How to Be a Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-Town South Africa

Author:   Graeme Reid
Publisher:   University of KwaZulu-Natal Press
ISBN:  

9781869142438


Pages:   320
Publication Date:   31 October 2012
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
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How to Be a Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-Town South Africa


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Overview

How To Be a Real Gay takes its title from a series of workshops organised by gay activists in the small town of Ermelo, South Africa. Focusing on everyday practices of gayness in hair salons, churches, taverns, and meeting halls, the book explores the ambivalent space that homosexuality occupies in the newly democratic South Africa: on the one hand, protection of gay rights is a litmus test for the country's constitutional democracy, yet on the other, homosexuality is seen to threaten traditional values, customs, and beliefs. The book is the first to emerge that recounts how gays in small-town South Africa negotiate this difficult symbolic terrain. How do discourses on international gay and lesbian social movements and gay equality hang together with local views on identity, gender, and relationships? Why do small-town gays harness fashion, style, and glamour in the making and sustaining of identity? How do economically vulnerable gays organise, access resources, and create networks linking small towns to cities? How To Be a Real Gay delves to the core of what it means to be 'the other' in contexts of risk, exclusion, and inclusion. In its richly textured way, the book also speaks to the tremendous capacity of gays to imagine and create life-worlds in a harsh environment.

Full Product Details

Author:   Graeme Reid
Publisher:   University of KwaZulu-Natal Press
Imprint:   University of KwaZulu-Natal Press
Dimensions:   Width: 13.50cm , Height: 1.50cm , Length: 21.50cm
Weight:   0.455kg
ISBN:  

9781869142438


ISBN 10:   1869142438
Pages:   320
Publication Date:   31 October 2012
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

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Reviews

It is beautifully written up in a style which makes for entertaining reading and this book is, to my mind, a hybrid genre of oral history, life-stories and participating observations. - Ena Jansen Reid has woven together theory, method, research results and personal observations in an attractive way ... Throughout the book he discusses and tests theories. He does not put down the great story of the history of sexuality in South Africa in a dry way in broad terms, but embeds the most important events in a story. - Gert Hekma


Author Information

Graeme Reid is director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch in New York, USA. He has conducted research, taught and published extensively on gender, sexuality, LGBT issues, and HIV/AIDS. Before joining Human Rights Watch in 2011, Reid was the founding director of the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa, a researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research and a lecturer in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies at Yale University. An anthropologist by training, Reid received a PhD from the University of Amsterdam. Reid is the author of Above the Skyline: The Reverend Tsietsi Thandekiso and the founding of an African Gay Church, an ethnographic study of the early years of an African, gay Pentecostal-style Christian community in Johannesburg.

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