, they’ve confronted persistent and violent threats of their every day lives — they’ve been attacked, crushed and threatened. Tsidi misplaced her companion, Mpho, who was stabbed to demise in a hate crime in 2021.

“Vee would tell me about the challenges the former pageant contestants faced living in Khayelitsha as black lesbian women,” Gunther explains. “Constantly navigating threats and dealing with family members who refused to accept them was incredibly difficult. It put enormous pressure on their mental health.”

At any time when Gunther spoke to Jara, she discovered herself asking the identical query: Had been issues getting higher or worse? Had something modified for the ladies featured in Gunther’s Rainbow Women mission because the 2012 Miss Lesbian pageant?

A decade later

In 2022, 10 years after making her unique Rainbow Women portraits, Gunther started contemplating a follow-up. Later that yr, when she returned to Cape City along with her companion, author Nick Schönfeld (the creator), she met with Jara, and collectively they determined to arrange a reunion of the ladies she had photographed a decade earlier.

Gunther was wanting to make new portraits, capturing the modifications of the previous 10 years, each externally and in character, temper and outlook.

Jara, too, was excited. She’d misplaced contact with a lot of her fellow contestants. “I wanted all of us to meet up again,” Jara says. “We had grown a lot and now led different lives.”

Gunther puzzled if, by putting the portraits from 2012 and 2022 aspect by aspect, one might see the influence of a decade of advocacy and wrestle.

Over the course of two days, she and Jara invited 9 ladies featured in Gunther’s Rainbow Women mission to the Fort of Good Hope to speak concerning the previous 10 years. This time, Gunther not solely made portraits however she additionally filmed conversations between Jara and the opposite ladies.

“One of the biggest issues facing LGBTQ people in South Africa is that they struggle to be heard,” Gunther explains. “We wanted to create a record of their experiences, told in their own words.”

In the beginning of every dialog, Jara introduced the sitter with their 2012 portrait. For some, seeing themselves from a decade earlier was a second of spontaneous pleasure. For others, like Sino and Tsidi, it was an emotional reminder of what that they had endured.

Jara subsequently requested every participant about their experiences since they’d final met and what, if something, had modified for them up to now 10 years.

She selected to conduct the conversations in Xhosa — considered one of South Africa’s official languages spoken by roughly eight million folks.

“I wanted them to be comfortable so they could share more,” Jara says. She lately accomplished a primary counseling course on the College of South Africa.

“In a way, it made the conversations more private, because I don’t speak Xhosa,” provides Gunther. Though Jara recounted the conversations for her, Gunther didn’t perceive their full extent till they had been translated. “That’s when the true power of their stories hit me.”

October was South African PRIDE month. Jara and the opposite ladies featured on this story hope that this movie will contribute to the battle for full LGBTQ equality.

Nick Schönfeld divides his time between writing about reasonably priced well being care, gender equality, schooling, and distributive justice, and publishing books for youngsters.

See extra of Julia Gunther’s work on her web site or comply with her on Instagram: @juliagunther_photography.

Catie Boring picture edited and Zach Thompson copy edited this story. Connie Hanzhang Jin created the pull quotes.