Nelson Mandela's Impact On Gay Rights Discussed By South African Journalist Mark Gevisser
LGBT leaders and gay pundits in the U.S. have praised Nelson Mandela in recent days as a champion who, as the first democratically-elected president in South Africa, led the nation to pave the way globally on LGBT rights. But prominent South African author and journalist Mark Gevisser, who wrote a prize-winning biography of his country's second democratically-elected president, Thabo Mbeki, and who co-edited a critcally-acclaimed collection of essays on gay and lesbian life in South Africa, said Mandela’s history on LGBT rights was more complicated.
“I would temper that analysis a bit,” Gevisser said in interview with me on SiriusXM Progress, speaking from Capetown. “It was not Mandela who brought the notion of LGBT rights into the ANC [African National Congress, the governing party].”
Gevisser, who lived and worked in New York writing for the Village Voice and The Nation in the 1980s, returned to South Africa in 1990, covering the tumultuous transformation of the country for the Mail & Guardian and other publications. He said there’s no question that South Africa is a global leader on LGBT rights. It formed a constitution in 1996 which outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation. That became the basis for judicial action which ultimately led to Parliament legislating in favor of same-sex marriage in 2006.
"A lot of that happened on Nelson Mandela’s watch,” Gevisser said. “But it wasn’t something Mandela was always comfortable with. Mandela was a man of his generation. He went to a conservative mission school.”
Gevisser noted, too, that Mandela spent over two decades in prison, where there were strong taboos on homosexuality, which was “used as a form of abuse and control.”
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