Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight was an anti-apartheid, gay rights and AIDS activist in South Africa
As the founder of South Africa's black gay movement, which he linked with the anti-apartheid fight of the time. His prominent profile in the campaign for freedom for the black citizens and his association with anti-apartheid's leaders were instrumental in gaining recognition for gay rights in his country. As an AIDS educator and organizer of South Africa's pride celebrations, he worked to unite black and white gay communities in a common cause across the country. Today's Out Spotlight is Tseko Simon Nkoli.

Tseko Simon Nkoli was born in Soweto (outside of Johannesburg) on November 26, 1957. At that time South Africa was under apartheid law which which control and imposed severe limitations on his family's and other black South African's lives. He told the story, that at age nine, he locked his parents in a wardrobe/cabinet so they could escape detection from police enforcing the pass laws, which restricted where blacks could live. The experience left a powerful impression that he used later on as a metaphor for living a closeted life.

Nkoli spent much of his childhood with his grandparents, low-income tenant farmers on a white-owned estate. He craved education and, against the resistance of the landowner and his grandfather who needed his labor, snuck away whenever he could to attend the rural schools. Eventually he rejoined his mother and stepfather in the Sebokeng township to continue his education.

As a teenager he recognized he had feelings for other men. Identifying as a gay man was confusing because the seSotho word for homosexual is sitabane, which implies hermaphrodite. At 18 he came out to his mother, who took him to a priest and a series of local healers or sangomas who attempted, unsuccessfully, to argue him out of it. At 19 he met his first lover, a white bus driver named Andre, through a pen pal magazine.

Both mothers of both opposed the relationship, Nkoli's because it was a same sex relationship and Andre's because it was biracial. Simon's mother arranged for him to see a psychologist, who turned out to be gay and assured him that his orientation was perfectly natural. Matters came to a head when the lovers made a suicide pact if they couldn't be together. Nkoli's mother learned of it and intervened. They were able to live together once they became college students in Johannesburg. Even then, however, to conform to enforced segregation, he had to pose as Andre's domestic worker.

Nkoli's anti-apartheid activism began when he was arrested four times in the student rebellions of 1976. In 1979 he joined the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) and became secretary for the Transvaal region. When his homosexuality became known, it was debated among his fellows within the organization whether he should be allowed to remain his post in the organization. They voted yes.

After his relationship with Andre ended, he found few resources for gay people of color. Most gay venues, excepting a few cruising areas, were in districts reserved for whites. In 1983 his allegiances in racial and sexual identity politics intersected: he came out in an interview in the City Press, a black newspaper an joined the virtually all-white Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), which maintained an apolitical distance from the apartheid struggle. Getting little support within GASA for advocating that they relocate their social activities away from whites-only facilities, in May of 1984 he started The Saturday Group, South Africa's first gay black organization. It was short-lived, however, because Nkoli's political life soon took a dramatic turn.

In the 80s his student activism resulted in his joining the African National Congress and the United Democratic Front. In 1984 he helped establish the Vaal Civic Association to undertake tenant organizing in the Delmas township. He and 21 others from the UDF were arrested after a march protesting government-imposed rent hikes and charged with "subversion, conspiracy, and treason," crimes subject to the death penalty.

The "Delmas Trial" lasted four years. While in the Pretoria Central Prison, Nkoli came out to his comrades during discussions of prison sex. This action and the debates it inspired prompted UDF leaders such as co-defendants Popo Molefe and Patrick Lekota to recognize homophobia as a form of oppression.

During the trial, proof of his attendance at a GASA meeting was a crucial point in countering the prosecution, which had tried to place him at the scene of a murder. This defense was also a public coming out and brought the Delmas Trial to the attention of the international gay rights groups. He received letters of support, especially from European activists, were an important demonstration of solidarity. Ironically, GASA had withheld its support during the trial. Acquitted in 1988 and he and the rest of the "Vaal 22" were freed. Now seeing an even greater need, upon his release helped found the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of Witwatersrand (GLOW), the first large black-based GLBTQ organization in South Africa. Beginning in 1990, GLOW organized the country's first three pride marches and became the model for several other gay groups in the black townships.

However, during his imprisonment, he learned that he was HIV positive.

Nkoli continued his participation in the ANC, he met with Nelson Mandela in 1994. His visibility in the anti-apartheid movement is credited in winning the ANC's support for gay rights and that that translated into major milestones once the ANC gained power. In 1996 South Africa became the first nation to include "sexual orientation" in its constitution's anti-discrimination clause. From that came striking down sodomy laws and the recognition of gay relationships.

In 1990 he became one of the first South African activists to publicly acknowledge his HIV-positive status. He co-founded the Township AIDS Project (TAP) and the Gay Men's Health Forum, working to bring AIDS education and counseling to disadvantaged populations. He was also a founding member of both the Positive African Men's Project and the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (now the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project), as well as a board member of the International Lesbian and Gay Association.

Playful and irreverent,he inspired the devotion of South African progressives from all backgrounds and drew an international following. A 1989 speaking tour of Europe, Canada, and the United States raised $35,000 for TAP.

After becoming one of the first publicly HIV-positive African gay men, he initiated the Positive African Men group based in central Johannesburg. He had been infected with HIV for around 12 years, and had been seriously ill, on and off, for the last four. He died of AIDS in a Johannesburg hospital on November 30, 1998.

A memorial at St. Mary's Anglican Cathedral was followed by a funeral in Sebokeng attended by many of the glbtq and anti-apartheid movements' leaders. The September 1999 Pride march was dedicated to him and included a stop at the newly named "Simon Nkoli Corner" at the intersection of Pretoria and Twist Streets in Johannesburg.

There is a Simon Nkoli Street in Amsterdam and a Simon Nkoli Day in San Francisco. He opened the first Gay Games in New York and was made a freeman of that city by mayor David Dinkins. In 1996 Nkoli was given the Stonewall Award in the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Canadian filmmaker John Greyson made a short film about Nkoli titled A Moffie Called Simon in 1987. He was the subject of Robert Colman's 2003 play, "Your Loving Simon" and Beverley Ditsie's 2002 film "Simon & I". John Greyson's 2009 film Fig Trees, a hybrid documentary/opera also includes reference to Nkoli's activism

His papers are at the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa include his letters from prison, which became the basis for "Your Loving Simon." and Simon & I provides a loving portrait of his final years.

Simon Nkoli made a difference not to just the GLBTQ community in South Africa, but for all Southe Africans, and for GLBTQ communities around the world.