South Africa is applauded for being the first country in the world to provide constitutional protection from discrimination to LGBTI people. However, high rates of discrimination, threats, and violence against LGBTI people persist. Against this backdrop, this dissertation explores the lived experiences of LGBTI activists in South Africa and how people navigate the gaps between the law as prescribed and every day lived experiences. Adopting an intersectional feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial framework, this project layers archival material with contemporary experiences and examines ways in which non-heterosexual and gender non-conforming people in South Africa (re)make spaces of queer resistance from spaces of vulnerability. This was done through a combination of semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, along with immersion in several archives. Particular attention was paid to the layers of legal meaning inherited from colonisation and apartheid, which continue to reverberate into the present. I demonstrate how anti-sodomy laws moved intact across the British Empire and how the vague language utilised by lawmakers has contributed to anti-LGBTI attitudes. Drawing from nine-months of fieldwork conducted between June 2017 and September 2018, I argue that violence is displaced in the public imaginary allowing participants to engage in place-based activities that nurture feelings of belonging and (precarious) safety. I further argue for understandings of multiple types of queer space and explore how participants navigate the inherent tensions between NGO-mandated queer spaces and more fluid queer spaces that are often fleeting and temporary. This research also offers insights into place-based activities in which solidarities are built and nurtured, both within and beyond LGBTI communities in the present and in the past. Ultimately, this dissertation contributes to scholarship that unsettles binary thinking about good and bad places to be gay, offering insights into (re)making queer spaces and nurturing solidarities as part of imagining a better future.