It is high time South Africa overhauled its rigid and prejudiced stereotyping of gender and sexuality.

We remain a deeply divided and prejudiced society. Growing poverty and structural inequality, coupled with a violent intolerance of difference, is a lethal cocktail for all those perceived as other.

The ‘othering’ of divergent genders and sexualities plays out in homes, institutions, the media and in the fabric of society. Gender and sexuality are primarily constructed in dichotomies: male-female, man-woman and gay-straight.

January 8th, 2010

In the past two years, the issue of gay marriage has dominated the scene of queer struggles. Some of us are actively supportive, others, grudgingly supportive, and more others who rail that yet again, queer struggles are being monopolized by assimilationist, middle class versions of normality and family: “We are the same as you, except for in bed.”