Joburg Queer Nightlife 1980s – Early 90s

This map charts roughly 45 key venues of queer nightlife in Johannesburg’s inner city in the 1980s and early 1990s. First explored as a part of the author's History Honours research, these venues were important meeting points for the mostly white, middle-class queer society that emerged in Hillbrow, Marshalltown and Yeoville in the early 1980s. This map is by no means complete - there were certainly queer venues outside of Johannesburg's inner-city, and many more gay businesses and queer-friendly spaces across the decades. However, this map provides a cursory introduction to the queer world that some had access to in the dying years of the apartheid regime.

As a public history project, this map seeks to make the archive more visible and more interactive, providing texture and tangibility to otherwise stagnant points in memory which are often difficult to access and lack personal testimony. Further, by plotting these venues onto a modern map, the physical realities of a long-gone queer city are made more clear. From this, a few points can be made: Firstly, that despite the fall of apartheid-era homophobic policy, and increased sexual freedoms post-apartheid, there are significantly fewer queer venues in Johannesburg now than there were 40 years ago. Secondly, that there existed a clear diversity in the available venues - from cruising clubs and saunas, discos and dancehalls, to restaurants and cafes. Importantly, there were enough venues to even host Lesbian nights or to open a select few women-only clubs. This is worth pointing out not only because of the lack of Lesbian spaces in history, but even today when Lesbian clubs have increasingly been forced to shut down.

This map invites you to struggle with senses of nostalgia and longing, for a queer city that clearly did exist, but which existed within the context of apartheid - the absence of clubs which catered for people of colour within the inner-city ought to leave the viewer questioning the nature of the city the map displays - a queer city, yes, but for who? Moreover, the map invites you to struggle with the contemporary queer city - what does Queer Johannesburg look like now? Where is it? To whom does it cater?

Daniel Lee (Mapping Project Phase 1 Coordinator), October 2023