Joburg’s Queer Choir Is About to Honour the Rebels Who Changed Everything and We Are So Ready
Let’s be honest. If your Pride month plans currently consist of posting a rainbow caption and calling it activism, we need to talk. Because on 27 June 2026, the Johannesburg Queer Chorus is taking over the Roodepoort Theatre with iCons, a concert dedicated to the rule-breakers, the rebels, and the ridiculously talented people who looked at what the world expected of them and said absolutely not. There is a matinee at 3 pm and an evening show at 7 pm, tickets are on Webtickets right now, and there is genuinely no better way to spend International Pride month in Johannesburg.
The Johannesburg Queer Chorus, affectionately known as the JQC, has been one of Joburg’s best-kept secrets since it launched in early 2020, which is immediately impressive because it launched roughly a week before the entire country went into lockdown. Most organisations would have folded. The JQC masked up, found a way to keep rehearsing, and built one of the most joyful queer community spaces the city has ever seen. They have since performed at major community events, represented Africa at the Various Voices LGBTQ+ Choir Festival in Bologna, Italy in 2023 as the first queer choir from the continent to do so, and delivered annual concerts that Joburg’s queer community talks about for months afterwards. Summer of Queer, This Is Queer, Landscapes. Each one themed, fully produced, and absolutely not boring.
iCons is next. And the lineup of artists being celebrated reads like a group chat of people who were simply too much for the rooms they walked into.
Brenda Fassie. Johnny Clegg. Madonna. (Just to name a few…)
Brenda Fassie was South Africa’s greatest pop star and also one of the most unapologetically herself human beings this country has ever produced. She was loud, magnetic, contradictory, and completely unbothered by what anyone thought about how she lived. She crossed every line that apartheid South Africa drew, sang in whatever language she felt like, and loved whoever she loved without making it a press statement. She was an icon before the word got overused. She earned it.
Johnny Clegg built his entire career on the radical idea that the connection between people was more important than the laws telling them to stay apart. He learned Zulu culture and music, formed interracial bands when the state had made that illegal, and sang about belonging at a time when belonging was conditional on race. The man Zulu danced his way through apartheid. Iconic behaviour frankly.
And Madonna. There is not enough space in this article to do Madonna justice, but the short version is this: she showed up for the LGBTQIA+ community when showing up had a cost. During the AIDS crisis, when mainstream culture was either silent or actively cruel, she was loud and present and refused to look away. She told a generation of queer people that the parts of themselves they had been taught to hide were actually the most interesting parts. She has been doing that for four decades and she is still going. You simply cannot argue with the legacy.
The JQC is taking all of that energy (+ so many more legendary icons), all of that resistance and joy and refusal to be diminished, and channelling it through harmonies that will genuinely make your chest do something unexpected. That is what this choir does. They do not just perform songs. They perform the meaning behind them, and in June, in Pride month, with a programme built around artists who changed culture by being exactly who they were, that meaning hits differently.
So here is what you do. You go to Webtickets, you pick the matinee at 3 pm or the evening show at 7 pm on 27 June, you book your ticket to the Roodepoort Theatre, and you put on something fabulous. The JQC will handle the rest.
June is for the icons. This one is for us. XOXO
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