THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER 

Review by Rupert Smith

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Among the human dross that passes for celebrity in 2002 it’s refreshing to be reminded of some really remarkable stories, and it’s greatly to BBC4’s credit that they picked out Simon & I to kick off a short Storyville season dealing with HIV and AIDS. “Simon” was Simon Nkoli, the sine qua non of the South African gay movement, an anti-apartheid campaigner who came out to his fellow prisoners when they were jailed without trial for three years in the late 80s. “I” was Bev Ditsie, Nkoli‚s right-hand woman, protégée and pupil, who both survived and surpassed her mentor in the struggle for gay rights in South Africa.

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Theirs was a volatile friendship, recalled in snatches of amateur video and one final encounter filmed a week before Nkoli‚s death from AIDS-related illness in 1998. Nkoli, by this time, was self-obsessed, narcissistic, interested only in remembering his triumphs in the struggle, despite Ditsie’s occasional interjections (“Look! Simon, Look! That’s me) as they watched home videos together. It may have been a result of his illness, but one got the impression that his was merely an exaggeration of Nkoli’s essential self. How else would he have faced up to the macho horrors of the anti-apartheid movement or the hellfire rubbish of the religious right?

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Ditsie struggled with the added burden of being a woman in a society where rape seems to be seen as the perfect end to a Saturday night out. After the first South African Gay Pride march was reported on TV in 1980, Ditsie’s Soweto home was surrounded by a gang of 20 irate men who wanted to take her out and teach her a lesson; if she wouldn’t come, they’d take her grandmother.

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Despite the setbacks, these were inspiring times, never more so than when Nelson Mandela became the first world leader to announce a constitution that specifically offered legal protection to gay people. After that, their paths diverged. Nkoli focused on HIV issues, while Ditsie stood in the firing line as South Africa’s most visible lesbian. She even went on a reality TV show, a proto-Big Brother, which put an assorted bunch of South Africans in a house for six months (without prize money, as she ruefully recalled).

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After some hairy encounters over the breakfast table, in which pasty-faced men with mullets told her that they used to “beat up queers”, she won them around and somehow made friends with them … this story came across loud and clear, inspiring and funny and frightening. Everything else was going to look a bit trivial compared to Simon & I.