When criminal law discovered lesbian love

On 4 March 1988, a law came into force in South Africa that at first glance looked like a dry administrative reform. The Immorality Amendment Act was meant to clean up outdated terms, increase fines and make several provisions gender-neutral. But behind the sober language lay a first. For the first time, South African criminal law also reached into sexuality between women.

Until then, the law had simply ignored lesbian relationships. Sex between men, by contrast, had long been prohibited, and since 1969 a higher age of consent of nineteen had applied to them in addition. This rule was now extended to women. A woman who had a female partner under nineteen was committing a crime. For heterosexual contact, the limit was sixteen. At the same time, the law was given a new name: the notorious Immorality Act became the Sexual Offences Act.

The timing says a lot about the late apartheid regime. The ban on relationships across the "colour line" had fallen three years earlier. But that was no reason for the state to give up control over bodies and desire.

The movement organised nonetheless. That same year, activist Simon Nkoli founded the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand, GLOW for short. Unlike earlier groups, it explicitly saw itself as part of the struggle against apartheid and was open to people of every skin colour.

The turning point came faster than expected. With the end of apartheid, South Africa gave itself a constitution that explicitly prohibits discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, one of the first countries in the world to do so. The unequal age of consent, however, only disappeared from the law in 2007. A year later, the Constitutional Court also declared the old rule unconstitutional retroactively. Today the same limit of sixteen applies to everyone.