Hello and welcome to Queer as FAC, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Alice.

I'm Jason.

And I'm Irene.

And today we're talking about the South African activist Simon Seco and Kodi.

We respectfully acknowledge the people of the Kulin Nation and pay our respect to their elders both past and present.

We acknowledge and uphold their continuing relationship to the land on which this podcast is recorded.

I have a few content warnings for this episode before we get started.

We're going to be talking about apartheid and racism in South Africa, as well as police violence,

the killing of protesters, imprisonment and mentions of capital punishment.

We'll also be discussing homophobia, HIV AIDS, including death from age-related illness,

and some mentions of depression. If any of that sounds like something you don't want to listen

to, feel free to skip this episode and check out the rest of our content.

So in terms of sources for this episode, there's no published full-length biography of Simon.

So most of my information from him has been pieced together from interviews, articles and book chapters that talk about aspects of his life.

For that reason, some aspects of the

timeline of this episode were not entirely clear to me, and I found that even Simon

contradicts himself in talking about when events in his life happened. I don't think Simon is,

you know, fabricating his story. I think that's just the nature of somebody talking about their

life off the top of

their head. But I did just want to mention that if the dates ever don't seem to line up where I can't

answer a question about when something happened. Yeah, I mean, I've done this about my own life,

...