“The Great Lesbian Monster Show”: GLOW’s Lesbian Forum Navigating Johannesburg, South Africa, 1991–1995

Abstract

The inner city of Johannesburg, South Africa, was regarded as a relatively gay-friendly space from the 1970s into the 1990s, but much of the research that interrogates this does so from an overwhelmingly gay and male lens. In this research, I seek to disrupt the view that Johannesburg’s gay subculture was dominated by gay men, and instead seek to examine the politico-queer spaces that lesbian women occupied. Queer literature often regards gay men as the norm within academic studies. In this article, I highlight the importance of lesbian women within South African history. I place the voices and movements of lesbian women within broader ongoing research in queer southern African history. Within this larger history the voices of women are further marginalised while those of gay men are brought to the fore. In this article, I seek to correct this by examining the prominence of lesbian women with South Africa’s gay and lesbian spaces in the 1990s. In order to examine these spaces, I analyse the Lesbian Forum, a group directly linked to the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (GLOW). In this article, I argue that the intricacies of Johannesburg was vital to allowing women in the Lesbian Forum a space to operate.