La Memoria

I limited my online search of newspaper articles to those published between 1995 and 2006. In 1995, Namibian state leaders began publicly issuing antigay statements that elicited responses from LGBT SMOs, and South African LGBT SMOs campaigned for sexual minority rights to be permanently enshrined in the Constitution. Before entering the field in Johannesburg, I acquainted myself with developments in the South African and Namibian LGBT movements over the previous decade by gathering and coding news articles from Namibian and South African mainstream and LGBT-specific online news sources. My primary online South African mainstream news sources were The Mail and Guardian and South African Press Association, and my online Namibian mainstream news sources were The Namibian and New Era. South African LGBT-specific online news sources included Exit, Mambaonline, and Behind the Mask.

When I entered the field, I quickly realized the limitations of media data. I had a distorted sense of which South African and Namibian LGBT SMOs existed before I started my archival research and ethnographic observation. This distortion is likely attributable to different forms of bias that affect how the media portray social movements and protests (Barranco and Wisler 1999; Danzger 1975; Davenport and Ball 2002; Earl et al. 2004; Hug and Wisler 1998; Martin 2005; Oliver and Maney 2000; Ortíz et al. 2005; Smith et al. 2001). To illustrate this sense of distortion, I present how my preliminary analysis of two South African LGBT SMOs’ standing in the movement based only on media coverage differed from what I learned about these organizations when I conducted fieldwork in Johannesburg from September 2005 to April 2006.

In 2006, the South African LGBT social movement organization, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, to receive the second largest amount of media coverage seemed to supplant the SMO, the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project, with the largest amount of media coverage as the most featured South African LGBT organization in the media. In fact, the Lesbian and Gay Equality

Project disappeared altogether from media coverage. Figure 3 below charts the peaks and low points of media visibility of two South African LGBT SMOs.

2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 Year 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Num ber of News Arti cles i n Whi c h SMO Appears Coalition-Equality Project (N=237) GLA (N=80) South African LGBT SMO

Between 1998 and 2006, the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (NCGLE), which later became the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project (LGEP) in 1999 (Dirsuweit 2006:331),38 was featured in 237 articles, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance (GLA) garnered mention in 80 articles.39 Of 17 South African LGBT SMOs that appeared in the news between 1998 and 2006, the Coalition-Equality Project (48.6%) and GLA (16.4%) received 65 percent of the total LGBT SMO news coverage. 1999 was an important year for both SMOs, as the Coalition-Equality Project appeared in almost 70 news articles, while the GLA received mention in about 20 articles. After 1999, the Equality Project appears to have declined in importance, while the GLA steadily climbed in the amount of the media coverage it received. Based on these data, I surmised that Coalition-Equality Project and the GLA were the largest South African LGBT SMOs because they appeared in the news media most frequently (Vliegenthart, Oegema, and Klandermans 2005). Given the Equality Project’s lack of and GLA’s rise in media coverage, it seemed reasonable to infer that the GLA supplanted the Equality Project as the most influential LGBT SMO in South Africa; I gauged influence by media coverage.

After I was immersed in the political reality of the South African LGBT movement, I learned that my preliminary findings were false. The Equality Project and the GLA were not equivalent, large, and powerful organizations within the movement, as their prominence in the media suggested. Once I gathered organizational records about the Coalition from the Gay and Lesbian Archives and GLA press releases from Behind the Mask, I conducted a content analysis of these documents and discovered a different explanation for why these two organizations figured so prominently in mainstream and LGBT-specific media coverage. Mainstream and LGBT-specific media concentrated on the legal status of sexual and gender minorities. The Coalition—later the Equality Project—was the public face of the LGBT movement for its entire existence, from the time that it was formed in 1994 to persuade political parties to protect sexual minority rights (Oswin 2007). The GLA emerged in November 1998 as a gay and lesbian political party and subsequently issued statements about the legal and political status of South African sexual and gender minorities (Hagen 1998). The Coalition-Equality Project and the GLA

38

The National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality was also known as the Coalition, and the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project as the Equality Project.

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featured prominently in such reportage because each organization’s stated goals were achieving and defending the legal equality of sexual and gender minorities.

The media treated the GLA and Coalition-Equality Project as legitimate representatives of the South African LGBT movement. The Coalition-Equality Project and other LGBT SMOs excoriated the GLA and informed the media that the GLA was a sham organization consisting of one person who faxed provocative press releases to the media and LGBT social movement organizations (DeBarros 2006; IRIN 2006). Between 1998 and 2006, the GLA issued many controversial public statements about the following: excluding transvestites and transgender persons from membership (“SA Gay Group” 2004); calling on police to arrest drag queens at the Johannesburg Gay Pride parade for violating an apartheid-era law that forbids people from disguising their faces in public (Mambaonline 2004); asking the state not to give antiretroviral medication to persons who contracted HIV sexually (Mambaonline 2005); outing lesbian and gay students at their high schools who planned on bringing their same-gender partners to dances in an effort to encourage them to be public about their sexualities (SABC 2005); and advocating for the reinstatement of the death penalty (SAPA 2003, 2004). Mainstream media did not verify such statements that the GLA made until January 2006 when the GLA claimed to have encouraged more than a hundred gay men who did not know their HIV status to donate blood at South African National Blood Service centers in protest of a ban on blood donations from men who have sex with men (Gallagher 2006).40 Such sensationalized media coverage of Namibian and South African sexual and gender minorities demonstrates how articles about LGBT organizing in these two countries were biased. This is the case with the media’s treatment of the GLA as a legitimate LGBT SMO.

The media sometimes misrepresents [sic] what [SMOs] want to say. . . . For example, . . . the GLA put out ridiculous press statement saying they’d had a big national conference and had decided to change their name from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance to the Death Penalty Party. Of course, the newspapers responded by putting out articles saying, “Gays Call for Death Penalty.” That’s despite that organizations . . . repeatedly informed the media about the nature of the GLA and warned them not to publish these press releases, which have little basis in the real world. That illustrates how big a gap there is between organizations and the media because organizations are still struggling to get their messages into the media. (South African LGBT activist, interview, 26 October 2005).

The LGBT activist’s statement illustrates the bias of media reporting about sexual and gender

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minority organizing, making the media an unreliable indicator of public visibility. Not only did LGBT SMOs experience problems with publicizing their efforts in the media, a problem that many other movements around the world share, but they also had to contend with the Namibian and South African media’s tendency to stereotype sexual and gender minorities. With the GLA, the media opted to cover the group’s eccentricity in keeping with the mainstream news media’s commercial interest in entertaining readers. According to a Behind the Mask staff member, the media “always want to portray us [LGBT persons] in a negative light. . . . They can never write something positive about the LGBT community” (Interview, 13 January 2006). Due to this media bias, I decided not to select SMOs solely based on their media visibility because synonymizing social movement or SMO visibility with media coverage flattens visibility into an outcome. Instead, I treated the media as one of many audiences available to social movements and SMOs and as one source of information about SMO strategies (Gamson 1975).

I spent several weeks at the Gay and Lesbian Archives in Johannesburg between the end of September and November 2005 photocopying and analyzing historical documents from each country’s LGBT movement. I first gathered historical documents related to the LGBT movement’s role in drafting the Equality Clause, a portion of the South African Constitution that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation; this meant that I gathered documents going back to the late 1980s. I did not include these data in my document analysis, but they enabled me to write more detailed historical account of movement activities between the late 1980s and mid-1990s. I also pored over the records of key SMOs that were or had been based and active in Johannesburg, including the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality, the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project, the Gays and Lesbians of the Witwatersrand, and ACTIVATE. I spent the bulk of my time scanning and photocopying articles from Exit, a South African newspaper targeting white middle-class gay men, and from GALA’s collection of news clippings related to LGBT issues, rights, and movement activities. From my online searches, a visit to Northwestern University’s Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, and my research at GALA, I gathered approximately 1,600 newspaper articles from Namibian and South African news sources about LGBT movement activity in both countries. I coded and analyzed national mainstream and LGBT-specific sources, but I confined my coding and analysis of local newspapers to those covering Johannesburg and Windhoek. Table 1 below contains the names of all Namibian and South African mainstream and LGBT-specific news sources from which I

selected articles to code and analyze. For the duration of my fieldwork in Johannesburg and Windhoek (September 2005-July 2006), I also purchased daily, weekly, and weekend newspapers and clipped articles related to LGBT organizing, rights, and issues, with the exception of The Windhoek Advertiser, which stopped publishing in the early 2000s.

Table 1: Namibian and South African News Sources

Country Mainstream Sources41

LGBT-Specific Sources

Namibia The Namibian (national, independent) Sister Namibia

The Windhoek Advertiser (local, independent)

New Era (national, state-owned)

The Southern Times (local, independent, weekly)

South

Africa Business Day (local, independent, centrist) Behind the Mask

The Mail and Guardian (national, independent, liberal) Exit

The Sunday Times (local, independent, conservative, weekly) Mambaonline

The Citizen (local, independent) Q Online

The Sowetan (local, independent, liberal)

The Star (local, independent, liberal)

City Press (local, independent, “black community-oriented,”

weekly)

The Sunday Independent (local, independent, weekly)

My criteria for clipping articles included mention of LGBT SMOs by name, homosexuality, LGBT organizing, or LGBT cultural visibility. For example, when I searched Namibian and South African news sources online, I entered keywords, such as homosexuality, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, into sources’ search engines. I entered these articles into QSR NUD*IST (Non-Numerical Unstructured Data Indexing, Searching, and Theorizing) 6 and 7, a qualitative data analysis program, and generated inductive codes from a glossary of themes that emerged from my intensive observation of SMOs, which I detail below. I also created deductive codes from secondary sources about LGBT organizing in the global South, such as being recipients of donor aid (Arnfred 2004b). I then entered the articles into SPSS and coded them according to the following: day, month, year, LGBT SMOs mentioned, LGBT-related issue, and

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Unless otherwise indicated, all mainstream newspapers are daily newspapers. Political classifications of newspaper sources come from the World Press Review. The World Press Review describes its mission as the following: “to foster the international exchange of perspectives and information” (http://www.worldpress.org/, accessed 14 April 2007).

type of source.

I also collected approximately 500 documents from the Gay and Lesbian Archives and the Namibian and South African LGBT SMOs I observed. Several years ago, GALA solicited materials from SMOs in neighboring countries, and SMOs, such as The Rainbow Project in Namibia and the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, donated materials to GALA. Thus, I was able to gather organizational records from the Namibian LGBT movement, even though I had not yet visited the country. I organized and coded these documents thematically according to issue, event, and strategic choice.