Sunday Times, South Africa - Sunday, December 6, 1998
Mark Gevisser

Nkoli's brilliance, as an anti-apartheid student leader, as the founder of the black gay movement in South Africa and as an AIDS activist in his later years, was his understanding of the tenet that "the personal is the political". From the time he came out of the closet, while Transvaal regional secretary for the Congress of South African Students in 1981, he put his body on the line and his destiny in the public eye.

Back then, he stared his homophobic opponents down and won re-election with 80 percent of the vote. A few years later, as a Delmas treason trialist, in jail for four years with leaders of the United Democratic Front like Terror Lekota, Popo Molefe and Moss Chikane, he came out to his co-accused during a heated debate about homosexual behaviour in jail.

So shocked were they at first that they demanded he be tried separately from them. But his unique combination of charm and perseverance won out, and, he recalled with some triumph, "at the end of the whole thing, when we were all about to go to the witness box, there was no-one against me".

Lekota, now the national chairman of the ANC, remembers him as one of the most enthusiastic, most caring and most intellectually curious of his co-accused. "When someone was not well, or feeling bad, he was the first to offer assistance. He also had a depth of social awareness which one would not easily associate with young people of his background. He read a lot, on all sorts of issues. And he was a brilliant athlete."

Over time, says Lekota, "all of us acknowledged that [Nkoli's coming out] was an important learning experience . . . His presence made it possible for more information to be discussed, and it broadened our vision, helping us to see that society is composed of so many people whose orientations are not the same, and that one must be able to live with it".

And so, when it came to writing the Constitution, "how could we say that men and women like Simon, who had put their shoulders to the wheel to end apartheid, how could we say that they should now be discriminated against?"

At the same time as he became involved in Cosas, Nkoli was engaged in a struggle with his family over his sexuality - he was dragged to almost every sangoma in Sebokeng and landed up, finally, at a psychologist in Johannesburg, who told him simply to accept himself.

And so he went in search of other gay people, and found the white Gay Association of South Africa (Gasa), which he proceeded, in his inimitable way, to turn upside down. Just as he would not accept the homophobia of his black comrades, he could not abide the racism of his white comrades. Once his ideas and Gasa proved to be incompatible, he founded Glow, Gays and Lesbians of the Witwatersrand, which organised South Africa's first Gay and Lesbian Pride March in 1990.

His enduring legacy is that he brought black people and the tenets of liberation ideology into the gay SA subculture, thus providing a pre-emptive strike against the "Homosexuality is Un-African" arguments of people like Robert Mugabe, and paving the way for the ANC's understanding of gay equality as a human rights issue.

There is a Simon Nkoli Street in Amsterdam; a Simon Nkoli Day in San Francisco. He has an international name-recognition few other South Africans share. He opened the first Gay Games in New York and was made a freeman of that city by mayor David Dinkins; in 1996 he was given the prestigious Stonewall Award in the Royal Albert Hall in London.

The best place to see Nkoli's legacy is in the powerful, vibrant black gay subculture that exists in the townships and cities of the Reef. These young men and women are the Nkoli Generation; they saw articles about him in the press, they flocked to him. He made something of a political home for them, giving them an ideology that fused the freedom struggle with a sense of how they might find redemption from their own personal traumas, their families' rejection, through gay community and activism.

I often watched Nkoli working the townships - at safer sex workshops, at funerals, at parties. I will never forget him at the funeral of Linda Ngcobo, a comrade who also died from AIDS, calling a conservative Soweto congregation to arms: despite the controversy (and even blasphemy) of his words, he managed to get the whole hall going in a call and response about gay freedom. This was because he respected the community as much as he challenged it.

He had a mischievous smile - "all teeth and eyes", as his partner Roderick Sharp remembers - that could turn even the most glowering old auntie (not to mention a macho treason trialist) into a fan. Whatever flamboyance he manifested - he was, for a while, a dedicated Leather Queen - he was, at heart, a serious-minded man who believed passionately in the power of ordinary people.

But perhaps the very thing that made Nkoli so charismatic a figure, his ability to personalise the struggle, made him unable to harness the immense energy he generated. As an organisational activist he often proved fractious and he overidentified with his cause; it was left to others to build the gay and lesbian movement to its present strength.

Nonetheless, there are few South Africans who approached activism as creatively as Nkoli did. He made the connections between his oppression as a black South African and as a gay man, and, later, as a person infected with HIV.

He had been infected with HIV for around 12 years, and had been seriously ill, on and off, for the past four. Perhaps surprisingly, he struggled immensely with going public about his HIV status, and appeared to have found it far more difficult than coming out of the closet. Once he decided to be public about it, however, he gave it the full throttle he is known for.

One of his earliest childhood memories was having to hide his parents, illegal squatters, in an old wooden wardrobe during a pass raid.

"In so many ways," he wrote in a memoir published in Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, "the closet I have come out of is similar to the wardrobe my relieved parents stepped out of when I unlocked them after the police left.

"If you are black in South Africa, the inhuman laws of apartheid closet you. If you are gay in South Africa, the homophobic customs and laws of this society closet you. If you are black and gay in South Africa, well, then it really is all the same closet, the same wardrobe. Inside is darkness and oppression. Outside is freedom. It is as simple as that."

Add to those closets the darkness of those - gay and straight, male and female - imprisoned in the silence of HIV stigma. Through his life and in his death, Nkoli has shone a little light for all of them.
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