that initially avoided taking an official position on apartheid, while the Rand Gay Organisation was multi-racial and founded in opposition to apartheid. Hubert du Plessis, one of the most prominent South African composers of the 20th century, was proudly and openly gay yet also a staunch supporter of the National Party and composed many nationalist works. He was outspoken about his sexuality, however, and appeared before Parliament in the late 1960s to protest the tightening of sodomy laws. In the country's 1987 general election, GASA and the gay magazine Exit endorsed the National Party candidate for Hillbrow, Leon de Beer. The campaign brought to a head the tensions between LGBT activists who overtly opposed apartheid and those that did not. De Beer was the National Party's first candidate to address gay rights, and advertised for his campaign in Exit. It was the general opinion of the gay community of Hillbrow that their vote was the deciding factor in de Beer's ultimate victory. From the 1960s to the late 1980s, the South African Defence Force forced white gay and lesbian soldiers to undergo various medical "cures" for their sexual orientation, including sex reassignment surgery. The treatment of gay and lesbian soldiers in the South African military was explored in a 2003 documentary film, titled Property of the State. Organisations such as the Organisation of Lesbian and Gay Activists (OLGA) worked with the African National Congress to include protections for LGBT people in the new Constitution of South Africa. Post-apartheid era In 1993, the African National Congress, in the Bill of Rights, endorsed the legal recognition of same-sex marriages, and the interim Constitution prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. These provisions were kept in the new Constitution, approved in 1996, due to the lobbying efforts of LGBT South Africans. As a result, South Africa became the first nation in the world to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in its constitution. Two years later, the Constitutional Court of South Africa ruled in a landmark case that the law prohibiting homosexual conduct between consenting adults in private violated the Constitution. In 1994, during his inauguration speech as president, Nelson Mandela stated the following: The gay pride flag of South Africa, designed by Eugene Brockman, is a hybrid of the LGBT rainbow flag and the South African national flag launched in 1994 after the end of the apartheid era. Brockman said