El sueño de Djuna

Understanding the internal logic guiding SMOs’ strategic choices and how strategic choices shifted over time drove my ethnographic observation. By ethnography, I mean observing SMO activities and interacting with SMO staff and members “for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, [and] asking questions” (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995:1). Studying strategic choices poses operationalization difficulties for scholars because, “although choices about targeting, timing, and tactics can be directly observed, the strategic “frame” within which we make these choices—and provide them with their coherence—must often be inferred (Ganz 2000:1010). I observed SMOs consistently for a period of time so that I could follow their internal logic and assign them “coherence” so that they were not a jumble of unrelated choices, when instead, they constituted a series of choices that affected and even constrained the subsequent choices that SMO members and staff believed to be possible (Blee and Currier 2005; Ganz 2000). Through daily fieldwork with each SMO, I studied how, when, and why they made themselves visible or invisible to the media, the state, the public, sexual minority populations, and other audiences. I did not limit myself to observations that occur in the office setting. If an SMO staged an event or meeting elsewhere, I gained permission to “shadow” staff and members as they represented the SMO elsewhere. This flexibility prevented me from privileging the office as the only “legitimate” site of organizational interaction. I took detailed notes about staff meetings, informal conversations I had with staff

members and visitors, and events that took place at and away from SMO offices.42

Purposive sampling drove my selection of LGBT SMOs for intensive ethnographic observation (Auerbach and Silverstein 2003; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995). Random sampling would have been impossible and unsuitable for my purposes, given my interest in choosing organizations that had been visible for some time. I entered the field not knowing which LGBT SMOs I would study because I wanted to avoid turning visibility into a constant and to ensure that there was variability in visibility over time in SMOs that I observed. My criteria for selecting visible organizations were that an SMO had to be in existence for at least two years and to have some form of verifiable, routinized visibility, such as a regular meeting space or office. I selected SMOs that had existed long enough to have established processes for making strategic choices and whose visibility I could verify through archival records, interviews, or historical accounts. I tracked SMOs with some identifiable level of visibility, meaning that I had to be able to locate them through conventional means, such as through the media, word of mouth, or advertised meetings. I eliminated SMOs that met sporadically, were in existence for two years or less, or were visible fewer than five times. Organizations that I eliminated included a Jewish LGBT organization and a Muslim LGBT organization, each of which met inconsistently and lacked public meeting space.

Selecting SMOs to study once I arrived in South Africa and Namibia enabled me to avoid biasing my SMO selection because I had an adequate understanding of what organizations existed and were doing. Before I left for South Africa, I collected data from Namibian and South African print and online mainstream and LGBT-specific news sources and from the websites of local Namibian and South African LGBT SMOs, international human rights NGOs, international LGBT SMOs, and Behind the Mask. These data acquainted me with the range of LGBT organizing in each country and the issues that SMOs addressed. However, if I had selected the SMOs that I would observe before I reached South Africa and Namibia, I would have biased my selection. I did not have all the available information within my grasp until I arrived in South Africa because I was unsure which SMOs were operation and which ones were defunct. For instance, before leaving Pittsburgh, newspaper articles I had gathered frequently named the

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See Appendix A for the ethnographic observational template I used. I drew on my experience observing SMO dynamics when I worked as Dr. Kathleen M. Blee’s research assistant on her National Science Foundation-funded project (SBE-0316436) when I drafted the observational template. I revised the template and added observational categories if I had not observed such discussions or decisions before.

Lesbian and Gay Equality Project as a leading SMO in Johannesburg; upon my arrival, I learned that the Equality Project’s board of trustees temporarily suspended the SMO due to allegations of financial mismanagement (Krouse 2005). I was not privy to this information until I spoke to local activists familiar with the SMO’s demise, and I ruled out observing the Equality Project’s activities.

Only two social movement organizations in each city met my minimum criteria for documented public visibility and for being in operation for at least two years. As a result, the selection process was simple and convenient. The ease of this selection suggested that Johannesburg was no longer a hotbed of LGBT organizing. The number of Johannesburg-based social movement organizations had declined steadily since the late 1990s, reducing the number of possible organizations I could study.43 In addition, no Namibian LGBT social movement organizations besides Sister Namibia and The Rainbow Project existed, which meant that the LGBT movement had remained largely confined to these two organizations.

All social movement organizations shared organizational characteristics. All employed professional staff, maintained an office open to the public, received funding from Northern donors, and claimed to represent the interests of the entire or a segment of the LGBT community in their country or throughout Africa. They diverged in their constitution of membership. Behind the Mask has been a professional and volunteer-driven SMO since its inception, whereas FEW, Sister Namibia, and The Rainbow Project once were membership-based. FEW, Sister Namibia, and The Rainbow Project recently made the transition from membership-based organizations to trusts that an executive board oversees; responsibility for and governance of the social movement organization shifted from members of the Namibian LGBT community to a select few. This restructuring satisfied Northern donors who were sometimes uneasy about allocating funds to fledgling organizations.

Studying two organizations meant that I was not able to study each SMO so intensively because “the more settings studied the less time that can be spent in each” (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995:40). What I may have sacrificed in terms of micro-level detail I made up for in rich observation about SMOs’ strategic choices about visibility and invisibility as I concentrated on staff members and visitors’ talk about audience, constituencies, and campaigns. I estimate that

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In a subsequent study, I hope to document the proliferation and depopulation of LGBT social movement organizations in South Africa between the 1960s and the present.

I spent 800 hours observing activities and interactions at all four SMOs. I averaged 20 hours a week of ethnographic observation. Gathering data from social movement organizations with varying degrees of public visibility allowed me to develop a more robust analysis of the strategic choices that organizations made about their visibility and invisibility. I limited my observation to what happened at organizations’ offices or when they participated in off-site events. Below I describe how I analyzed my ethnographic data in conjunction with my documentary and interview data.