It seemed like a simple request.

Election workers asked a voter in Hamilton Township to take off her MAGA hat and cover up her shirt expressing support for former President Donald Trump.

Enraged, the woman took off her hat and shirt, spinning it like a lasso. She then proceeded to vote, wearing her bra, after hurling vulgar epithets at the workers before a crowd of as many as 100 voters, several people told NJ Advance Media.

In Gloucester Township, a voter waltzed into the polling location wearing a red cloak and white bonnet, inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian book and television series about a patriarchal society where women are forced into sexual slavery to bear children for their masters.

She complied with the request to remove her cloak and bonnet before voting, and then she walked out quietly while putting her outfit back on.

Early voting began in New Jersey last Saturday and turnout has been heavy so far. In addition to long lines, poll workers around the state have had to contend with, and sometimes confront, belligerent people who insist on showing their candidate preferences at the polls. Many may not realize that wearing political messaging while voting is not allowed, election officials said, but some simply don’t seem to care.

Indeed, ”electioneering” is against the law in the Garden State.

People cannot “distribute or display any circular or printed matter or offer any suggestion or solicit any support for any candidate, party or public question within the polling place or room or within a distance of 100 feet of the outside entrance to such polling place or room, or within 100 feet of a ballot drop box in use during the conduct of an election.”

That includes wearing T-shirts, hats or buttons, for example, that support a candidate or can be interpreted as trying to sway a voter’s opinion, election officials said. Bumper stickers and flags on vehicles within 100 feet of polling places are also prohibited.

When the “handmaid” voter arrived at the Gloucester Township polling location for early voting on Saturday, at first, poll workers thought she was wearing a Little Red Riding Hood costume, perhaps for a Halloween party.

She was dressed in a flowing red cloak with a white bonnet.

Then workers saw the bloody red handprints on the bonnet.

“When the board worker asked, she said it was Handmaid’s Tale,” said Sarah Napper, one of Camden County’s election administrators, who said the costume was a political statement. “We asked her to remove it. She did, but she proudly put it back on when she walked out of here.”

The woman who ultimately voted in her bra in Mercer County took offense when she was asked to remove a MAGA hat and T-shirt.

It happened at the Colonial Fire House in Hamilton Township, where voters waited on a long line for their turn to cast a ballot, said Jill Moyer, chair of the Mercer County Board of Elections.

“I asked her to remove her hat and said if you want to go get a jacket from your car, I will hold your place in line or you could go into the bathroom to turn the shirt inside out,” Moyer said of the Saturday encounter. “Before I could get it all out, she took off her shirt and flung it around.”

The woman started to curse at election workers and call them “nasty” names, Moyer said.

Moyer said she went to call the police but the woman quickly voted and left the building.

But before the voter left, one witness told NJ Advance Media, they captured a photo of the woman as she voted in her bra.

The witness said before the voter left, she put her shirt back on, inside out this time, and she also donned her hat, but not before she had another message for poll workers. “She gave the finger and said ‘Suck my ****,’” a witness said.

“I felt so bad for (the poll workers). They’re just trying to do their jobs and people are saying this god-awful stuff,” the witness said.

But it didn’t end there. The photo vent viral on social media, getting the attention of vice presidential candidate JD Vance. He retweeted the photo and called the voter a “patriot.” Vance later removed the post.

It’s not just about apparel. At the Galaxy Mall in Guttenberg in Hudson County on Saturday, Ben Applegate was standing in line with several dozen people, all waiting for their turn to vote. He said he heard someone start clapping for the crowd, as if they were happy to see so many people had come to cast their ballots. It was a man leaning over the second floor railing, he said.

“Then he yelled ‘Go Trump,’ and a man in a MAGA hat in line behind us said, ‘F*** it, I’m not afraid,’ and also started chanting ‘Trump,’” Applegate said. “I told him it was a polling place and they couldn’t do that here, and told him to shut up.”

The man who was upstairs came down and started walking through the line, shouting, “Trump! Where were you all in 2020?” Applegate said. “The poll workers were mostly older ladies, and I felt so bad for them. They were conferring with each other about what to do.”

Maryanne Kelleher, Hudson County’s Superintendent of Elections and Commissioner of Registration, said the man was “quickly shooed away by onlookers.”

“What we were advised is that Saturday’s incident was a momentary event that ended quickly, and was beyond 100 feet of the polling entrance,” she said.

Election officials across the state noted several dozen reports of electioneering, mostly people who were asked to remove hats or to cover T-shirts, and most complied without incident. But when voters don’t cooperate, poll workers call police for backup.

It happened at the Lower Township Library voting site in Villas, Cape May County, on Saturday, when a voter grew defiant.

“A gentleman had a Trump hat on. He was asked to remove it but he refused,” said Michael Kennedy, registrar and department head of the county Board of Elections. “One of the poll workers called the police. He told them he was being harassed by one of the other voters.”

The man removed the hat when police asked, Kennedy said. At least, he temporarily removed it.

“I was told right before he went in to vote that he put the hat on after the police left,” he said.

With Halloween on Thursday, some election officials said they are expecting more mischief.

“We are waiting for Halloween when someone comes dressed at a candidate,” said Beth Thompson, administrator for the Hunterdon County Board of Elections.

Back in Camden County, at the site of the Handmaid’s Tale incident, Napper, a Republican, said there are times when voters test the limits of the electioneering rules while accusing election workers of partisanship.

“When you talk to a voter and the first thing they say is, ‘Oh, you must be a certain party,’ that’s when I introduce my counterpart,” she said, giving a nod to Nellie McFadden, who serves as the county’s Democratic elections administrator.

“They are testing us,” McFadden said.

They shared the story of another voter who came to cast her ballot wearing a “Make Halloween Great Again” T-shirt. It included a picture of someone wearing a hockey mask like the one made famous by the Mike Meyers character in the Halloween movie franchise.

“It also had Trump hair, so you’re pushing it there,” Napper said.

“The voter said she was being discriminated against when she was asked to cover it up. She said it was a Halloween shirt but it’s a political statement as well,” Napper said.

“We do get pushback, but we try to explain to them we just want to run everything smoothly,” McFadden said. “We want everybody to vote and to be fair and kind to one another. We want this to be a pleasant experience for everyone.”

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.