Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
The Radical: A documentary about world’s first gay imam
mambaonline.comMuhsin Hendricks is said to be the world’s first openly gay imam. (Photo: Richard Finn Gregory) A documentary feature film about Muhsin Hendricks, a Capetonian ex-dress designer who became the world’s first openly gay imam, is premiering at the Encounters International Documentary Film Festival. Four years in the making, The Radical is an intimate portrait of Hendricks, who came out in 1996.
Today he leads a devoted group of queer Muslims through the Al-Ghurbaah Foundation, based in a modest mosque in Wynberg. Al-Ghurbaah (“the strangers”) is an organisation that supports the LGBTQ+ community and runs various educational and empowerment programmes that help Muslims reconcile their sexuality with their faith.
The film provides first-person accounts of being and growing up queer as a South African Muslim in a society caught between the liberalism of its constitution and the conservativeness of its cultures and history.
The film chronicles individual journeys to queer acceptance, and the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights across Africa, as a diversity of Muslim people, negotiate these tensions.
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