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.

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.