Mark Gevisser: creativity

Abstract

South African author and journalist Mark Gevisser has achieved national and international influence through the publication of many newspaper and journal articles and several books on South African and African political figures and issues, as well as on issues affecting the LGBQT+ community. This prolific writer recently published The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers, a book arising from five years of research into the lived experiences of gay people living in several different countries. He focuses on issues of sexuality and gender through recounting their diverse lived experiences. Gevisser, who was born in Johannesburg in 1964, is a descendant of orthodox Jews who fled from a Lithuanian shtetl (village) during a Czarist pogrom, to settle in South Africa. He grew up in a suburban ranch house in the Johannesburg north suburb of Atholl. His father was a businessman, and his mother a schoolteacher at the Barnato Park High School. His maternal grandfather, a furniture manufacturer, was a self-taught intellectual and member of the Left Book Club who bequeathed to his only daughter a voluminous library that included books such as The Road to Wigan Pier, Red Star over China and The Mind and Face of Bolshevism. Gevisser was educated at King David and Redhill Schools in Johannesburg, and graduated from Yale University in the US in 1987 with a degree in comparative literature. Gevisser then taught at a high school in New York and worked as freelance journalist writing for Village Voice and The Nation. He returned to South Africa in 1990.