The SABC may have reached a turning point in its attitude to gay content on the airwaves. This is the message from commissioning editors, who told the audience at the Out in Africa gay and lesbian film festival how gay and lesbian issues are being increasingly positively portrayed on the broadcaster, and have arrived on widely watched programmes.
The popular soap opera Isidingo recently staged a gay wedding and the highly rated Zola 7, hosted by pop star Zola, has also shown a gay youth dealing with a coming out crisis.
Members of the gay community, howver, have complained that gay and lesbian lifestyles are depicted as extreme and over-sexualised. They also criticise the fact that programmes with gay content tend to be aired after 9pm, assuming that such content is harmful to children and lending credence to negative stereotyping of gays and lesbians.
Head of drama of the Content Hub, Kethiwe Ngcobo, said that in beginning to air gay issues the SABC had ‘taken something from nothing. We have problematised the gay lifestyle and showed how it is on the margins of the heterosexual world — not just saying it is wonderful.â€
Head of entertainment Pat van Heerden said the role of commissioning editors at the SABC is ‘to push forward a future agenda†and that, in the past, there had been a certain ‘erasure†of gay and lesbian points of view.
The event provided some indication of the extent to which representation of gays and lesbians on television is being tackled. Along with the National Lottery and others, the SABC is an official supporter of the Out in Africa gay and lesbian film festival while, surprisingly, the National Film and Video Foundation is not.
Patrick Kelly, who represented the general management of the SABC Content Hub, explained that the broadcaster is committed to the issue: ‘The issue will not be discussed tonight and then forgotten until next year.†Kelly, like others, said the SABC would actively recruit gay and lesbian content and that commissioning editors will soon be supported by a panel of experts drawn from the gay and lesbian community, who will look at issues of representation.
Part of the event included a peek at an upcoming series, titled After Nine, in which a well-to-do black businessman has a male lover behind his wife’s back. But the series will air on SABC at 9pm, not during family hour.
The debate will continue at a panel discussion during the Cape Town leg of the Out in Africa film festival at the V&A waterfront cinemas on March 22 at 6.30pm