Karen Martin
Gala (The Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa) will be hosting much of the cultural programme of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (Ilga) conference in Johannesburg this month.
Gala, in partnership with historical tour company Mindwalks, has developed a tour of lesbian and gay Johannesburg and surrounds. The tour was researched using material kept at Gala, including scrapbooks, diaries, photo albums, letters and artefacts.
There are many places in and around Johannesburg that are part of gay and lesbian history. For instance, the house in Forest Town where police raided a private gay party in 1966. The raid resulted in a parliamentary investigation into homosexuality, which in turn gave rise to the Legal Reform Movement. Perhaps the first gay and lesbian political organisation in South Africa, it attempted to intervene in the country’s legislative processes in much the same way as the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality has 30 years later.
In the Fifties and Sixties, the inner city housed gay clubs and bars in buildings like the New Library Hotel and the Park Royal. The East Africa Pavilion was a gathering place for the bohemian set, including many gay men and lesbians. In Soweto, there was Lee’s, the shebeen where the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand was formed. In Kwa- Thema, MaThoko’s shebeen was a social haven for many closeted gay men and lesbians. MaThoko’s postbox, which received many a clandestine letter, is kept at Gala in all its battered glory.
The tour will visit a men’s hostel, where stories about gay life on the Reef will be told. The tour guides will be from Johannesburg’s gay and lesbian community and are likely to include Mark Gevisser, Matthew Krouse and Mpumi Njinge.
The first Queer Johannesburg tour, on September 22, is only open to Ilga delegates, but thereafter bookings can be made through Gala and Mindwalks.
On September 24, at The Parktonian’s Park Room, Gala and the Handspring Puppet Company will present a storytelling hour, inspired by a similar festival held at Amsterdam’s 1998 Gay Games. Participants will read poetry and give testimonies. A rare silent home movie made in Durban in the Fifties, and unearthed by Gala earlier this year, will be shown.
During the conference period, Gala will host a small film festival. Works will include mostly South African and African films, including Greta Schiller’s The Man who Drove with Mandela, Jack Lewis’s From Sando to Samantha and Philip Brooks’s Woubi Cherry. Gala will also show some of the old filmfootage it has found and preserved.
The Gala-produced community musical After Nines is another highlight of the month. Having already enjoyed runs at the Civic Theatre, the National Arts Festival and at the 1998 Gay Games in Amsterdam, the production plays at The Parktonian on September 21. This year, it is hoped, After Nines will do a stint at the Sydney Mardi Gras.
Ilga delegates will also be treated to a visit to the archives where they will witness the many roles that Gala finds itself having to play. Far from being limited to the slow and dusty work of sorting and indexing, Gala is often called on to provide instant and up-to- date information to journalists and students or detailed lists of our holdings on a particular topic to more sedate scholars both locally and abroad. Members of the public drop in every now and then simply to browse, or to see the Gala foyer exhibition at the University of the Witwatersrand’s William Cullen Library.
At the Pride Parade, on September 25, Gala will present its mobile exhibition tent, a project designed by artist Clive van den Berg. The first exhibition of its kind, Gala’s material on the history of South African pride marches will be displayed.
With these public events Gala hopes to let gay and lesbian history out of the necessarily dark and dusty closets of the archives.
For more information contact Graeme Reid at (011) 716-2818 or e-mail [email protected]