Gay Aryan Nations Members Are the Fringe of the Fringe
Gay white supremacists, sneered at by their fellow racists, come out on the Net.
Ku Klux Klansmen, neo-Nazis, Christian Identity adherents, racist Skinheads and Odinists, along with your garden variety white supremacists — these are the people that populate America's radical right. They inhabit, by definition, the outermost fringes of our society.
And then there are the gay neo-Nazis.
Talk about a sect within a sect. The members of this tiny subculture on the radical right — mainly men who inhabit Web chat rooms like "Gay Aryan Resistance" — just can't seem to get any respect.
After all, the real Nazis murdered thousands of gay men and lesbians, and most people on the modern white supremacist right act pretty much as if they'd like to follow suit.
Take Pete Peters, a leading ideologue of the racist Christian Identity religion. The title of his 1993 book, Death to all Homosexuals, leaves little to the imagination. Or consider Fred Phelps, the radical Topeka Baptist. He runs the godhatesf---.com web site. Tom Metzger, who leads the White Aryan Resistance, offers up for his part cartoons that depict gay men being beaten to death.
No matter. Gay white men, declares a web page called the Gay Racialist Network, are "nature's elite." While straight men are good for breeding, gay white men are "charismatic leaders that possess ... genius."
Similar messages appear on sites like Gays Against Semitism, and especially in chat rooms with names such as "Gay Nazi Sex," "Gay Nazi WP [White Power] Fetishists," "Gay Aryan Neo-Nazi Skinheads," "Nazi Muscle" and, most curious of all, "Diapered Skinheads."
"The Gay Aryan Mann [sic] must rise up," writes one impassioned man in the "Gay Aryan Resistance" chat room, "and destroy ZOG [the "Zionist Occupation Government"] and end the Semitic homophobia imposed on our Kultur!"
Or, in the posted message of a rare lesbian: "Even if you are gay and white, or retarded and white, YOU ARE WHITE. BOTTOM LINE! Instead of letting the white race go extinct because of worthless races such as the african [sic] race or the mexican [sic] race popping out literally millions of babies a day, we have to fight this f----- up shit they are doing. They are raping our country."
Although it will come as a surprise to many, there has long been a fascist gay subculture. Hitler's paramilitary SA storm troopers had a significant gay element — until SS head Heinrich Himmler announced that all gays would be sent to concentration camps "and shot while trying to escape.
Small groups of gay neo-Nazis dotted the European landscape after the war, while in America homosexuality continues to be a "secret of postwar American National Socialism," according to Jeffrey Kaplan, a well-known scholar of extremism.
In fact, Kaplan writes, gays made up a "significant" — if carefully hidden — part of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party in the 1960s. In 1974, the first openly gay American neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist League, was formed in Los Angeles by Russell Veh. Before disappearing in the 1980s, the group put out a journal — NS Kampfruf — complete with explicit photographs and racy advertisements.
This reality has been acknowledged by some white supremacists. Long-time neo-Nazi Harold Covington, revealing his own homophobia, put it this way: "[T]his movement has a distinct tendency to attract f------ because of the leather-macho image that the System Jew media imparts to the SS uniform."
Today, life remains tough for the committed gay neo-Nazi. After a heterosexual neo-Nazi chat room called the "Racialist Club of America" expelled "practicing homosexuals" recently, one gay man wrote, "[W]e will never win this war as long as they [straight neo-Nazis] are considered the NORM of white pride groups."
Another man, in considerably more despair, asked this question: "What does belonging to a group, who would kill you along with everyone else the second they found out what you were really, make you feel like?"
