At the 36th GLAAD Media Awards, GLAAD honored the journalists who cover LGBTQ issues and people accurately and inclusively. These stories feature LGBTQ people in all walks of life and around the world, from the streets of Dallas, Texas, to the townships of South Africa.
NPR’s The Picture Show won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Online Journalism – Video or Multimedia for “Rainbow Girls: 10 Years of Protection and Prejudice.” This heartfelt documentary follows the lives of a group of lesbian women from in and around Cape Town, South Africa.
Julia Gunther started by photographing the “Miss Lesbian” beauty pageant in Khayelitsha township in the fall of 2012. “The Miss Lesbian beauty pageant is our way of having fun, being happy and expressing ourselves,” pageant volunteer Siya Mcuta explained to Gunther. “We are doing this for the younger generations to see.” The resulting portraits would soon be dubbed “Rainbow Girls” in reference to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s term for a multicultural and unified post-apartheid South Africa – Rainbow Nation.
Photo credits: ‘Rainbow Girls’ is a photographic documentary series about lesbian women in South African townships, beginning with the 2012 Miss Lesbian beauty competition in Khayelitsha Township, at the IAM Women’s Shelter, and in private homes in Gugulethu Township. In 2022, photographer Julia Gunther reunited with many of the women from her original portraits to reflect on what has — and hasn’t — changed over the past decade. See Julia’s photos here.
10 years later, Gunther and writer Nick Schönfeld returned to Cape Town to see how the contestants’ lives have changed in the decade after the pageant. They worked with one of the Rainbow Girls, Velisa “Vee” Jara, to record the women in their own words. The documentary explores the tension felt by the LGBTQ South African community — living in a country which outlaws hate crimes and discrimination based on sexual orientation, but which remains deeply unsafe for LGBTQ people.
“Vee [Velisa Jara] would tell me about the challenges the former pageant contestants faced living in Khayelitsha as black lesbian women,” Gunther explained. “Constantly navigating threats and dealing with family members who refused to accept them was incredibly difficult. It puts enormous pressure on their mental health.”
And yet, these courageous women continue to fight for love and acceptance, living openly and discussing their lives and loves. “Something that helped me is to help other people,” Mcuta told Vee, as she looked at the portrait of her younger self. “That child who is crying in me, she was crying for safety. I changed to be that person I wanted in my life. I became that thing I wanted in my life. I was that shoulder I wanted in my life. I became something that I wanted from other people.”
“This film would not exist without the courage and generosity of the women who chose to speak out,” Gunther posted following the GLAAD Media Awards. “They trusted us with their experiences, and we are deeply grateful. This award is for them.”
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The GLAAD Media Award honors the Rainbow Girls, as well as Julia, Nick and Vee, and from NPR, Director of Visuals Nicole Werbeck, photo editor Catie Dull, copy editor Zach Thompson, Managing Editor for Enterprise Stories Gerry Holmes, and Keith Jenkins, Vice President of Visuals and Music Strategy. Their creativity and resilience, and commitment to capturing deep and wide perspectives of LGBTQ women in South Africa, accelerates acceptance of LGBTQ people everywhere.
