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Reading: Securing Pride: Sexuality, Security and the Post-Apartheid State

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Research Article

Securing Pride: Sexuality, Security and the Post-Apartheid State

Author:

Xavier Livermon

University of Texas at Austin, US

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Abstract

   This paper explores the contestation that emerges between state
   security providers and communities in hybrid security situations.
   Rather than focusing on the failures of the state, the article explores
   how communities use contested (in)securities to create forms of
   security for themselves. The article argues for Soweto Pride as an
   example of vernacular security for black LGBT+ populations in
   Johannesburg. Ultimately, what is enivisioned is an expansive concept
   of security that considers cultural practices, space making, and
   communal formations as central to its formation.
   How to Cite: Livermon, X., 2018. Securing Pride: Sexuality, Security
   and the Post-Apartheid State. Stability: International Journal of
   Security and Development, 7(1), p.12. DOI:
   http://doi.org/10.5334/sta.607
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     Published on 06 Jun 2018
   Peer Reviewed
    CC BY 4.0
    Accepted on 19 Apr 2018            Submitted on 04 Dec 2017

Introduction

   In 2016, the City of Johannesburg and the South African Police Service
   (SAPS) would not grant the organizers of one of the largest queer Pride
   events in Africa authority to host their 12^th annual event. Soweto
   Pride, which is about advocating for and celebrating achievements in
   the attainment of equal rights, was determined by the security forces
   to pose a potential physical security threat to citizens. This step
   exemplified the complex and contested relationships that exist between
   the state security providers and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
   (LGBT+) community in South Africa.^1

   In this article, the 2015 Soweto Pride is offered as a case study in
   vernacular security. Drawing on Bubandt’s (2004 and 2005) concept of
   vernacular security, this article explores the repertoire of strategies
   that participants at the 2015 Soweto Pride deployed to negotiate issues
   of safety and freedom in their appropriation of public space.
   Vernacular security encompasses not only the argument that security is
   discursively and socially constructed, but also the idea that solutions
   to (in)security lie in communal formations and responses (Jarvis and
   Lister 2013; Luckham and Kirk 2013). The 2015 Soweto Pride itself
   functioned as a practice of security in its effort to provide spaces of
   safety, freedom, acceptance, and affirmation for the performance and
   expression of black LGBT+ identities. The strategies by which the 2015
   Soweto Pride worked to accomplish this suggests that scholars might
   decentralize state-level conceptions and practices of security and
   instead begin to shift analytical focus towards the everyday practices
   and strategies by which vulnerable and marginalized groups, such as
   black LGBT+ South Africans, deploy their own conceptions and practices
   of security. Such an approach is needed to illuminate the semiotic,
   discursive, and social fields which nurture and provide space for black
   LGBT+ identity formation and performance. In demonstrating how black
   LGBT+ people construct Soweto Pride as a form of security configured
   and deployed around specific symbolic, social, and geographic concerns,
   the agency and creativity of black LGBT+ South Africans in developing
   and enacting their own strategies of security is highlighted.

Approach and methodology

   Since the spread of the human security concept in the late 1990s, there
   has been increased recognition of the centrality of the individual, as
   opposed to the state, as a referent in security analyses. This article
   approaches understanding the security challenges of a vulnerable and
   minority social group, not by focusing on the risks they face as
   potential victims, but rather by understanding the agency and
   strategies of such communities in circumscribing, producing, and
   managing their own identities.

   The events of Soweto Pride represent a locally configured form of
   security as the event organizers appropriate spaces that allow
   participants to perform and explore their identities in a safe and
   affirming manner. Thus, beyond the visible measures of protection, some
   of which engage state actors and some that do not, Soweto Pride itself
   is a strategic deployment of security to allow the safe performance,
   expression, production, and reproduction of black LGBT+ identities.
   Black LGBT+ South Africans engage in everyday mechanisms to help create
   a sense of safety and security for themselves – warning each other
   about dangerous areas, prescribing certain dress codes for certain
   areas, and recommending appropriate response during and after
   homophobic violence. Since there are no exclusively and
   geographically-based black LGBT+ communities, there is nothing
   analogous to a neighborhood watch. Thus, Soweto Pride constitutes its
   own temporary geographic neighborhood that functions to provide a type
   of policing within its geographical and temporal borders.

Soweto Pride as Performance

   The methodology deployed for this study centered on performance
   ethnography, a type of situated participant-observation and informal
   interviewing that draws attention to how my body as a self-identifying
   black queer man shaped my relation to my field sites and my reception
   in these sites (Madison 2011). My body facilitated my myriad and
   diverse experiences, even as my shared subjectivity was impacted by my
   foreign nationality and status as a researcher.

   The events of the 2015 Soweto Pride serve as an example of what I refer
   to as ‘making space’. Throughout my scholarship on black queer South
   African life, I developed the concept of ‘making space’ to theorize how
   black queer people, living under multiple forms of disempowerment and
   marginalization, strategically labor to delineate discursive,
   practical, and geographic spaces that are at once liberating and
   affirmative, while at the same time, afford a type of visibility for
   their lives and their identities (see Livermon 2012 and 2014). My
   concept of ‘making space’ as it relates to black queer life goes beyond
   physical geography because it foregrounds how black queer people and
   communities strategically activate geographies – whether a church,
   night club, or neighborhood – to delineate a field of discourse and
   social praxis that is both meaningful to those who are engaged in its
   production, and protected from exogenous threats.

   While my concept of ‘making space’ depends upon a geographical
   specificity – whether it be a neighborhood or a nation-state – I deploy
   space to theorize the discursive, social, and cultural delineations
   that black queer people make as they negotiate their own desires amidst
   intrusions and threats, both physical and discursive, to their
   personhood and collective citizenship. Resistance, identity, and
   geography have been central notions in queer scholarship, especially in
   the scholarship on queer South African life (see Msibi 2012; Matebeni
   2011 and 2013). As agents in the creation of their own spaces, my
   ethnographic research illuminates how black queer South Africans deploy
   vernacular security to maintain the boundaries – both real and
   imagined, discursive and physical — of their space and to protect it
   from perceived threats. My observations and analysis draw attention to
   the ways in which the events of the 2015 Soweto Pride provide examples
   of the ways in which black queer South Africans engage, disengage,
   circumvent, reject, and reconfigure the types of the security that the
   South African government makes available to its black and queer
   citizens. In the ethnographic descriptions and discussion that follow,
   it is important that we not simply see black queer South Africans as
   victims of insecurity; rather, we should view them as producers of
   their own notions of security who strategically negotiate, challenge,
   and critique the securities made available to them by the South African
   state.

Securing South Africa

   In contemporary South Africa, security has emerged as a key word in the
   post-apartheid state. Insecurity was a marked feature of the declining
   years of the National Party (NP) government, particularly from the late
   1980s to the 1994 election. Near revolutionary conditions created by
   internal dissent fueled different forms of state reprisal and
   repression (Wolpe 1990). These forms of state repression, while not
   new, took on a different interpretative character as South Africa was
   positioned internationally as a pariah state that could no longer claim
   moral authority in relation to state sponsored violence both within and
   outside its borders (Vale and Taylor 1999; Pfister 2005). Its last gasp
   of international legitimacy as the bulwark against communism ceased to
   be a sufficient cause for racial oppression post-1989.

   By the late 1980s, the NP, rocked by internal dissent and increasingly
   unable to govern, began seeking a negotiated settlement. The
   technocratic elites within the NP, influenced by neoliberal ideologies
   and seeking to maintain the operations of global and local capital,
   realized that political representation of the black majority had become
   an obstacle to achieving this goal. Importantly, this approach was in
   line with consumer business interests in South Africa that had long
   pressed for a relaxation of apartheid laws in order to nurture a black
   middle class that would buy its products and expand transnationally to
   exploit a growing African middle class.

   Key to the settlement negotiation was the idea that the post-apartheid
   majority government, stewarded by the African National Congress (ANC),
   would ensure security in a post-transition South Africa. While adopting
   a rhetorical rights-based approach to safety and security in the
   Constitution and key legislation, this has not translated into improved
   security for all South Africans. What has largely remained unresolved
   (or unchanged), is for whom the state guarantees safety and security.
   Critical theorists would suggest that safety and security has been
   achieved for the machinations of global capital, thus leaving the
   majority of South Africans living in constant insecurity (see Bond
   2014). Hence, the ANC government can paradoxically claim that it is
   representing the interests of South Africa while also using deadly
   force, for example, to repress worker dissidence as happened at
   Marikana in August 2012. The ANC has struggled to balance the needs of
   global capital with those of social transformation and maintaining
   investor confidence has become tied to its ability to manage labor, and
   by proxy the black majority population. The use of violence and
   coercion to manage exploitative labor practices has long been near the
   heart of racial inequality in South Africa.

   Many activists and scholars do not see the actions of the state as
   justifiable; instead, they suggest that the state has been captured by
   corporate capital and guarantees the safety and security of those
   interests above all others (see Chinguno 2013; Bond 2013). The tension
   inherent in how security is defined and by whom is a central debate in
   discussions of legitimacy and authority in South Africa. While at a
   macro-level in South African society, this security debate can be
   defined by race and class with white people and wealthy people more
   able to access security (and not necessarily through the state).
   However, there is little consideration for how these divides manifest
   along other societal fault lines and how other groups and sub-groups
   within society are affected.

   With respect to queer rights, the post-apartheid state has taken
   significant steps to guarantee and safeguard the rights of the LGBT+
   community. What Thomas Boellstorff (2005) describes as ‘political
   homophobia’ has not been a central tenet of the post-apartheid state
   and South Africa seems to have escaped the transnational development
   and flow of homophobic discourse that has come to characterize queer
   issues on the continent. Weiss and Botha (2013) argue that
   transnational spread of homophobic discourse has produced similar, if
   not sometimes even identical, political vocabularies around issues of
   sexual difference. In the South African case, the state suggests that
   far from punishing and disciplining its queer population, it would
   rather prefer to act as guarantor and protector.

   However, LGBT+ life in South Africa is far from ideal. According to a
   2017 report from Centre for Risk Analysis at the South African
   Institute of Race Relations, four out of ten LGBT South Africans know
   of someone who has been murdered for being or suspected of being
   lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Black LGBT+ people are twice as
   likely (49%) as white respondents (26%) to know someone who was
   murdered for these reasons. What framework for analyzing security might
   be helpful in this case, and how might that framework inform our
   discussions concerning LGBT+ rights continent wide? Rather than focus
   solely on the failures of the state, it is equally useful to
   investigate how communities affected by (in)security create their own
   forms of securitization. Considering securing and security responses to
   the Soweto Pride provides fertile ground to further explore these
   issues.

Presenting Soweto Pride

   Soweto Pride is a series of events centered around LGBT+ affirmation,
   culture, and community organizing that takes place annually in Soweto –
   the South West Townships of Johannesburg. Soweto has a population of
   nearly 1.3 million people, more than 98% of whom identify as black
   South Africans.^2 Created in 1927, in response to legislation
   separating ‘natives’ from white areas of the city and to cater for the
   thousands of laborers flocking to the vibrant gold economy, Soweto is
   still home to 30–40% of the city’s population, many of whom still live
   in conditions of extreme deprivation.

   During the months of September and October, there are Pride
   celebrations in and around Johannesburg. Pride functions as a unique
   combination of politics and commerce as well as offering geographies of
   visibility and spaces of pleasure. The multiple Pride celebrations
   attract slightly different crowds but there is an overlap in
   constituencies and communities served. Importantly, the Pride events
   tend to combine a march/parade celebration, and a political element.
   Participants must be willing to enter into the space as political
   sexual subjects. Peripheral events not attached to the official Pride
   parade – such as house parties and after-parties – tend to attract a
   more diverse and larger crowd of people, who want to participate in
   celebratory spaces with LGBT+ people, but who might eschew public
   political identification as a member of the community.

   In the spirit of grassroots activism and communal support, Soweto Pride
   encouraged participants to bring their own drinks, food, and music to
   the first event in 2004. Over the years, the event has grown from a
   relatively small local gathering to a major social calendar event
   featuring numerous official, and unofficial, corollary events. Despite
   this growth, the event has maintained its grassroots accessibility and
   has eschewed commercial sponsorship.

Soweto Pride as Vernacular Security

   From its very inception, Soweto Pride was oriented toward producing
   forms of vernacular security that responded to and resisted the types
   of (in)security offered by the South African state. The Forum for the
   Empowerment of Women (FEW) started Soweto Pride in 2004. FEW was
   organized by black lesbians and gender non-conforming women to address
   the issues surrounding violence against black lesbian women in township
   areas. Numerous high-profile cases around the country, including in the
   Johannesburg area, revealed the intersecting vulnerabilities of black
   lesbian and gender non-conforming women particularly in township
   spaces, where most lived and socialized. From 2000–2014, there had been
   at least 31 murders linked with female sexual preferences and an
   average of 10 lesbians had been raped per week to “correct” their
   sexual preferences (Strudwick 2014).

Creating safe spaces

   Soweto Pride was about providing safe spaces for black LGBT+ visibility
   (especially for black LGBT+ women) in township areas as well as
   creating forms of political visibility for black LGBT+ citizens in
   black communities. Soweto Pride was a combination of a demand for
   visibility, the recognition of the humanity of black queer people, and
   a call to the community to acknowledge the right to safety and security
   as black LGBT individuals (particularly black LGBT women) navigated
   social space. Central to the endeavors of the Pride celebration was
   also the call to create political pressure on what was considered
   indifferent or hostile police prosecution of numerous crimes committed
   against black LGBT+ individuals. The political praxis of FEW fostered
   the idea that because the violence against black lesbian and gender
   non-conforming women was explicitly gendered, the political response to
   that violence needed to be gendered. The formation of FEW also tacitly
   recognized that the already existing women’s organizations and LGBT
   organizations possessed insufficient capacity to deal with this problem
   of gendered, sexualized, and racial violence. Women’s organizations did
   not seem to fully address sexuality, while LGBT organizations were
   unwilling to sufficiently address racialized gender.^3

   The creation of Soweto Pride was a process of space making for members
   of South Africa’s black LGBT+ community, especially those who reside in
   townships. Prior to Soweto Pride, there were no sustained annual Pride
   events held in majority black spaces in South Africa. To attend queer
   Pride events, one had to enter predominantly white spaces in the
   wealthier, and traditionally white, northern suburbs. As discussed
   elsewhere (see Livermon 2014), the lack of explicit black queer space
   in the townships of Johannesburg did not mean that black LGBT+
   populations were absent. Rather, black LGBT+ populations found creative
   ways to repurpose or reuse heterosexual space; and in so doing,
   revealed how township space is specifically inhabited and marked as
   black and heterosexual.

Political claims to safe space

   Soweto Pride was about making a political claim to space –
   specifically, a right to the township space for black LGBT+ people. As
   a claim to a right to exist in place, Soweto Pride was not, therefore,
   about the racialization of the white queer space, the queering of black
   heterosexual space, or the racialized, sexualization of white
   heterosexual space. It was instead about creating a specific black
   queer space articulated to portions of the city that are materially and
   representationally coded as black. If the township is coded as the
   space of insecurity for black queers (particularly black queer women),
   what might it mean for black queer women to publicly declare their
   sexuality and gender non-conformity on the streets of Soweto? What
   discursive and political work do such public declarations and claiming
   of spaces accomplish?

   The 2015 edition of Pride was a renewal to a call for political action.
   Beginning in Credo Mutwa Park in 2004, the Pride celebration had
   shifted to various locations around Soweto. Due to renovations at the
   Credo Mutwa facility, the event returned to Meadowlands Park Zone 2,
   near the Meadowlands Police Station in 2015. The location was symbolic:
   in July 2007, Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Masooa were raped, tortured
   and murdered in Meadowlands in one of the many unresolved attacks on
   lesbian women. It is important to note that FEW’s security concerns
   were related to the state requirements for event security as well as to
   the larger issues of townships insecurity. In a journalistic account,
   the advocacy coordinator for FEW, Siphokazi Nombande, claimed that the
   return to Meadowlands was meant to place renewed pressure on the police
   to solve the murders and bring additional attention to sexuality based
   hate crimes in South Africa (Mamba 2015).

   A large march was held through the main streets of Soweto, along with a
   political program that was based on the theme of “Our Lives Matter:
   Safety, Justice, and Freedom Are Our Rights.” The Pride celebration
   itself was highly accessible, located in a park that did not charge
   admission. Participants were encouraged to bring lawn chairs, picnic
   baskets and coolers for their own drinks. Most of the booths featured
   non-governmental and governmental organizations handing out
   information, along with a few small business owners and entrepreneurs
   selling various gay Pride merchandise, ranging from stickers to
   t-shirts. Absent in the space were commercial vendors representing
   larger corporations. Held during the day, the event was heavily
   attended by young black women, who made up the majority of the crowd.

   The key component to Soweto Pride was the march through the main
   streets of Soweto and the political program/picnic in Meadowlands Park.
   Both events were significant for the way in which they reimagined the
   township space for a few hours as a space of vernacular security for
   queer men and women. Much of the violence experienced by black queers
   is explicitly gendered in that black gender non-conforming and black
   lesbian women remove their bodies from certain prescriptions of
   masculine control, while black gender non-conforming queer men reveal
   the artifice and construction of masculinity. Much of the violence
   experienced by black queer women, then, is an attempt by black men to
   reassert masculine control and patriarchal privilege over women who
   dare to explicitly perform their gender and sexuality in ways that mark
   their bodies as unavailable for male pleasure. On the other hand, black
   gender non-conforming men are punished for violating the codes of
   prescriptive masculinity.

Entering safe spaces

   What does it mean for a few hours, on a bright and warm Saturday
   afternoon, for black queers to have the safety and security of space in
   the township? As black queers march through Soweto demanding justice
   for lost lives, they are escorted by a police patrol. For once, the
   state ensures their safety and security. Black queers were safe at the
   park next to the police station. The municipality had employed minders
   to observe the proceedings and ensure the flow of participants in and
   out of the space, but next to the police station the black LGBT
   population could safely gather. As thousands of predominantly young
   black queers, representing a diverse array of stylistic presentations
   of gender and sexuality, congregated in the park next to the police
   station, they took pleasure in one another’s visibility. They watched
   black queer women give speeches and perform, they received information
   about available services they could access from other black queer
   women, they watched feminine black queer men twist and twirl on stage.
   They formed and participated in community. Importantly, this was a
   space that, because of its central public location and daytime
   activity, was open and available for black queer youth.

   As I entered the space I was struck at how the space skewed toward
   black queer women and their presence in space. While queer spaces tend
   to be divided by gender, Soweto Pride has increasingly become a space
   that accommodates female bodies and non-gender conforming spaces. I was
   quickly reminded of how urban space is constantly fraught for women and
   that rarity of black women occupying public space. I saw young,
   carefree black women engaging one another in socially intimate ways:
   kissing, holding hands publicly, and smiling, flirting with each other.
   Expressing their sexuality and sexual desire publicly as any other
   young person might on a warm spring afternoon in a public park. Knowing
   how rare this occurrence was, I experienced the space as welcoming and
   accepting of difference, accommodating of all different kinds of black
   LGBT bodies. As a result, black queer men were there as well in all
   their difference, but unlike other Pride events, they did not dominate
   the space. While the queer space of Johannesburg is often divided by
   gender, I saw this predominantly woman-centered space was capable of
   accommodating men as an experience of possibility and solidarity.
   Safety and security was predicated on the creation of space that could
   accommodate difference, particularly differently sexualized and
   gendered black women. Importantly, the state offered both explicit and
   less explicit markers of support for the forms of security present. And
   yet within the securitized space of Pride, a vernacular security was
   created that emphasized belonging, hospitality and liberty as
   identified by Jarvis and Lister (2013) as being among central pillars
   of vernacular security in everyday experience.

Exploring the made spaces

   Contrary to the first Soweto Pride, where the after-party events were
   held in local homes and black LGBT+ people migrated to nearby taverns,
   several targeted after-party events have since emerged. These events
   attempt in various ways to capture the “Pink Rand”^4 and to commodify
   black LGBT+ identity in township space. In the absence of a regularly
   operated black gay/lesbian club in Soweto, the rise of these
   after-parties requires a nuanced and complex engagement with
   understanding what kinds of politics can and do emerge from being
   recognized as a market.

The official after party

   Research revealed that the spaces of after-parties provided a more
   heightened sense of the forms of vernacular security that function in
   township spaces. This is illustrated well by the “official” after-party
   of Soweto Pride, which was hosted at the ‘Rock’, located in the local
   neighborhood of Moroka. In the early 2000s, the Rock had emerged as a
   key site of nighttime conviviality where mixtures of Sowetan citizens,
   accompanied by white hipsters and foreign tourists, mingled in an
   upscale Soweto nightclub. As discussed elsewhere (see Livermon 2006),
   the Rock also allowed black LGBT+ South Africans to claim and repurpose
   heterosexualized space. Hence, the Rock was known as a place of fluid
   sexuality and contact between black heterosexual and black queer South
   Africans as well as between black and white South Africans and between
   South Africans and foreigners. Over the years, the club had ceased to
   operate on a regular basis and now functioned only to host special
   events. One of those special events was the official after-party of
   Soweto Pride.

   Tickets for the party sold for between 50 and 80 ZAR (approximately 4–6
   USD). These prices were in keeping with admission prices at many clubs
   and bars in Johannesburg. While not exorbitant, the entry fee would be
   beyond the reach of someone without regular employment or a parental
   allowance. What also must be factored in is that there is little
   nighttime transportation in Soweto, so nightlife for those without a
   car or access to a ride is always a negotiation. Many young people will
   arrange carpools or walk home in groups to provide some form of
   security after a night of partying. The ability to walk home from a
   nightclub space, though, is heavily gendered as women rarely take the
   risk of walking home, even when accompanied by males. Hence, the
   location, the timing, the cover charge, as well as the price for
   drinks, would be among various factors for those considering attending
   this party.

   Because of the parameters described above, it is no surprise that the
   crowd skewed older and better resourced, and yet it was still
   predominantly comprised of women appearing to be in their 20s and 30s.
   They were a fashionable and well-dressed crowd, certainly better
   attired than many of the young people who earlier at the park had been
   in casual dress. There were two forms of security. First, there were
   security car guards who watched over the parking lot and made sure that
   the attendee’s cars were safe and undisturbed by potential thieves.
   While not officially part of their job description, they also kept an
   eye on the general security in the parking lot areas outside the club.
   The Rock also has a long history of informal partying that occurs
   outside the club itself. With individuals barbecuing and others pumping
   music out of the sound systems of their cars, the outdoor space
   surrounding the club was just as festive, if not more so, on some
   occasions as the inside of the club. The vibrant outdoor area means
   that people can bring their own drinks to an area in proximity to the
   club and avoid having to buy more expensive drinks from inside the
   club. This established pattern was salient on this evening, with an
   informal party occurring outside the venue and those outside extended
   the black queer space created by the venue to the surrounding streets
   and parking lot around the club. The parking lot attendants (all of
   whom were men) were responsible for managing the outdoor festivities.

   Secondly, there was security that determined who would be allowed
   admission, and these men generally kept an eye on happenings inside the
   club. In a mirror to the day’s earlier events, the non-state security
   actors provided their services for the protection and enhancement of
   safety and security for black LGBT+ South Africans. An important
   difference, however, was the commodified nature of the arrangement.
   While security was no longer provided by the state, private security
   created a sense of safety for the attendees. There was also perhaps the
   psychological impact of safety by numbers, in that the large
   constellation of black queer women demarcated the space and made the
   violation of that space and the temporary safety it provided,
   impossible.

   The nightclub space as a venue allows for large groups of strangers to
   come together, while also delineating the public that might constitute
   its space. In this sense, it functions as a public-private venue.
   Nightlife itself is a space where people are often performing
   alternative versions of the self, taking pleasure in the escape from
   the everyday. Yet it also is a space where various forms of social
   arrangements can be made and remade – everything from finding a tailor
   for your next dress to a lead on a government job can be procured in
   nightlife space (Grazian 2008) (Hunter 2010). Hence, it allows for a
   laxity of strict social mores. The pleasure of nightlife is in pushing
   boundaries and in building community.

   For many of the women in the space, the after-party might be one of the
   few ‘safe spaces’ where they can experience and express public desire
   for other women, free from the gaze of heterosexual men. While
   belonging, hospitality, and liberty were all part of the space, there
   was also a sense of equality, a sense of being able to experience the
   same rights of pleasure and sensual communion that heterosexuals
   routinely experience in their youth. Black queer women rarely get this
   opportunity in public space. On this night, in this space, in this
   moment, black queer women defined sensuality and pleasure for
   themselves.

Unofficial and appropriated spaces

   Spaces temporarily appropriated as ‘queer’ for Pride events illuminate
   some of the most engaging productions of vernacular security. A bar
   located in Mapetla, a towship within Soweto with less middle class
   roots than Moroka, is typical of Sowetan shebeens – local informal
   taverns. What differentiated the Mapetla shebeen from the official
   after party was that the crowd seemed to be entirely comprised of black
   queer men. The comparatives in locations reproduced some of the social
   divides existent in the Johannesburg black LGBT+ community more
   broadly. A local health organization was advertising its services and
   handing out packages of condoms and lubricant, which suggested that the
   party and venue was a known part of community life, and that local
   health organizations saw the party as an opportunity to reach men who
   have sex with men.^5

   However, gender was not the only significant difference from the
   previous party space. Class differences were apparent, given the more
   casual dress (that in many ways replicated the attire from earlier in
   the day), the lack of cover charge, and the cheaper drink prices. It
   also could be said that security, such that it existed, was less
   visible. There were no guards patrolling the parked cars, the club had
   no dedicated parking spaces, and patrons parked on the streets
   surrounding the club in typical township fashion. And yet there were
   few cars there in relation to the numbers of people inside. By my own
   estimation, the number of cars was less than a fourth of the number of
   cars at the Rock. This is not to suggest black queer women are more
   economically resourced than black queer men. Instead, the classed
   locations of the clubs themselves serviced different kinds of black
   queer people. It is also important to point out that, in general, black
   queer women (even those of the middle class) have fewer women-dominated
   spaces to congregate, and the Soweto Pride after-party would be a more
   important event on the social calendar for black queer women than
   similarly situated events occurring for black queer men.

   The only security was a search performed by a guard before one could be
   permitted into the entry area of the club. After being searched and
   once inside though, the politics of joy that encapsulated much of the
   day were on display here in this space. This politics centered on a
   privileging of freely performative sexuality, and a pleasure around a
   sense of community and belonging in their own township landspace. The
   joy and pleasure of being able to participate in a Pride celebration in
   their own communities (something that would not be true if they
   participated in the larger, more publicized Johannesburg Pride) was a
   source of Pride, pleasure, and joy, as township space could be
   temporarily appropriated for the affirmation and celebration of LGBT+
   community formation. Importantly, this was a space that younger, less
   well-resourced black queer men could access given both its location and
   prices. Perhaps the lack of security was in recognition of the
   materiality of the space and the lack of material wealth present, and
   the favoring of free expression.

   The Pride Parade and its subsequent after-parties mark an important
   instance of space making with both racialized and sexualized
   dimensions. Pride events are important forms of cultural labor that are
   politicized due to the invisibility and indifference with which black
   LGBT+ people must navigate their daily lives. Important sociopolitical
   events such as those described above, reframe everyday forms of
   violence and invisibility. This practice of space making is a form of
   vernacular security in which geographic space may be temporarily
   appropriated to provide a geographic, symbolic, and discursive space
   for the formation, performance, and expression of LGBT+ identity. Space
   making, then, is a crucial form of labor in which black LGBT+ South
   Africans engage to articulate their own concepts and strategies of
   security.

Securing Pride Spaces

   The controversy over the cancelation of the 2016 Soweto Pride
   highlighted the collisions that can occur between vernacular securities
   and state-level security. These collisions illuminate the vulnerability
   of black LGBT+ people to broader social dynamics and to their
   institutional and civic allies.

   According to the organizers, the 2016 Pride was cancelled due to state
   coercion enforced by the South African Police Service (SAPS) and backed
   by Emergency Medical Services, Disaster Management, Johannesburg Metro
   Police, and Public Order Police. From FEW’s perspective, the coercion
   took two forms. First, the event was upgraded to a higher risk
   category, from low risk to medium risk. This required the organizers to
   hire more police and security details, despite the fact that SAPS could
   not cite specifically the forms of disruption and unruliness that
   required this upgrade. For FEW, the upgraded risk category would mean
   an additional 22 Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department (JMPD)
   officers, 300 marshalls, and 80 security guards at a prohibitive cost
   of 146,000 Rand. Secondly, SAPS also suggested that the group orient
   the Pride away from its inclusive measures that I have outlined above,
   which included holding the Pride in accessible space during the day
   (while transport is still running), not charging admission, and
   allowing community members to bring their own provisions into the
   space. Authorities had demanded that FEW charge an entrance fee as a
   means of crowd control, obtain a liquor license for alcohol to be sold
   at the venue. The organization pointed out that these conditions go
   against the ethos of accessibility. The authorities wanted to ban
   cooler boxes in order to limit the intake of alcohol and thus minimize
   the ‘risk of chaos’ (see Forum for the Empowerment of Women 2016).

   For their own part, FEW points to the increasing state distrust and
   attempts to manage protest and dissent as being at the heart of these
   measures (De Barros 2016). By imposing impossible-to-meet conditions,
   the South African police service ensures that the event cannot happen,
   and thus its attendant politics struggle to gain grounding.
   Furthermore, for the organizers, this was not just a matter of
   finances; this was also about controlling the extent to which Black
   queer life submits to state management and control. I would also like
   to add that there was perhaps a discomfort at the symbolic and material
   nature of Black queer bodies, occupying space, particularly in large
   numbers (as the event has increased in popularity). Perhaps it is the
   Black queer body, particularly Black queer women and gender
   non-conforming subjects, that are the unruly subjects. Their sheer
   existence and desire to claim space and critique the state make the
   event and its participants unruly and disruptive.

Race, sexuality and security

   Looking at the relationship between Soweto Pride and other Pride events
   helps to further illuminate negotiations of vernacular security as they
   relate more boldly to issues of race. In 2016, the white male,
   elite-dominated Johannesburg (Jo’burg) Pride was held in Melrose Arch,
   an exclusive, up-market development. While admission was free, food and
   drinks needed to be purchased in that space. Since these were
   night-time events, transportation was also an issue. Twitter commentary
   from a variety of attendees remarked that the event felt like attending
   a European Pride event, making some black attendees feel like strangers
   in their own land. Excluded from Jo’burg Pride, black queer people, who
   are not privileged with means, are now also left without the Soweto
   Pride festivities.

   Ironically, the decision made by Jo’burg Pride to hold the event in
   Melrose Arch was a result of the same constraints placed on the Soweto
   Pride organizers by the City of Johannesburg, Emergency Services and
   SAPS. Jo’burg Pride organizers specifically cited the untenable costs
   of hosting open air accessible Prides as the reason for the relocation
   to Melrose Arch instead of other venues, such as Mary Fitzgerald Square
   in the more centrally located Newtown (Mamba 2016). While Soweto Pride
   organizers resisted the commodification and coercive practices of the
   state, the Jo’burg Pride organizers appear to have capitulated in the
   name of safety and leisure. But important questions must be asked: For
   which queer bodies was this safety of greatest concern? Who has the
   right of pleasure and leisure in certain spaces? It seems that when
   queer bodies are visible as consumers, they can be managed as upscale
   subjects they are both visible and protected by the state. In this way,
   the state uses the apparatus of security to produce acceptable LGBT
   citizenship (up-scale, predominantly white, male and consumptive) and
   police more unruly forms of LGBT citizenship (poor/working class,
   predominantly black and female).

   In 2017, the organizers of Soweto Pride reached a compromise with SAPS
   about the categorization of risk for the event. This compromise allowed
   the event to resume after its 2016 cancellation. According to Nombande,
   “Because last year the event was cancelled, we felt that we still want
   to be able to organize our Pride without the state imposing some of the
   things on us…This year, we had to negotiate with them…because we need
   Pride, especially in the townships, so they re-categorized us to a
   low-risk event if we agreed to stop allowing people to bring their own
   alcohol…Pride is a protest, it is a march which will claim the streets
   of Soweto. We are hoping people can come in numbers to attend the march
   and claim their streets” (van Niekerk, 2017). For FEW, having the event
   necessitated compromising on allowing attendees to bring their own
   alcohol. However, FEW refused to compromise on an admission fee, it was
   clear that their Pride event was embedded in the politics of claiming
   and making space. In the process of making space, (in)security from the
   state and community is reconfigured into a valuable form of vernacular
   security for black LGBT South Africans.

Conclusion

   Three conclusions can be drawn from the foregoing discussion. First, we
   must consider security not as an already given set of conditions but
   rather as a set of concerns that animate a specific set of strategies.
   The strategies are negotiated by various actors within a social,
   economic, and political field. While state-level practices of security
   are often assumed to be the most effective, the above case study
   suggests that even when state-level concerns intersect with more local
   concerns, the broader political economy shaping these strategies, and
   they ways in which these strategies are enacted, may differ
   significantly. If security is taken to mean a set of concerns rather
   than a fixed set of conditions, then our understanding of the agency,
   creativity, and specificity of the strategies deployed by local
   communities to navigate these concerns, is enriched.

   Second, understandings of security must go beyond a focus on physical
   bodies to interrogate how black queer South Africans must be provided a
   sense of security to have the freedom, safety, and affirmation to form,
   re-form, develop, and evolve. While the securitization of the physical
   body may be a precursor, our notion of security cannot stop there, for
   security must account for the symbolic and discursive as well as
   practical. For example, the consideration of black LGBT+ security must
   consider questions of engagement in cultural practices as opportunities
   for expressions of vernacular security.

   Third, this case study highlights that when understanding security for
   minority and/or vulnerable populations, like black and LGBT+
   communities, we must decentralize notions of security as such
   communities do not always have access to the protections that states
   provide or choose not to access such protections. Black and LGBTQ+
   people often navigate a set of locally and socially-specific concerns
   that require that they must be resourceful and strategic. If we do not
   understand these local strategies of adaptation, we fail to fully
   recognize the agency and resourcefulness that such communities display
   when responding to shifting political, economic and social relations.

   Questions abound as to what effective and inclusive justice and
   security service provision could look like in South Africa. While
   advances have been made in rights and representation across the racial
   divide in South Africa, there remain crucial fault lines, deeply
   embedded in government practices and social norms, that continue to
   delineate between male and female, black and white and heterosexual and
   queer spaces. Across the African continent, it might be best to see
   forms of state recognition as necessary, but hardly sufficient,
   condition for effective and inclusive security. Perhaps more
   controversially, Tushabe (2013) finds in their forthcoming work that
   state recognition does little to help the most vulnerable gender and
   sexuality non-conforming Africans. Instead, such recognition simply
   adds additional state regulation to intimate practices, and privileges
   some African LGBT+ individuals (those whose practices allow them to be
   visible as ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’) to the exclusion of other African queer
   folks, whose practices and ways of knowing fail to conform to the
   global LGBT model. Ossome (2013) argues that contemporary African LGBT+
   organizing, and the forms of state recognition that emerge from it, are
   simply class-based movements benefiting a small cisgender male elite,
   able to obtain and manipulate the forms of visibility required by the
   state for their benefit. We might see the cancellation of 2016 Soweto
   Pride within the twin concerns raised by Tushabe (2013) and Ossome
   (2013), that the state recognizes a particular kind of LGBT
   subjectivity, while suppressing another.

Notes

   ^1In this essay the term “queer” popular in academic circles is used as
   an all encompassing term for gender and sexual non-conformity. I use it
   interchangeably with the term LGBT+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual,
   transgender, plus) a term more popular in NGO and governmental circles.
   The + suggests the inclusivity of a range of identities such as
   Intersex, Queer, and Questioning which might exist on the gender and
   sexuality spectrum. My use of both of the terms is meant to express the
   lack of consensus regarding which term(s) best describe the LGBT+
   community and create the conditions to make change.

   ^2Basic data taken from Wikipedia based on the 2011 census data.

   ^3While it is common in many areas of the world to have women specific
   LGBT organizations it is true that across Africa this has tended to be
   less common. However, cleavages between women and men, trans and
   non-trans LGBT constituencies do exist outside of South Africa and
   cannot be said to be produced primarily by a history of racialization,
   although that is an important factor to consider in LGBT organizing
   that makes South Africa distinct from other countries. Cisgender gay
   and bisexual men are more visible in the movement but the reasons for
   this visibility seem to be more about economic access and patriarchal
   notions of women’s sexuality (Ossome 2013; Mbugua, 2013; Makahamadze
   and Murungi, 2013).

   ^4The “Pink Rand,” like the “Pink Pound” or the “Pink Dollar” is meant
   to refer to the imagined spending power possessed by members of the
   LGBT+ community in South Africa. It is often classed and raced in a way
   that excludes all but the most privileged members of the black LGBT+
   community.

   ^5MSM (men who have sex with men) is often used in public health to
   describe potentially at risk populations for HIV without resorting to
   identity markers such as gay or bisexual since it is acknowledged that
   a significant percentage of men who have sex with men that could
   potentially be at risk do not identity as gay or bisexual.

Competing Interests

   The author has no competing interests to declare.

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   Livermon, X., 2018. Securing Pride: Sexuality, Security and the
   Post-Apartheid State. Stability: International Journal of Security and
   Development, 7(1), p.12. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/sta.607

   Livermon X. Securing Pride: Sexuality, Security and the Post-Apartheid
   State. Stability: International Journal of Security and Development.
   2018;7(1):12. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/sta.607

   Livermon, X. (2018). Securing Pride: Sexuality, Security and the
   Post-Apartheid State. Stability: International Journal of Security and
   Development, 7(1), 12. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/sta.607

   Livermon X, ‘Securing Pride: Sexuality, Security and the Post-apartheid
   State’ (2018) 7 Stability: International Journal of Security and
   Development 12 DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/sta.607

   Livermon, Xavier. 2018. “Securing Pride: Sexuality, Security and the
   Post-apartheid State”. Stability: International Journal of Security and
   Development 7 (1): 12. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/sta.607

   Livermon, Xavier. “Securing Pride: Sexuality, Security and the
   Post-apartheid State”. Stability: International Journal of Security and
   Development 7, no. 1 (2018): 12. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/sta.607

   Livermon, X.. “Securing Pride: Sexuality, Security and the
   Post-apartheid State”. Stability: International Journal of Security and
   Development, vol. 7, no. 1, 2018, p. 12. DOI:
   http://doi.org/10.5334/sta.607
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