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Rainbow Girls: 10 Years of Protection and Prejudice
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Photographer Julia Gunther made the portraits in this story 10 years apart for her independent documentary project, Rainbow Girls. She wanted to know what, if anything, had changed for these South African lesbian women over a decade that, on paper, promised big gains for LGBTQ rights.
In the autumn of 2012, photographer Julia Gunther was working in South Africa, researching a documentary project about activism within LGBTQ communities in and around Cape Town.
Gunther was particularly interested in making portraits of individuals advocating in the challenging environments of the city’s many townships.
By chance, during a meeting with Professor Zethu Matebeni, at the time a senior researcher at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town, a fax arrived inviting Matebeni to judge a lesbian beauty pageant in the township of Khayelitsha a few days later. She suggested that Gunther attend, as it would be a good opportunity to meet other LGBTQ advocates.
The pageant, called Miss Lesbian, was organized by Free Gender, a lesbian rights organization founded in 2008 by community activist Funeka Soldaat and based in Khayelitsha.
That year’s edition of the pageant would be held on Dec. 1 (World AIDS Day) in the Andile Msizi town hall. When Gunther called Free Gender to ask for permission to take photos, she ended up speaking to Siya Mcuta, a volunteer, who told her that everyone was welcome.
Gunther spent the entire day making portraits of the contestants, including Mcuta and Velisa “Vee” Jara, for whom this was her third pageant.
Jara can remember how excited she was. “We don’t often have events like Miss Lesbian in our community.”
“I could see the girls were nervous about presenting themselves in their hometown,” Gunther recalls. “But they had such a strong sisterhood that they got through the day together.”
The images Gunther made at the pageant would later form the core of her project, Rainbow Girls — a series of portraits of lesbian activists, filmmakers and ordinary women celebrating and advocating for LGBTQ rights in Cape Town.
The project’s name referenced the “Rainbow Nation,” a term coined in 1994 by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe post-apartheid South Africa.
“Rainbow Nation” symbolized multicultural unity and hope in a country once defined by strict racial divisions under apartheid.
Yet, despite South Africa adopting the world’s first constitution prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, life for many LGBTQ individuals remained dangerous and unequal.
Gunther met with Mcuta and Jara a few days after the pageant to discuss the future of LGBTQ rights in South Africa. They explained that pageants like Miss Lesbian helped sensitize traditionally intolerant communities.
“The Miss Lesbian beauty pageant is our way of having fun, being happy and expressing ourselves,” Mcuta explained in 2012. “We are doing this for the younger generations to see.”
Over the years, Gunther kept in touch with Mcuta, Jara and others, meeting them whenever she was photographing in South Africa. “We’d bump into each other at political rallies, demonstrations, or at a party.”
Meanwhile, Rainbow Girls, Gunther’s project, began to be published internationally and in South Africa. In 2015, a selection of images was featured in Cape Town’s GRID photo festival, held at the Castle of Good Hope.
“The girls could see their portraits in their hometown and show them to friends and family,” Gunther says.
Protection and prejudice
In the book Gender Violence, the Law, and Society, psychologist Deepesh Dayal describes LGBTQ communities in South Africa as existing in a paradox of constitutional protection and prejudice.
On paper, South Africa has made some advances in the protection of LGBTQ people since 2012, passing the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Act in 2023. That same year, the country’s Minister of Social Development at the time, Ms Lindiwe Zulu, led a walk against LGBTQ-based violence in Pretoria.
But South Africa’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex communities still face significant challenges, particularly in terms of discrimination and hate crime. The protections guaranteed by the country’s progressive constitution have yet to deliver the safety and acceptance they promise.
South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates on Earth — there were more than 7,700 murders recorded in the third quarter of 2023 alone.
Journalists from MambaOnline.com documented at least 24 LGBTQ individuals killed in 2021. When Phelokazi Mqathana, a 24-year-old lesbian, was murdered in Khayelitsha, it was the eighth known killing in less than three months. The true number of murders and rapes is likely far higher, as tens of thousands of cases have gone unsolved since 2019.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex communities are disproportionately the target of violent crimes. The dangers of living openly as a black lesbian in South Africa were all too familiar to Jara and many of the other women featured in this story.
In the past decade, they have faced persistent and violent threats in their daily lives — they have been attacked, beaten and threatened. Tsidi lost her partner, Mpho, who was stabbed to death in a hate crime in 2021.
“Vee would tell me about the challenges the former pageant contestants faced living in Khayelitsha as black lesbian women,” Gunther explains. “Constantly navigating threats and dealing with family members who refused to accept them was incredibly difficult. It put enormous pressure on their mental health.”
Whenever Gunther spoke to Jara, she found herself asking the same question: Were things getting better or worse? Had anything changed for the women featured in Gunther’s Rainbow Girls project since the 2012 Miss Lesbian pageant?
A decade later
In 2022, 10 years after making her original Rainbow Girls portraits, Gunther began considering a follow-up. Later that year, when she returned to Cape Town with her partner, writer Nick Schönfeld (the author), she met with Jara, and together they decided to organize a reunion of the women she had photographed a decade earlier.
Gunther was eager to make new portraits, capturing the changes of the past 10 years, both externally and in personality, mood and outlook.
Jara, too, was excited. She’d lost contact with many of her fellow contestants. “I wanted all of us to meet up again,” Jara says. “We had grown a lot and now led different lives.”
Gunther wondered if, by placing the portraits from 2012 and 2022 side by side, one could see the impact of a decade of advocacy and struggle.
Over the course of two days, she and Jara invited nine women featured in Gunther’s Rainbow Girls project to the Castle of Good Hope to talk about the past 10 years. This time, Gunther not only made portraits but she also filmed conversations between Jara and the other women.
“One of the biggest issues facing LGBTQ people in South Africa is that they struggle to be heard,” Gunther explains. “We wanted to create a record of their experiences, told in their own words.”
At the start of each conversation, Jara presented the sitter with their 2012 portrait. For some, seeing themselves from a decade earlier was a moment of spontaneous joy. For others, like Sino and Tsidi, it was an emotional reminder of what they had endured.
Jara subsequently asked each participant about their experiences since they’d last met and what, if anything, had changed for them in the past 10 years.
She chose to conduct the conversations in Xhosa — one of South Africa’s official languages spoken by approximately eight million people.
“I wanted them to be comfortable so they could share more,” Jara says. She recently completed a basic counseling course at the University of South Africa.
“In a way, it made the conversations more private, because I don’t speak Xhosa,” adds Gunther. Although Jara recounted the conversations for her, Gunther didn’t understand their full extent until they were translated. “That’s when the true power of their stories hit me.”
October was South African PRIDE month. Jara and the other women featured in this story hope that this film will contribute to the fight for full LGBTQ equality.
Ntombozuko ‘Nozuko’ Ndlwana (from left), Thozama, Nana, Zintle, Hlomela Msesele and Tsidi Zondi (in front) pose for a photo backstage during the Miss Lesbian beauty pageant in the Khayelitsha township of Cape Town, South Africa, in 2012.
Julia Gunther
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Julia Gunther
Nick Schönfeld divides his time between writing about affordable health care, gender equality, education, and distributive justice, and publishing books for children.
See more of Julia Gunther’s work on her website or follow her on Instagram: @juliagunther_photography.
Catie Dull photo edited and Zach Thompson copy edited this story. Connie Hanzhang Jin created the pull quotes.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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