Gay Appointed to South Africa’s Highest Court

Justice Edwin Cameron, a justice on South Africa’s Supreme Court, has been appointed to the Constitutional Court, the nation’s highest court by the nation’s President Mothlanthe. Cameron has been particularly vocal on the subject of HIV/AIDS and has been praised by Nelson Mandela as ‘one of South Africa’s new heroes’. Judge Cameron was the first judge to disclose that he was HIV-positive.

Former South African Leader Denied HIV/AIDS

According to a report conducted by Harvard University, it is estimated the South African government could have prevented 365,000 HIV/AIDS deaths by providing antiretroviral drugs and drugs specifically to prevent mother-to-child transmission to it’s citizens.

The study concludes the health policies of former President Thabo Mbeki were to blame. After years of tension in the African National Congress, the party ousted Mbeki in September. The study has raised several questions about why Mbeki was so influenced by AIDS denialists, and why his political colleagues did not challenge him earlier.

One of the first acts of Mbeki’s Successor, Kgalema Motlanthe, was to replace Mbeki’s health minister, Manto Tshabala-Msimang, who suggested beetroot, lemon juice and garlic as treatment. Barbara Hogan, the new health minister, has quickly reversed course.

Hogan, who was incarcerated for 10 years during apartheid stated;

“I feel ashamed that we have to own up to what Harvard is saying. The era of denialism is over completely in South Africa.”

Out In Africa: 15 Years of GLBT Film Festival

Gay cinema is undergoing a quiet revolution – where stereotypes have been ousted and reality is being truly reflected. The Festival has something to suit all tastes and moods! The films? Silly, serious, sweet and sexy by turns, something for everyone… and from countries all over the world - Argentina, Australia, France, Germany, Hungary, South Africa, Spain, UK and USA. .

Below is a recap of “Out of Africa’s” opening week from Shaun de Waal as reported on Mail & Guardian online.

The rights of gay and lesbian people are protected under South Africa’s Constitution, yet Jon Qwelane can also blather in the Sunday Sun about how wicked and perverted it is to be gay or lesbian, and how Robert Mugabe got it right — presumably when he called gay and lesbian people lower than pigs and dogs. What next, asks Qwelane, bestiality? Just to rub the point in, the cartoonist for his column provided a picture of someone marrying a goat.

You’d have thought that, after a history in which black people were compared with and treated like animals, such comparisons would be taboo. You would have thought, too, that making such comments at a time when gay and lesbian people, particularly women, are regularly subjected to “corrective rape” and to murder, would amount to a form of incitement.

Read the rest here.

South Africa Not “So Gay” for Travelers

According to a post in the Sowetan;

A gay couple is livid after allegedly being turned away by a guesthouse because the lodge did not have a policy on homosexuals.  Lindani Mchunu and a gay friend, Lebogang Modise, feel downhearted and discriminated against because they were forced to drive through the night after they were allegedly rejected by the management at Dikolobe Guesthouse in Seabe village, northeast of Pretoria.

Modise said yesterday that they arrived at the guesthouse on Wednesday night – exhausted and hungry.

“We wanted to book as a couple and management told us they did not cater for gay people,” he said.

Read more here.

S African GLBT’s to Protest Homophobic Author

Cape Town - The Mother City’s gay community will on Friday protest outside Media24’s offices in reaction to a “homophobic article” written in the Sunday Sun, Cape Town Pride said.

Spokesperson Ian McMahon said in a statement the protest was organised in reaction to “a shocking homophobic article” written by Jon Qwelane in his column in Media24’s Sunday Sun, published last Sunday.

The protest would highlight the attack on the constitutional and human rights of gay people and what McMahon referred to as “Qwelane’s blatant hate speech”.

McMahon said a petition, calling for a retraction and apology to gays, would be handed to the Media24’s managing director.

Qwelane wrote that: “There could be a few things [about which] I could take issue with Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, but his unflinching and unapologetic stance over homosexuals is definitely not among those.”

He added that he could only pray that politicians would one day have “the balls” to scrap the sections in the Constitution that sanctioned gay and lesbian marriages.

Qwelane added that soon people would also start demanding that the right to marry animals. Alongside the column appeared a cartoon of a man and goat kneeling before a clergyman as they were pronounced “man and goat”.

Read more on the rantings of this homophobe at news24.com.