A crown that sent a signal
The first Mister Gay Namibia: a catwalk as a political statement, a crown and, shortly afterwards, a brutal attack.
On 26 November 2011, a Mister Gay Namibia was chosen in Windhoek for the first time. What sounds like glitter and catwalks was a political event in a country where sex between men was still a crime. After South Africa, Namibia was only the second country on the continent with such a contest.
Five candidates competed. The winner was Wendelinus Hamutenya, the only Black man in the field. He comes from a village in the north of the country where homosexuality is hardly talked about. When his family found out, he was disowned and taken to a psychiatric clinic. Only after long conversations did they find their way back to each other.
The reactions to the evening were remarkable. The opposition party RDP praised the event as a meeting of equals. A well-known human rights lawyer saw it as proof that people of different orientations can live together peacefully.
The euphoria did not last long. A good week after his crowning, two men lay in wait for him near his home in the township of Katutura. They demanded his supposed prize money, pushed him to the ground and smashed a bottle into his face. Hamutenya spent twenty-four hours under observation in a clinic and filed a police report. Whether greed or homophobia was behind it, he deliberately left open. He did not want to fuel unnecessary debates.
Giving up was out of the question for him. The following spring he travelled to the Mister Gay World contest in Johannesburg, where he was among the first Black African participants ever. Later he took over running the national contest himself.
The colonial sodomy ban that hung over his title was only struck down by the High Court in 2024. The evening in Windhoek is one of the early moments when queer life in Namibia became publicly visible.