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Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa.

Edited by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron

First published in 1996 and still in print, Defiant Desire has become a classic, and is widely taught across the world. It records the lives of lesbian and gay South Africans of all races, lived in the face of censure, denial and oppression, from a drag salon in Woodstock to a gay ‘shebeen’ in kwaThema; from a church in a Pretoria nightclub to Johannesburg's lesbian and gay pride march; and from Afrikaans love poetry to the new activism.

Defiant Desire brought together South Africa's most prominent gay and lesbian writers, activists and academics. 

The contributors set out to refute beliefs that homosexuality is a white, male or middle-class phenomenon. Their writing makes clear and vibrant the relationship between a growing lesbian and gay rights movement and the broader anti-apartheid struggle in a time of transition and upheaval in South Africa, and challenges its people to build a new society that respects and cherishes all of its citizens. Defiant Desire is an articulate testimony to the range of gay and lesbian experiences in South Africa. It is both a document of lesbian and gay struggle, and an indispensable book for those interested in the sexual politics coursing beneath the country's troubled passage to democracy.

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Reviews.

  • Voice Literary Supplement

    “Defiant Desire needs to be read…  scrupulous in representing the great range of voices that lay claim to gay and lesbian identity in South Africa, without pretending to be exhaustive or forgetting the enormous gender, race, and class differences between and amoung self-identified gays and lesbians.”

  • - Anne McClintock, Columbia University

    “Vividly capturing the diversity of lesbian and gay culture, Defiant Desire blends provocative testimony and nuanced analysis to raise important questions about race, sexuality, and gender ambiguity in South Africa.”