Ek het die volgende werkstuk gelees, wat heel interessant is, nl:
Shifting sexual morality? Changing views on homosexuality in Afrikaner society during the 1960s deur Kobus du Pisani Professor of History at the Potchefstroom campus of the North-West University. He has made contributions in the form of conference papers and chapters in books to the study of Afrikaner masculinities.
Hierdie is ‘n lywige document, en ek kwoteer net sekere geselekteerde paragrawe:
A police raid on a gay party in Johannesburg in 1966 set in motion a series of events which led to a proposal in parliament that there be amendments made to the Immorality Act that would criminalise male and female homosexuality.
This is seen as the beginning of the organised gay rights movement in South Africa. For Afrikaner society, the work of the parliamentary select committee was particularly significant because in 1968 it triggered a debate in the letter column of at least one Afrikaans newspaper, Die Burger. It was a historic debate.
Over a period of seven weeks during March and April 1968, a series of 38 letters on the topic of homosexuality, reflecting a wide range of opinions, were published in Die Burger, the leading Afrikaans daily newspaper of the time. It was part of the first public debate on this topic among Afrikaners1 and was revealing of Afrikaner attitudes. The debate was sparked by the introduction in parliament of legislation to tighten the regulation of homosexual activities.
There is no question that homosexuality, which is an integral part of every society, has always existed in Afrikaner society. Researchers have pointed to the evidence of same-sex practices in different South African regions before 1910.
Only gradually have more data been revealed about Afrikaner involvement in homosexual relationships and same-sex activities after 1900. From the 1920s, white middle-class gay subcultures emerged in South African cities. The strength of homophobic attitudes in South Africa became clear when in the late 1930s, moral panic around homosexuality flared up as a result of revelations about an organised male prostitution ring in Johannesburg, which led to a flurry of sensational reports, articles and letters in newspapers.
Homosexuals were forced to live a life of stealth. As long as they kept to themselves and did not try to influence "normal" persons, especially young boys, they were usually allowed to do their own thing.1
When Afrikaner power was triumphant in South Africa with the victory of the National Party (NP) at the polls in 1948, the racial rather than the gendered order of society was prioritised. Because of the heteronormative attitudes of the majority of its constituency, the conservative NP government would be inclined to tighten the control of homosexuality, but because of other priorities for some years, did not do much about it.
Epprecht alleges that there was state repression of all types of non-normative sexuality by the apartheid regime and that a masculinist political discourse developed that attempted to link homosexuality to communism and African nationalism, the main enemies of Afrikaner nationalism.
It is significant that the NP government wished to tighten the control of homosexuality, but only white homosexuality. Although it was a common practice for black mineworkers to have male "wives", widespread black same-sex practices were tolerated by the political and mining authorities who realised that it had become indispensable for the satisfaction of the sexual desires of a section of the workers. This type of same-sex practice was viewed as situational homosexuality that did not pose a serious threat to heterosexual hegemony.22
In the 1950s an explicitly homophobic youth subculture of violent "moffie-bashing" emerged in South African cities. [...] These homophobic attitudes in South Africa were in line with what was happening elsewhere in the world in the 1950s, because repression and even witch-hunts against homosexuals still occurred in other countries.25
In 1957 the Immorality Act was passed. Just a few months earlier homosexuality made the headlines of newspapers when the police arrested 35 white homosexual men soliciting sex on the Durban Esplanade.
Although sodomy remained a common law offence, sex between consenting adult men in private was not criminalised. When homosexual men met each other at a gay club and then went to a private residence to engage in sexual activity, the police could not have them prosecuted, because in terms of the law they did not pose a threat to public decency
A police raid in January 1966 on a private home in Forest Town, Johannesburg, where a large party, attended by more than 300 white homosexual men, was being held,30 set in motion a series of events that focused attention on the issue of homosexuality in South Africa. Much publicity was given in the media to this incident and the extent of homosexuality in the country.3
Public awareness of the issue of homosexuality was raised by the Forest Town raid, which elicited divergent responses. For homosexual persons, Forest Town was a pivotal event which represented an act of defiance and an expression of their newly found self-confidence. The mid-1960s was an era of sexual liberation in the West when the gay rights movement was just beginning to organise and assert itself.
In 1968, draft legislation was initiated in the form of the Immorality Amendment Bill, inter alia to curb homosexuality. The aim of the clause of the draft legislation was to make the commission of unlawful, indecent and unnatural deeds between persons of the same sex punishable, which in effect meant that all homo-erotic deeds performed by men and women would be criminalised. Had this formulation be approved it would have given the police sweeping powers to crack down on homosexuals. A legal expert stated that the bill caused an uproar in legal and medical circles, because it came close to making criminals of about 5 per cent of the population for simply being a certain way.42
In South Africa the moves to extend the criminalisation of homosexuality forced white homosexuals into rearguard action to at least try and maintain the status quo. An action group was established to provide legal defence for those arrested at Forest Town in 1966, and it extended its activities to employ the services of legal officers and expert witnesses to give evidence at the inquiry of the parliamentary select committee. Although this body, the Homosexual Law Reform Fund (HLRF), was a lobby group for white middle-class homosexuals on a particular issue and did not envisage itself as a broad-based and permanent gay rights group, it represented the first attempt to launch a formal movement to protect gay rights in South Africa.50
It is significant that the HLRF came into existence in South Africa the year before the Stonewall riots in the USA against police persecution of homosexuals. These riots are frequently cited as a defining event in the gay rights movement, where the homosexual community in the USA for the first time fought back against their suppression by the state.51 Although the HLRF was short-lived, it achieved its immediate goal of countering the emotional homophobia in some police and church circles by having rational medical-scientific and legal arguments presented to the select committee.52
Kotzé interprets the 1969 legislation quite differently. According to him, it implied a formal acceptance by the state of the homosexual subculture.76 It was indeed a victory of sorts for homosexuals. Section 20A made public homosexual acts illegal, but sex between consenting adult men in private was excluded.
In response, (to the Burger’s public debate on homosexuality) a homosexual person wrote that homosexuality was in fact more common among Afrikaners than in the English-speaking community, (‘n Stelling wat ek herhaaldelik hier op SêNet gehuldig het)
Vir diegene wat belangstel om die hele document te wil lees, is dit soos volg verkrygbaar:
http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?pid=S0018-229X2012000200006&script=sci_arttext
Jaco Fourie


Kommentaar
Beste Jaco,
Dankie vir hierdie stukkie interessante geskiedenis oor "Gaywees", of liewer, homoseksualieit, in die Suid-Afrikaanse konteks. Dit lyk vir my dat die wetlike posisie en hantering van homoseksuele in Suid-Afrika nie veel verskil van die behandeling van homoseksuele in die res van die Westerse wêreld nie - die VSA en Europa, iets waarop Suid-Afrika homself kan roem.
Só interessant is die feit dat juis seuns van Afrikaner-oorsprong en -opvoeding geneig is tot hierdie tipe van seksuele gedrag. Dit sal ' n interessante studie wees om die redes op te spoor - wat is die rol van genetika of opvoeding volgens Calvinistiese beginsels?
Wonderlik om te dink dat die Kerk nie langer die mag het om homoseksuele te verbrand op brandstapels nie.
Beste groete,
Pieter Redelinghuys
Hello Jaco,