2010 has just emerged, foetus-like from the bloody hips of 2009 and surely South Africa is thinking about things beyond soccer?  And us queers, where are we? 

Well, I'm guessing most of us are still in closets.  Iconic lesbian website After Ellen's round up of lesbians who came out in 2009 includes a whole one South African i.e. Melanie Lowe.  Whether or not you like her music, if you're one of those fabled and privileged queers with plenty of disposable income, please go buy at least one of her CD's, for the simple reason that she bothered to come out.  She's also very approachable on Facebook, so do me a favour and go say thank you to her.

For as long as I can remember, Celluloid Closet (Hollywood) tales have been echoed locally, by rumours of queer Springbok rugby players, actors, singers and the like, who stay in their closets for reasons like – it'd hurt their career if they came out and (I'm sick of this one) their sexuality is nobody's business but their own.  Inconvenience.  Loss of income.

Considering that we queers are still very much a minority under threat; that they want to execute us for homosexuality in Uganda, murder us for being gay in South African townships, or just rape us to cure us, that the Media sparks from time to time with stories of first world schoolchildren and soldiers being battered to death for being queer; there is no possible way that we can separate the queer individual from the queer political just yet.  If we do, we have to seriously sweep our consciences under the metaphorical carpet, ignoring all of those victims and all the ones that never get any media attention at all.

We desperately need out celebrities, not so that we have plenty of nice, queer-focused entertainment (though there's less than nothing wrong with that), but because we're a society full of media whores and fame junkies and we need representatives to tell the world (sigh) that it's OK to be gay.  It's shocking that the message we need to get across is that damn basic, that we are still, in 2010, screaming for acceptance.

Like it or not, as queers, we're linked to every single other queer out there, not purely for the fact that we have a common sexuality, but because we have a common enemy too – homophobia.  And if you ever get confused by whether something's homophobic or whether it's perfectly acceptable, remove the word gay, queer, faggot or whatever from the concept and try it out with “black” or “Jewish” or something instead.  As South Africans (ex-purveyors of apartheid), we ought to have incredibly fine and sensitive methods of detecting intolerance.  And we really ought to be intensely careful about eradicating it.

If any of my regular readers have got this far – thanks!  I'm surprised you bothered; I seem to have been saying the same damn thing as a queer columnist for a whole decade now – is any of it ever going to change?  Are we ever going to get enough people out of enough closets, so that homophobia, be it political and violent or “merely” personal, subtle attrition, ever stops?  I'm beginning to feel like a complete parody – some sort of robotic lesbian feminist with a scratchy recorded message.

To every queer who ever came out, in any way at all, thank you.
To every queer activist, thank you.
To every non-queer person who stood up for us, thank you.
To all of our non-queer friends and relatives who have ever taken strain on our behalf, thank you.

{words:ulla kelly
photo:GLK}