Wednesday, July 22, 2009

An article by Mark Gevisser: Lives - Same-Sex Marriage in South Africa - NYTimes.com

Classmate Mark Gevisser wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times recently about his recent marriage.  First, and most importantly, congratulations to Mark and his partner. 

It turns out that Mark has been quite busy since 1987.  After graduating from Yale with a degree in comparative literature, Mark he worked in New York, writing for Village Voice and The Nation before returning to South Africa in 1990. He is currently The Nation’s Southern African correspondent. In South Africa, his work has appeared in the Mail & Guardian, the Sunday Independent, the Sunday Times and many magazines and periodicals. Internationally, he has published widely on South African politics, culture and society, in publications ranging from Vogue and the New York Times to Foreign Affairs and Art in America.

Mark has previously published two books – Defiant Desire, Gay and Lesbian Lives In South Africa (Routledge, 1994), which he co-edited with Edwin Cameron, and Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa (David Philip, 1996), a collection of his celebrated political profiles from the Mail & Guardian. He has also published widely, in anthologies, on sexuality and on urbanism in South Africa. His essay, “Inheritance”, appears in the award-winning new anthology, Beautiful/Ugly (Duke/Kwela, 2006). His feature-length documentary, The Man Who Drove With Mandela, made with Greta Schiller, has been broadcast internationally, and won the Teddy Documentary Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999. The film is an excavation of the life of Cecil Williams, the South African gay communist theatre director. Mark has also written scripts for the South African drama series Zero Tolerance; his scripts were short-listed for SAFTA and iEmmy awards.

Since 2002, Mark has also been involved in heritage development. He co-led the team that developed the heritage, education and tourism components of Constitution Hill, and co-curated the Hill’s permanent exhibitions. He is a founder and associate of Trace, a heritage research and design company. Mark also works as a political analyst; his clients have included several South African and multinational organisations and corporations.

Most recently, Mark wrote A LEGACY OF LIBERATION: THABO MBEKI AND THE FUTURE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN DREAM, a new book which has been very well received.  For more information, check out Mark's website.  http://www.markgevisser.com/legacy.htm

Mark lives in France and South Africa with his partner.

Lives - Same-Sex Marriage in South Africa - NYTimes.com

1 comment:

Mark Gevisser said...

Thank you for this Tim! I keep on meaning to write in and never do... Chetty and I live in Paris, but I also spend a good few months in Joburg, where I'm teaching writing and journalism at the University of Pretoria. If any classmates are in either place, please drop me a line - mark@markgevisser.com