People became more interested in sex in the 19th century – sex, that is to say, as a subject for research, medical investigation and public debate. In particular there was an increasing focus on ‘unnatural’ sex: behaviour that from the 1870s would be called ‘homosexuality’. Scientists and social scientists – Ambroise Tardieu, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Paolo Mantegazza and Sigmund Freud among them – tried to discover the cause of homosexuality, its signs and symptoms and, for some, its ‘cure’. Others, such as Heinrich Hössli, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, took a more legal, historical and philosophical approach, defending the same-sex desires that they shared.
Among these men Magnus Hirschfeld is pre-eminent. He combined scholarship with political activism, earning an international reputation and suffering several homophobic attacks. Hirschfeld was born into a non-practising Jewish family in Pomerania, on the Baltic Sea. After a happy childhood, he led a peripatetic student life – like many young Germans at the time – attending courses in Breslau, Strasbourg and Munich before taking a degree in medicine in Berlin, in 1892. In 1896 he set up as a doctor in the German capital.
The same year, under a pen name, Hirschfeld published a 35-page pamphlet called Sappho und Sokrates, the first of his many writings on the theme of homosexuality. In 1897, along with a publisher, a railway official, a philologist, a barrister and an Austrian aristocrat, he set up the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee – the single most important organization in the homosexual emancipation movement at the time, and for half a century afterwards. The committee’s specific goal was the repeal of Paragraph 175 of the German legal code, which criminalized homosexual activity. Its strategy was public education, lobbying and petitions to the Reichstag. Despite these enormous efforts, the campaign proved unsuccessful, and it was not until 1994 that the newly unified Germany repealed the original Paragraph 175. That delay should not obscure the pioneering work done by Hirschfeld’s committee.
Hirschfeld continued to contribute to the field of sexology. In 1899 he founded and edited the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (‘Yearbook on Sexually Intermediate Subjects’), which treated a wide range of topics related to sexuality – particularly non-conformist sexuality – including history, ethnography, medicine, law and culture. These yearbooks represented the first concerted effort to study homosexuality in all its variations.
In 1919 Hirschfeld established the Institute for Sexual Research in an elegant mansion in central Berlin, which also housed his office (and apartment), consulting rooms and a lecture hall. In hundreds of talks each year, speakers presented the latest research on sexuality, and thousands came to seek treatment for sexual problems or for reassurance about their sexual feelings. Four years later, Hirschfeld set up the World League for Sexual Reform with two fellow physicians, the British sexologist Havelock Ellis and Norman Haire, an Australian working in London. At international conferences in London, Copenhagen, Vienna and Brno, delegates from around the world discussed the need for law reform on the basis of their scientific studies of contraception, abortion, homosexuality and other areas.
Hirschfeld published his research in countless articles and lengthy books. His hypothesis explaining homosexuality was that human beings at embryo stage are of indistinct sexual orientation; at the point of endocrine development, however, some become a ‘third sex’, meaning that in later life they feel desires not for the opposite sex, but for their own. This theory, although shared by many, aroused the hostility of other sexual researchers.
One group who had initially supported his initiatives, led by Benedict Friedländer and Adolf Brand, broke away in 1903 to found a journal that focused on conceptions of a virile intergenerational homosexuality, based on the Greek model. Such rivalries served only to stoke Hirschfeld’s energies: he published a thousand-page book on homosexuality, a three-volume work on sexual pathology, and a four-volume one on post-First World War mores, as well as the first major study of transvestism. For good measure, he also appeared in one of the first films about homosexuality, Anders als die Andern (‘Different from the Others’), which had a short run in 1919 and 1920 before it was banned by the government.
Hirschfeld spread his ideas on sexual reform by crisscrossing Europe to attend meetings, give lectures and make contacts. In 1930 he embarked on a 500-day journey around the world. The American sector, in which he gave thirty-six lectures in fourteen weeks, proved an enormous success, and he garnered acclaim also in Japan, China, India and Egypt, consecrating his position as the world’s premier sexologist. The Asian journey was particularly significant: as he continued with his punishing schedule of lectures, he also came into contact with the continent’s sexual cultures. The trip sharpened his political ideas, too, encouraging his support for Indian independence and women’s emancipation, and his suspicion about Zionism.
As well as provoking the rivalry of fellow scholars and colleagues, and a certain amount of criticism for his methods – giving lectures illustrated by real patients, lending his name to a dubious patented aphrodisiac, engaging unashamedly in self-promotion – Hirschfeld also attracted the hatred of the German right wing. Thugs appeared at his lectures to heckle, and in one attack in Munich, in October 1920, they threw stones and spat on him; he was knocked unconscious and seriously hurt. As the Nazis gained in influence, Hirschfeld’s institute became a symbol of all that was decadent in Weimar Germany. His Jewish background and support for the socialist party made his situation still worse. When he landed back in Europe after his world tour, in 1932, associates warned that it would be unsafe to return to Germany. He took refuge in Paris; while there, he learnt from a cinema newsreel that, shortly after Hitler had gained power, the Nazis had pillaged his institute and burned most of its 20,000 books. His German citizenship revoked, Hirschfeld was still living in exile when he died, in Nice, in May 1935.
Although discreet, Hirschfeld was homosexual. His long-term partner was Karl Giese, whom he met around 1919, when Giese was in his early twenties and Hirschfeld over fifty. As Hirschfeld’s most trusted collaborator, Giese became the archivist of the institute, where he also lodged. But during his world tour Hirschfeld met another young man, a Hong Kong Chinese living in Shanghai. They immediately became intimate, and Li Shiu Tong accompanied Hirschfeld on the remainder of his tour and followed him to Europe. Giese and Li rushed to Nice (both were training as doctors elsewhere) when they heard of Hirschfeld’s death, and Giese delivered the eulogy at his funeral. Hirschfeld’s will stated that his possessions were to be divided between the two men. Giese never benefited from his inheritance, committing suicide in Brno in 1938 after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. Li returned to Hong Kong in 1958, before emigrating to Vancouver, where he died at the age of 83.
Hirschfeld’s influence was enormous. As well as providing a focal point for sexological research, his institute was one of the centres of gay life in inter-war Berlin. His work paved the way for the famous Kinsey Institute, established in Indiana in 1947; even if his theories about homosexuality were later discredited, Hirschfeld’s use of interviews and surveys established a methodology for later researchers. His agitation for law reform was taken up elsewhere, and gay movements might well have borrowed his declaration ‘Not you, not nature, but the law is wrong’ as a slogan. His achievements in the fields of research and activism are commemorated by the Magnus Hirschfeld Society, and by a plaque on the site of his institute in Berlin.
The years after the Second World War saw the foundation of homosexual emancipation movements in several countries: COC in the Netherlands in 1945; the Danish F-1948 three years later; the Mattachine Society in the United States in 1950; and Arcadie in France in 1954. These groups provided spaces where gay men and lesbians could socialize, offered education about homosexuality and promoted changes in discriminatory laws. Most argued for the integration of homosexuals into society, and often were at pains to present gay men and women as upstanding citizens and respectable members of the community – just like heterosexuals, except for their erotic preferences.
The associations included women members but were largely dominated by men. One of the first groups aimed specifically at lesbians was set up by Del Martin, her partner, Phyllis Lyon, and six other women in San Francisco in 1955. The Daughters of Bilitis, as it soon became known, was named after a lesbian-themed poem published in 1894 by Pierre Louÿs, which purported to be the work of a (fictional) contemporary of Sappho. Martin and the others chose the obscure name in order to keep the organization’s aims a secret.
Martin and Lyon had met in 1949, when they were both working on the same trade journal in Seattle, and they had been lovers since 1952. Dorothy Louise Taliaferro Martin was born in San Francisco and studied journalism at San Francisco State College and the University of California at Berkeley, where Lyon, who was originally from Oklahoma, had also been a student. In a joint interview with the American National Public Radio in 1992 – which acknowledged the two women as the ‘mothers of the gay rights movement’ – Martin said that she became aware of her feelings for women when she was 10 or 12 years old. As a young woman she married, thinking that perhaps her proclivities had been a passing phase, but the marriage came to an end when she fell in love with the woman next door. (She retained her husband’s name, however.) When Martin and Lyon met in Seattle, neither had any real idea of what ‘lesbian’ meant in terms of a social identity. As she explained to her interviewer, at that time there were no role models for lesbians or lesbian couples: most of the books they found, discouragingly, portrayed lesbians as sick, and only in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness did she find some comfort. When Martin announced to Lyon, at a meal in the Seattle press club, that she was a lesbian, even Lyon appeared somewhat bewildered.
By 1955 the two women were living together. They recalled how, to a degree, they began to conform to the butch–femme stereotypes common at the time: Lyon jokingly reminisced that Martin was already butch, so ‘I didn’t have much of an option,’ to which Martin fondly replied that she was a ‘sissy butch’. More seriously, alluding to the need to create an identity and a life in the 1950s, Martin declared: ‘We’ve had to invent our lives as we go along.’
For its first year the Daughters of Bilitis remained a very small circle of acquaintances but, after Martin and Lyon began organizing public forums, taking out advertisements and publishing a newsletter, it grew. Its first national convention, in 1960, attracted two hundred participants. Chapters were formed around the United States and as far away as Australia. Lyon and Martin, in turn, edited the Daughters of Bilitis magazine, called The Ladder, which was sent to a confidential list of subscribers who paid one dollar a year. Among the articles it contained were pieces on the civil rights of lesbians, at a time when police were regularly raiding bars frequented by homosexuals. Martin and Lyon did feel that women’s concerns were somewhat different from those of men: rather than worrying about criminal charges resulting from anti-sodomy legislation, lesbians focused more on rights relating to their children, keeping their households together, and general discrimination against women in the workplace and in public life. In the United States of the 1950s – the time of the Cold War, Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunts against subversives and the conformism of the Eisenhower presidency – such concerns as Martin and Lyon raised were new and challenging.
By the late 1960s the numbers in the Daughters of Bilitis had declined: more radical groups and ideas (including lesbian separatism) beckoned, and the women’s movement, exemplified by the National Organization of Women, gained ground. That network was often uncomfortable with lesbian issues, and with lesbians themselves, however: it was only after a struggle that Martin was elected as the first openly lesbian on NOW’s board of directors.
In 1970 the Daughters of Bilitis disbanded; The Ladder, which had been run independently since the break-up, ceased publication two years later. Nonetheless, Martin and Lyon continued to be active in a variety of organizations: the Council on Religion and Homosexuality; the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club; the American Civil Liberties Union; and, late in life, Old Lesbians Organizing for Change. Both women were delegates to a White House conference on ageing held in 1995.
Despite their commitment to political activism, Lyon found the time to complete a doctorate in education and Martin took a Doctor of Arts degree from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. In 1972 Martin and Lyon published Lesbian/Woman, followed the next year by a short guide to Lesbian Love and Liberation. In 1976 Martin published one of the first books on domestic violence, Battered Lives.
In 2004, when San Francisco made gay marriage legal, Martin and Lyon wed. Within a few months, however, the California supreme court voided all of the gay marriages. Four years later, when gay unions were again allowed in California, the mayor of San Francisco suggested that theirs should be the first ceremony he performed. Martin died after a fall just over two months later, with Lyon at her bedside. They had been together for fifty-five years. The mayor ordered flags to be flown at half-mast in her honour, and Lyon was quoted in the New York Times as saying, ‘I am devastated, but I take some solace in knowing we were able to enjoy the ultimate rite of love and commitment before she passed.’
Don Bachardy, Portrait of Del Martin, undated (Reproduced by permission of Don Bachardy)
In Lesbian Love and Liberation, Martin and Lyon wrote: ‘Happiness is personal. Some women find it with other women. It’s really as simple as that.’ Happiness as a lesbian came from ‘knowing it, accepting it, and finding a compatible and loving woman, or women, who share your same values’. The words provide a good summation of their views on life.
When Harvey Milk moved to San Francisco in 1972, it was the most liberal and sexually vibrant city in the United States. It had a long frontier tradition of welcoming migrants from all walks of life: miners who arrived during the gold rushes; Chinese, Irish and Italian settlers; Beat Generation poets and bohemians. More recently, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district had been the home of hippie culture in the 1960s; and the university in Berkeley, across the bay, was a rallying point for student demonstrations, the anti-war movement and the activities of the New Left. San Francisco was also the centre for a gay community that had become increasingly public over previous years. Castro Street was its high street, and acted as a mecca for visitors and refugees from small-town America and further afield. The place, and its atmosphere, would be memorably chronicled in Armistead Maupin’s best-selling Tales of the City.
Milk’s life was a very American story. He was born in the New York suburb of Long Island, into a middle-class family of Lithuanian Jewish migrants who had done well. Having taken a degree in mathematics at Albany State College in 1951, he entered the armed forces during the Korean War, serving aboard a submarine and at a naval base in San Diego, California, and eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant. After demobilization, he became a teacher at a secondary school.
In 1956 Milk began an affair with a man he had met at the beach. They moved, briefly, to Dallas, but returned to New York, where Milk found employment first with an insurance firm and then with a Wall Street investment company. After six years the relationship ended, and Milk began another, this time with a man who played an active part in the homophile Mattachine Society. More lovers, changes of job and relocations followed (in matters of sex and work, Milk was something of a drifter), but at the beginning of the 1970s he and his current partner, Scott Smith, ended up in San Francisco.
In good entrepreneurial American fashion, Milk opened a camera shop in Castro Street. He was becoming increasingly aware of politics, on both a local and a national level, from the arrests of gay men in his home city to the Watergate Scandal unfolding in Washington. In 1973 he decided to stand for election as a city supervisor. Despite Milk’s charisma, powerful rhetoric and support for policies that proved popular in the Castro – such as the decriminalization of homosexual acts and the legalization of cannabis – his bid was unsuccessful. Working at grass-roots level, Milk had nevertheless begun to build a coalition of gays, unionists, small business people, the retired, and others who felt disenfranchised by San Francisco’s political elite and their electoral machines. After supporting the winning candidate, the Democrat George Moscone, in the 1976 mayoral elections, Milk was appointed to a position on a city advisory body – a first for an openly gay man.
The same year, Milk tried to gain election to the California State Assembly but failed by a small margin. His homosexuality no doubt contributed to his defeat, at a time when gay rights were becoming an increasingly volatile issue in American politics. In a series of anti-gay campaigns, John Briggs introduced a legislative act to ban gays from teaching positions in California schools, and Anita Bryant, a Christian fundamentalist (and a star of television adverts for orange juice), led national calls for the defence of traditional ‘family values’.
Milk actively combated both, but also turned his attentions back to San Francisco. His public profile, the growing gay population of the Castro Street neighbourhood, and recent voting reform that saw supervisors elected by particular wards rather than on a city-wide basis all played roles in Milk’s election to the board of supervisors in 1977. He was now one of the few openly gay people to hold public office in the United States, and his stance on particular issues made him, in a very conservative country, a radical. Supporters hailed his election as the successful mobilization of a local community and as a great victory for progressive politics and gay emancipation.
In his speeches Milk called for gay men and women to ‘come out’ and to defend their human rights. Likening the gay struggle to the civil rights movement in America, he enjoined gays not to agree docilely to sit at the back of the bus. ‘Gay people, we will not win their [sic] rights by staying quietly in our closet,’ he told one audience: ‘We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions!’ While Briggs and Bryant implied that gays were child molesters, Milk warned about the dangers that homophobic campaigns posed for all minority groups, lambasting the time and money spent on ‘morals’ issues at the expense of other pressing concerns. But his vision encompassed more than just gay rights. He talked about the need to tackle poverty, the lack of education, transportation problems, the plight of the aged, and other concerns relevant to San Francisco. As well as proposing a by-law banning discrimination against gays and lesbians in San Francisco (a measure the council passed overwhelmingly, with just one supervisor, Dan White, voting against it) and campaigning against homophobia across the country, Milk was also responsible for a ‘pooper-scooper’ ordinance requiring San Franciscans to clean up after their dogs. The city, he promised, could be a beacon in America: ‘a place for the individual and individual rights’, a metropolis where ‘we sit on the front stoop and talk to our neighbors once again, enjoying the type of summer day where the smell of garlic travels slightly faster than the speed of sound’.
Milk’s personal life was sometimes difficult, and lovers and friends occasionally tired of his unrelenting political activity. After Milk’s election his young lover, Jack Lira, who had been suffering from depression, hanged himself. But Milk basked in his new role and in the adulation of the supporters whose efforts he had galvanized.
With his outspoken political views, Milk had made many public enemies; he even managed to ruffle the feathers of more conservative gays and lesbians. Not surprisingly, he was regarded as a major enemy – indeed, as little less than evil – by those on the right. Dan White, one of his colleagues on the city council, also frequently quarrelled with Milk, disapproving of many of his views. In November 1978 White resigned from his post on the pretext that his salary was insufficient. Just over two weeks later, he burst into City Hall and shot and killed Moscone and Milk.
The assassination turned Milk into a martyr. Crowds, angry and grieving, streamed into the streets of San Francisco to pay tribute to the murdered leaders. Milk’s reputation grew, especially following the publication of Randy Shilts’ biography of the ‘mayor of Castro Street’, and thirty years after his death a film was made of his life story. In 2009 Barack Obama posthumously awarded him the highest civilian honour in the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Sexual liberation was one of the themes that characterized the new social movements exploding on the streets of Paris in May 1968. Guy Hocquenghem, who was a student at the time, eagerly participated in the demonstrations, sit-ins and public debates. Three years later, he joined the newly founded and dramatically named Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action (FHAR) and, through his publications, television appearances and political activism, the handsome and articulate Hocquenghem became perhaps the best-known gay man of his generation in France.
Hocquenghem was an intellectual in the French style. A child of the post-war baby boom, he came from a prosperous middle-class background and studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, which enrolled only three dozen students a year. He flirted with Communism – even though his homosexuality made him unwelcome within the staid French Communist Party – and with Trotskyism and Maoism. During the 1970s Hocquenghem began to appropriate many of the fashionable ideas of the day, such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘anti-Oedipal’ psychology, and to apply them to an analysis of sexual desire. During this period he taught philosophy at the University of Vincennes, wrote for the newspaper Libération, set up by Jean-Paul Sartre, and in 1979 collaborated with the director Lionel Soukaz on an amateurish documentary film about homosexuality, called Race d’Ep! He published extensively and in a variety of genres, producing philosophical–sociological treatises, travelogues and novels. His public comments were often confrontational: his first writings on AIDS denied the severity of the disease, for instance, and he infamously said that, even if some homosexuals did succumb to the illness, it meant that not every man would die quietly and boringly as an old man in bed. Such views made him a media celebrity and an enfant terrible of the gay intelligentsia.
Hocquenghem and the FHAR represented a revolutionary stage in the history of French homosexual activism. The FHAR’s manifesto was intentionally inflammatory:
Down with the moneyed society of the hetero-cops!
Down with sexuality reduced to the procreating family!
With active–passive roles!
Let’s stop hiding in the shadows!
We want self-defence groups who will use force to oppose the sexual racism of the hetero-cops.
We want a homosexual front that will have as its mission to mount an assault on and destroy fascist sexual normality.
Hocquenghem’s writings of the early 1970s tried to provide an intellectual basis for such slogans and for the rebellious campaign that they accompanied. He argued that homosexuality is but one part of a natural polymorphous desire – a desire that is stifled by social norms, the demands of procreation, and fears surrounding sexuality, especially taboos related to the eroticism of the anus. Society is marked by an ‘anti-homosexual paranoia’ and, historically, by ‘the constitution of homosexuality as a separate category going along with its repression’. For Hocquenghem, the expression of homosexual desire is in itself revolutionary, since it challenges the whole canon of social norms and can be the point of departure for a new personal and social experience of sexuality in general. He thus sees protean sexual experiences – a happy promiscuity – not only as a right, but also as emancipation on various levels. Through an open and celebratory sexual life, as he wrote in Le Désir homosexuel (‘Homosexual Desire’; 1972), a gay man rejects society’s demonization of sodomy and its fixation on the anal taboo. Engaging in wild sex helps break down the boundaries of sexual normativity. As he writes at the book’s outset, ‘The problem is not so much homosexual desire as the fear of homosexuality’, so both the individual and society must stop fearing the pédés. Homosexual desire – only one manifestation, after all, of the multiple sexual desires that any person is capable of feeling – must be released by an assault on masculinist and patriarchal codes entrenched in capitalist society. In setting out such views, Hocquenghem’s theoretical work constituted both a deconstruction of society’s concept of homosexuality and a manifesto for action in the widest sense.
Hocquenghem’s positions often shocked even other gay commentators, although critics generally appreciated his fictional writing, which displays a great breadth of knowledge, skill and interests. His novel L’Amour en relief (‘Love in Relief’; 1982) tells the story of a blind Arab boy and his amatory adventures in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. The subject of Les Voyages et aventures extraordinaires du frère Angelo (‘The Voyages and Extraordinary Adventures of Brother Angelo’; 1988) is an Italian Renaissance friar, who ends up evangelizing to Indians in North America. In Eve (1987), the hero, Adam, is the son of a lesbian who was implanted with an ovule created by Nazi eugenicists; ranging across Europe, South America, the Caribbean and Africa, the plot encompasses imprisonment, murders, AIDS, homosexual and heterosexual couplings, incest, and a series of revelations about the origins of Adam and Eve, his relative and sometime lover. Hocquenghem’s other works are no less provocative. Co-ire, album systématique de l’enfance (‘Co-anger: Systematic Album of Childhood’; 1976), for example, looks at the construction of childhood sexuality, while Le Gay voyage (1980) recounts the author’s sexual peregrinations around the world. In two other works, he condemned the racism he discerned at the heart of French society and castigated those who abandoned the demands and hopes of 1968 in favour of comfortable bourgeois security.
Hocquenghem’s life and writing belong to a radical phase in the history of homosexuality. He and his fellow activists in the FHAR laid claim to being sexual, political and social revolutionaries, snubbing their noses at respectability, flaunting their sexuality and sexual conquests, and firing shots at established society. Their sentiments were shared by militant liberationists elsewhere who drew a direct line between the personal and the political; they saw (to quote the title of one American essay) ‘cock-sucking as an act of revolution’.
The moment did not last. Revolution did not occur, and the militant groups such as the FHAR fragmented in doctrinal and personal disputes. In countries like France, rather than being marginalized, homosexuals were increasingly absorbed into the mainstream. Moreover, the arrival of AIDS changed the real and theoretical situations that most homosexuals confronted. Nonetheless, Hocquenghem’s committed activism, his tonic willingness to challenge taboos, and his intellectual and literary approach to questions surrounding homosexuality made him one of the most important figures of the gay world in the 1970s and 1980s. His death from AIDS also linked him to the phenomenon that would dominate the next stage in the history of homosexuality.
Some African politicians have claimed that homosexuality is an import, brought in by Westerners, and that same-sex sexual encounters did not take place before the colonial era. Anthropologists, however, have shown that homosexual behaviour of many different types – ‘boy-wives’, intergenerational sexual relations, situational homosexuality in mining camps, and so on – has a long history in Africa, though the subject remains taboo.
One notable African who was publicly active in an emergent gay movement was Simon Tseko Nkoli. He was born in Soweto, a black township in South Africa; his stepfather worked as a chef, and his mother as a domestic worker and shop assistant. Nkoli became aware of politics at an early age, once hiding his parents (who were considered illegal squatters) from police. He came out to them in his late teens and had his first homosexual affair, with a white man. His mother reacted badly and sent him to traditional African healers – some of whom decided that he had been bewitched and prescribed numerous cures – and a Christian pastor told him he was damned. He was also sent to see a psychologist, a man who happened to be gay himself. He told Nkoli and his partner that they were normal and suggested that they move in together, opening a bottle of champagne for all to share. Nkoli’s mother eventually changed her attitude, while his stepfather had taken Nkoli’s sexuality in his stride from the first.
Nkoli became involved in anti-apartheid politics as a student, joining the Congress of South African Students (though he almost lost his position as the Transvaal regional secretary when he came out) and the United Democratic Front. He also became involved in the largely white Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), which was established in 1982; disappointed with its lack of engagement with apartheid, however, he formed the Saturday Group, the first black gay organization in the country.
For Nkoli, the anti-apartheid and gay movements were both part of a quest for emancipation: as far as he was concerned, ‘my baptism in the struggles of the township helped me understand the need for a militant gay rights movement’. Before the arrival of apartheid reform, he had written: ‘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.’
Having already been detained for political activism in 1976, Nkoli was arrested again for his anti-apartheid protests in 1984 – a crime for which he faced the death penalty. He was kept in detention for sixteen months and finally arraigned before the court in 1986 to take part in the Delmas Treason Trial. Interrogators brought up the fact that he was a ‘moffie’ (a homosexual), torturing him and threatening him with rape. When another accused was found to be having an affair with a fellow prisoner, Nkoli came out to his cellmates, saying, ‘I seem to have been coming out of closets all the time.’ Several of them, outraged, demanded a separate trial (they were unsuccessful), but others in the prison were more encouraging. In the outside world Nkoli’s case prompted expressions of support and solidarity from around the world.
Nkoli was freed in 1988 and returned to anti-apartheid activism. He also recognized new challenges in the fight for gay rights, founding the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (GLOW) and helping to set up the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality. Having learned, and publicly disclosed, that he was HIV-positive, he established the AIDS Township Project and several men’s health initiatives.
The leaders of the African National Congress (ANC), of which Nkoli was a member, were not initially supportive of gay rights, but Nkoli’s actions played a major part in encouraging them to change their stance. Thabo Mbeki, the future president of South Africa, understood the need for gay rights to be recognized, stating that ‘the ANC is very firmly committed to removing all forms of discrimination and oppression in a liberated South Africa. That commitment must surely extend to the protection of gay rights.’ Marc Epprecht, an expert on sexuality in Africa, notes that the 1991 trial of Winnie Mandela for assault and kidnapping – in which she claimed she had been trying to save black youths from white homosexuals – nevertheless showed that the issue of homosexuality remained controversial.
Nkoli was warmly received by Nelson Mandela in 1994, and the same year the ANC manifesto included a commitment to include sexual orientation within the country’s new anti-discrimination legislation. The Bill of Rights of the South African Constitution, finally adopted in 1996, states: ‘The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.’ South Africa was thus the first country in the world to outlaw anti-gay discrimination constitutionally. The last anti-homosexual laws were removed from the statute book in 1998, the year of Nkoli’s death. In 2006 the South African parliament legalized full gay marriage.
Simon Nkoli, c. 1990 (Gordon Rainsford/Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA), Johannesburg)
Among the many memorials to Nkoli are the streets in Johannesburg and Amsterdam that bear his name, and a documentary film about his life and political activism. Called Simon & I (2002), it was directed by Beverly Ditsie, a fellow founding members of GLOW.
Gay activism of the sort Nkoli pioneered is not widespread in Africa; and even in South Africa not all communities are welcoming to openly gay and lesbian people. The president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has characterized homosexuals as ‘worse than dogs and pigs’, and a former president of Namibia, Sam Nujoma, publicly declared that ‘homosexuals must be condemned and rejected in our society’. Homosexual acts are a criminal offence in well over twenty countries in Africa. More than 22 million Africans, most of them heterosexual, are HIV-positive; they frequently lack treatment because of the cost of supplying medication, the absence of government initiatives, and the taboos that still attach to public discussion of sexual activities.