Theirs was a kiss that stunned a conservative town. When a moment of passion between two men was published on a newspaper front page, it provoked fierce debate in one of South Africa's oldest communities.

In a single photograph Bjorn Czepan and Mark Dean Brown became unwitting symbols for tolerance and gay rights at the predominantly Afrikaner, rugby-playing Stellenbosch University.

Just a month later, there is a tragic postscript. Czepan is dead and Brown is critically ill in hospital after a car crash.

The students were involved in an accident in Woodstock, a suburb of Cape Town, last week, the Cape Times reported. Czepan, from Germany, was killed and Brown is now on a ventilator at the Netcare Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital.

The hospital said a third student, Brian Kline, was admitted late last Thursday night after the crash. Brown and Kline were critical but stable.

The Cape Town University couple's fleeting moment of fame came at last month's annual Soen in die Laan (Kiss in the Avenue) event at the nearby university, when lesbian and gay students decided to join the traditionally heterosexual event.

The photograph was published on the front page of the student newspaper Die Matie, triggering furious debate on social networking sites. Copies were torn up or defaced in protest but there were supportive comments from gay students.

At the time Vanessa Smeets, the paper's picture editor, told the Christian Science Monitor : "We knew it would be controversial, but not this level of reaction, which has been overwhelming. We had planned to use a kiss by an interracial couple but we didn't in the end and settled for this one after checking it was OK."

She said reactions had been mixed. "Most women seem OK, but a lot of Afrikaans men and African men were very unhappy. Some have been using the paper as dart boards, tearing them up."

The image caught the attention of South Africa's lesbian and gay community. Marlow Valentine, community engagement and empowerment manager at the Triangle Project in Cape Town, said today: "It did stir a lot of conversations and for me that is always a plus.

"It was one of those articles that challenge heteronormative ideas. It was a same sex couple expressing their pleasure and joy and love for each other. It is nothing out of the ordinary for someone who is gay or lesbian."

Valentine said the accident was a shock. "It is a sad day when anyone dies young with their life ahead of them. It is ironic that they made this statement just before the accident. You wonder if it was divine providence.

"Stellenbosch is a very conservative town and doesn't like anything out of the ordinary. From a fundamentalist point of view people would say this was punishment. But my view of God is not one of punity.

"I hope people will remember them as a couple who had the guts to stand up and challenge the status quo; that's a positive, not a negative. If articles like that stimulate positive conversations, then the action and the picture were not in vain."

The Cape Times reported that Brown's grandmother Elizabeth flew to the hospital from Pretoria when she heard about the accident. She told the paper she knew nothing about the controversial photograph.

"I don't care much about any of those things," she was quoted as saying. "All I want is for him to get better. I have hardly spoken to him because he is sedated most of the time."

Matthew Gardiner, a friend of Czepan, told the Cape Times: "Bjorn couldn't understand the Soen in die Laan situation could make so much of an impact, but he was also very proud that he had been able to help a lot of people come to terms with their sexuality through that kiss."

By The Guardian UK