Outed educator and novelist Hovelmeier flees Zimbabwe
Educator and novelist Neal Hovelmeier’s life changed forever in 2018. The longtime deputy head of school at St. John’s College, a boys’ academy in Borrowdale, a suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, was at his desk on a September afternoon when the email arrived. It was a short, direct note from a journalist at a local paper who was writing an article about him that would run the following day. “Do you wish to comment?” the reporter asked. “I was about to be outed in a country that hates homosexuals,” said Hovelmeier, the Robert G. James Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Harvard Scholar at Risk. “I knew immediately that this was that awful moment of reckoning and that what had been an intensely personal life for me was going to be made into a public debacle.” Being gay isn’t illegal in Zimbabwe, but according to the country’s Criminal...