‘Now I Am Not Afraid’: Simon Nkoli, Queer Utopias and Transnational Solidarity

Abstract

This article employs the epistolary exchanges between Simon Nkoli, a South African gay rights and anti-apartheid activist undergoing trial in Delmas, South Africa in the late 1980s, and Andrew Hansen, a gay man from Chicago living with AIDS, to demonstrate how the radical empathy built between both men suggests the possibility of queer utopia. Simon Nkoli came out as gay during the four-year long Delmas Treason Trial and thus resisted the notion that homosexuality was not political. His visibility pushed the African National Congress to consider the role that gay rights would have in a democratic South Africa. While under trial, Nkoli discovered he was HIV-positive. After being acquitted, Nkoli came out publicly as being HIV-positive, becoming one of the first black South African men to do so. I employ Jose Esteban Muñoz’s framework of queer utopia put forth in his Cruising Utopia (2009) to read the transnational exchanges between Hansen and Nkoli, tracing the way that Nkoli employs empathy to build bonds that resist the social stigma of HIV/AIDS. Seen through the lens of Nkoli’s work as a tenants’ rights, anti-apartheid and gay rights activist, this essay challenges depictions of Nkoli as predominantly a ‘gay martyr’ to present a view of his affective lives. I engage with the intimate modes of resistance to stigma made clear by Nkoli’s letters and personal interviews.