Simon Tseko Nkoli (1957 - 1998)

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AIDS Update 2001: An Annual Overview of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome by Gerald J., Ph.D. Stine

This comprehensive, authoritative, accurate, and up-to-date book on HIV/AIDS presents the entire 17-year chronology of the AIDS pandemic in a reasonable, logical, and scientific manner that interweaves biological, clinical, social, and legal discoveries in a uniquely readable presentation. AIDS in Africa; AIDS Industry in America; recent info on the possibility of an HIV vaccine; the discovery and naming of the illness; presents various opportunistic diseases and forms of cancer associated with HIV disease and AIDS; offers pre- and post-test counseling procedures and communication problems between counselor and client; offers insight to the many social ramifications of having HIV disease or AIDS, human attitudes and behaviors. Covers the molecular aspects of disease transmission, as well as the cultural aspects that affect the spread of HIV/AIDS. For anyone researching the coverage of AIDS, Virology, Immunology, Endocrinology, and Human Sexuality. This authoritative chronology can be a useful source of information to speakers around the world, or as a manual for action by anyone.

Fighting for lesbian and gay rights in South Africa

By Norm Dixon

Excerpt:

“In South Africa all issues are linked together. Homophobia is part of discrimination. We can not deal with it in isolation. We are trying to link our struggle with the struggle of the majority of the people against apartheid and racism”, Tseko Simon Nkoli explained in an interview with Green Left Weekly.

Nkoli is the coordinator of the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of Witwatersrand (GLOW) and works for the Township AIDS Project as an AIDS educator. He is also a member of the African National Congress.

“There are lots of lesbians and gay people in South Africa, especially in the big cities. Johannesburg happens to be called `the gay city' because lots of gay people move there from the other cities and from the countryside because it's quite liberal about homosexuality.”

But “homosexuality is still a taboo” in South Africa. “People are still being suppressed”, Nkoli points out. Lesbian and gay people “don't get jobs. [If] people `come out' at work, they get fired. At our last Gay Pride March, we had 27 people who were expelled from jobs because they had been seen on the march or had appeared on television or in the newspapers.”

South African law does not mention homosexuality directly. Gay men are arrested under laws which outlaw “sodomy”. “Last year 380 people were charged ... and 90% of them were black people.”

While there are larger gay and lesbian groups that organise social and sports events, GLOW is the biggest political gay and lesbian organisation in Johannesburg. “Our main work is to mobilise the lesbian and gay community to accept themselves, to come out within their own organisations, and to take up other issues, not only gay issues.”

GLOW's membership is 80% black. But this majority has been passive when it comes to campaigning for gay and lesbian rights within the broader political movement. “We have only a few black people, mostly lesbians, who are very active in the ANC, the ANC Women's League and youth groups. The black gay men, however, do lots of work in AIDS education.”

After GLOW's formation in 1989, Nkoli said, “we

discussed coming out within our organisations, because a lot of our people were members of the ANC and the Youth Congresses, but they were not known to be gay ... We managed to get some ANC activists, mainly the white gay men and women, to come out openly within the ANC...”

A leading light of gay and AIDS activism in South Africa

Excerpt:

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...

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