How to Be a Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-town South Africa - Softcover

Reid, Graeme

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1869142438 ISBN 13: 9781869142438

Publisher: University Of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013

Synopsis

How To Be a Real Gay takes its title from a series of workshops organized by gay activists in the small town of Ermelo, South Africa. Focusing on everyday practices of gayness in hair salons, churches, taverns, and meeting halls, the book explores the ambivalent space that homosexuality occupies in the newly democratic South Africa: on the one hand, protection of gay rights is a litmus test for the country's constitutional democracy, yet on the other, homosexuality is seen to threaten traditional values, customs, and beliefs. The book is the first to emerge that recounts how gays in small-town South Africa negotiate this difficult symbolic terrain. How do discourses on international gay and lesbian social movements and gay equality hang together with local views on identity, gender, and relationships? Why do small-town gays harness fashion, style, and glamour in the making and sustaining of identity? How do economically vulnerable gays organize, access resources, and create networks linking small towns to cities? How To Be a Real Gay delves to the core of what it means to be 'the other' in contexts of risk, exclusion, and inclusion. In its richly textured way, the book also speaks to the tremendous capacity of gays to imagine and create life-worlds in a harsh environment.

About this title

About the Author:

Graeme Reid is director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch in New York, USA. He has conducted research, taught and published extensively on gender, sexuality, LGBT issues, and HIV/AIDS. Before joining Human Rights Watch in 2011, Reid was the founding director of the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa, a researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research and a lecturer in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies at Yale University. An anthropologist by training, Reid received a PhD from the University of Amsterdam. Reid is the author of Above the Skyline: The Reverend Tsietsi Thandekiso and the founding of an African Gay Church, an ethnographic study of the early years of an African, gay Pentecostal-style Christian community in Johannesburg.

Review:

It is beautifully written up in a style which makes for entertaining reading and this book is, to my mind, a hybrid genre of oral history, life-stories and participating observations. - Ena Jansen Reid has woven together theory, method, research results and personal observations in an attractive way ... Throughout the book he discusses and tests theories. He does not put down the great story of the history of sexuality in South Africa in a dry way in broad terms, but embeds the most important events in a story. - Gert Hekma

About this edition

• Publisher: University Of KwaZulu-Natal Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1869142438
• ISBN 13: 9781869142438
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 318