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"An inner life of Johannesburg that turns on the author's fascination with maps, boundaries, and transgressions This singular memoir begins with a transgression--the invasion of a private home in Johannesburg. But it is far more than the story of a theft. Lost and Found in Johannesburg is a luminous exploration of place, one in which the author's and the reader's assumptions are constantly being tested. As a child growing up in apartheid South Africa, Mark Gevisser was obsessed with maps--and with Holmden's Register, Johannesburg's street guide, in particular. He played a game called Dispatcher with this eccentric guide, transporting himself across the city into places that would otherwise be forbidden to him. It was through Dispatcher that he discovered apartheid by realizing that he could not find an access route to the neighboring township of Alexandra and, later, by realizing that Soweto was not mapped at all. This was the beginning of his lifelong obsession with maps and photographs, and what they tell us about borders and boundaries--how we define ourselves by staying within them or by transgressing them. This memoir is an account of getting lost in one's hometown, and then finding oneself as a gay Jewish South African who was raised under apartheid and who eventually married a man of a different race as the country moved toward freedom. Using maps, shards of memory, photographs, and stories, Gevisser constructs a stunning portrait of race and sexuality, heritage and otherness"--

With unprecedented access to Mbeki and the ANC, A Legacy of Liberation weaves a nuanced portrait of the black experience under apartheid and sheds light on the future of the nation under a new regime. It is a gripping social history of South Africa's past and future, beautifully narrated by one of Africa's most esteemed journalists

AbstractIn 1904, seven years after he founded the world's first homosexual rights movement, the German sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld published a slim volume calledBerlin's Third Sex, which detailed the city's extensive queer life. If Hirschfeld was a pioneer in establishing the founding truth of what we now call the "LGBTQ Rights Movement"—that visibility brings equality—he understood something quite contradictory about the power of the city in this process: it allows you to hide in plain sight. He formulated an equation for queer urban life that has proven to be startlingly durable: "That which is hidden from the uninitiated in the metropolis can be all the more easily discovered by the initiate because it is far less constrained." In the last few decades, African cities have boomed. The forces of globalization—the digital revolution, industrialization, and rapid urbanization—mean that queer communities have seeded in these cities in ways that are quite similar to the dynamics in Berlin in the twentieth century. But the differences, over time and space, and given the politics of the twenty-first century, are very marked too. This essay thinks with Hirschfeld about the dynamics of visibility and urbanism in African cities today, using research I conducted in Egypt, Uganda, Nigeria, and Senegal for my 2020 book,The Pink Line: Journeys across the world's queer frontiers,as well as other contemporary African texts.

Für wie viele Geschlechter sollte es Toiletten geben? Manche sehen in dieser Frage nur einen Karnevalskalauer, andere nutzen sie zur Inszenierung eines Kulturkampfes. Viele Menschen erinnert sie jedoch schlicht an tagtäglich erfahrene Demütigungen. Über Themen der Geschlechteridentität und der sexuellen Selbstbestimmung wurde in jüngster Zeit weltweit erbittert gestritten. Und während in einigen Ländern erhebliche Liberalisierungsfortschritte zu verzeichnen sind, schüren in anderen mächtige politische Akteure gezielt Stimmung gegen Lesben, Schwule und Transpersonen. Mark Gevisser zeichnet diese neue Konfliktlinie IBM die pinke Linie, wie er sie nennt IBM rund um den Globus nach. Einfühlsam, klug und in bestechender Prosa kombiniert Gevisser Reportage und Analyse und liefert ein ebenso faktenreiches wie bewegendes Standardwerk zu einem der prägenden Themen unserer Gegenwart. (Verlagstext)