Black, Queer, and Precarious Visibilities: Simon Nkoli's Activist Image in South Africa's Exit Newspaper

We must be visible if we are going to be liberated.

—Simon Nkoli

In November 2015, Exit, South Africa's longest running monthly LGBT newspaper, published its 300th issue. As critic and activist Donna Smith asserts, in the context of pervasive uncertain and inconsistent publication of lesbian and gay print media in South Africa, founded in 1985, and still available in clubs and bookstores throughout the country, Exit has uniquely stood the test of time (189). Not surprisingly, Exit editors marked the milestone with a celebratory and confident tone. The issue's cover photo featuring a smiling, young, muscular, seemingly able-bodied white man, standing poolside with a dainty glass of beer raised outlines the aesthetic, embodied, and affective contours of Exit's brand of gay triumphalism. Along with the luxury, pleasure, and leisure harkened by the cover image, in an essay published in Exit's November print edition and subsequently posted on the newspaper's Facebook page, cultural critic, literary scholar, and contributing writer for the periodical, Tim Trengove-Jones, notes that for Exit "to survive in South Africa for 300 editions is close to miraculous" (8). In his guest column entitled "Long Life to Exit" Trengove-Jones goes on to offer a brief history contextualizing the great achievement of Exit's continued run in the face of apartheid-era Christian nationalism, the AIDS crisis, and Pride politics, upheavals, and fractures. As he charts the importance of Exit as "not a voice. THE voice" of the LGBT community in South Africa, Trengove-Jones highlights key moments in Exit's thirty-three-year trajectory. He asserts that Exit "was there" when "Pride really mattered," when debates regarding performance artist Steve Cohen's now infamous antics emerged, when (openly gay and HIV-positive) Justice Edwin Cameron defended Cohen's right to free speech, when the now defunct "Out in Africa" film festival was launched, when LGBT rights were constitutionalized, when "a group of disaffected lesbians lay down in Jan Smuts Avenue in protest against what they believed was the depoliticization of Pride," and when the queer community mourned the passing of well-known drag performer and Exit contributor Dainti Delischia (8). In the making of his tightly abbreviated queer timeline, Trengove-Jones pinpoints key moments of victory, visibility, and contestation in South Africa's LGBT recent history. While much and many must be left out of such a brief and largely informal construction, the glaring absence of how race, racism, and racialized queer subjects have shaped LGBT politics in South Africa ironically affirms long-standing critiques of Exit as white supremacist and white masculinist centric. In choosing to construct a memory project in which three white South Africans—Steve Cohen, Justice Cameron, and Dainti Delischia (Charles Wiley)—uniquely serve as central figures in their country's LGBT history, Trengove-Jones misses an opportunity to center the names and flag the stories of important Black and of color queer activists and figures such as Bev Ditsie, Zackie Achmat, Phumi Mthethwa, Wendy Isaack, Caster Semenya, and Simon Nkoli. In Trengove-Jones's commentary, South Africa's Black queer notables are at best coded and minoritized as disaffected bodies or at worst relegated to the impermeable background of LGBT history. As a central force behind the first Pride march in South Africa, the politicizing of AIDS treatment for gay men, and the successful campaign to include legal protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation in South Africa's constitution, it remains that Simon Nkoli haunts the silences and blank spaces of Exit's most recent (re)fashioning of LGBT history and memory. Yet Nkoli was, and is, more than a specter to the white-centered representational practices systematized in Exit. Simon Nkoli was an early, consistent, yet dynamic figure in the newspaper, even after his death in 1998; he was memorialized three times in the pages of Exit that following year. As such, failure to make explicit mention of his contributions, if not his controversies, in celebrating the periodical's history, however passingly, is especially egregious. Indeed Nkoli was there in...