By Barry Moody
Johannesburg - Down the road from a constitutional court that is charged with upholding gay rights, South Africa's only lesbian soccer team fight not just for the ball but to overturn brutal prejudice and discrimination.
The "Chosen Few" play with skill and huge enthusiasm despite the scrappy dirt waste ground bordered by a large puddle on which they are obliged to train, a few hundred metres from the imposing Constitutional Court in central Johannesburg.
"We tried many other places," said Lerato Marumolwa, one of the best players, pointing ruefully at a well-kept green pitch 500m away. "But they just won't let us in."
Such frustration is minor compared to the so-called "corrective" rape, murder, insults and beatings that South African lesbians have frequently suffered, despite the widely admired, post-apartheid constitution which was the first in the world to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.
More than 30 lesbians are reported to have been murdered in the last decade, and the British NGO ActionAid said in a report last year there was an increasing trend of homophobic attacks and murders by men who believed they would "cure" lesbian women.
Marumolwa, 21, and her team mates are more than just soccer players. They campaign to overturn prejudice against black lesbians, which is greatest in the townships where most of them live.
The group demonstrated outside the court where one of the murderers of former South African national women's soccer team player Eudy Simelane was tried and sentenced last year.
In a shocking crime that exposed the amount of hatred suffered by lesbians in the black community, Simelane was raped and stabbed 25 times in a township on the edge of Johannesburg.
The Chosen Few was launched in 2004 by the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW) and the players say the team has become a refuge for them, in contrast to the danger and prejudice they suffer in their townships. - Reuters