Gay Nazi Watch: Lest We Forget

The Mail - no friends of Nazism or historical revisionism they - sent some undercover reporters to a top secret meeting of holocaust deniers in London this week.

They didn't make much of this, but you'll never guess who they spotted there.

Only Martin Webster, national organiser of the National Front - and some say de facto leader of - during their glory days in the 70s!

He got jackbooted out of the party in 1983 for being a poof (like no-one knew!) - and later claimed to have been the bumlover of a teenage Nick Griffin.

Can't link to much bar Webster's Wikipedia page, as it looks like Mr W has had a load of stuff about him removed under that Google Right To Be Forgotten thing.

Funny that.

PS Lest we forget too...

'Parading hateful Blackshirt insignia...'

Fagburn: On The Beach

Nothing remarkable in Saturday's papers, so I think I'll go to the beach with some improving literature.

PS Mind you, I was up at this crack this morning and went for a troll down Holborn with dolly old Peter Ackroyd.
She says she's writing a gay history of London.
Bona!

Nicky Crane: Rough Trade

He was the British extreme right's most feared streetfighter. But almost right up to his death 20 years ago, Nicky Crane led a precarious dual existence - until it fell dramatically apart.

The skinhead gang marched in military formation down the High Street clutching iron bars, knives, staves, pickaxe handles and clubs.

There were at least 100 of them. They had spent two days planning their attack. The date was 28 March 1980.

Soon they reached their target - a queue of mostly black filmgoers outside the Odeon cinema in Woolwich, south-east London.

Then the skinheads charged.

Most of them belonged to an extreme far-right group called the British Movement (BM).

This particular "unit" had already acquired a reputation for brutal racist violence thanks to its charismatic young local organiser. Many victims had learned to fear the sight of his 6ft 2in frame, which was adorned with Nazi tattoos. His name was Nicky Crane.

But as he led the ambush, Crane was concealing a secret from his enemies and his fascist comrades alike. Crane knew he was gay, but hadn't acted on it. Not yet...

BBC News magazine.

Jon Kelly profiles the Neo-Nazi thug Nicky Crane, who died of Aids 20 years ago today.
It's certainly a fascinating story, and has been told several times before.
This has to be one of the longest accounts I've ever read though, and one of the longest features by far I've ever seen on BBC News magazine - and it's not linked to any BBC programme.
All a bit odd/off - but the straight media sure do love doing stuff about gay Nazis.
Whodathunkit? etc.
Guess it must just be their favourite bit of rough.

Eurovision: A Heated Debate

Charles Shaar Murray: I've been thinking about what it is about this oom-pah stuff, or its modern, glitzy equivalent, that I don't like, and I figure it's because most of the music I like is derived from an African-American tradition – soul, blues, rock, reggae. But the Americans ain't in it, the Latin Americans ain't in it, the Caribbeans ain't in it.

Cheryl Baker: In Eurovision? That's because it's Europe! Although there is Israel.

Charles Shaar Murray: I have a problem with that. It's like they're saying, OK, we may be geographically in the Middle East, but culturally we're down with you white folks. Here's my Eurovision nightmare: this is what all popular music would have been like if the Nazis had won.

Cheryl and Charles talk Eurovision in The Guardian.
Mr Murray clearly has no grasp of the charm of the bad.
Here's someone who does - a great, funny live blog from Eurovision World Of Chig.
Fagburn will be rooting for Jedward.

Rod Liddle: "Gay Fascists Run The World"

"I don’t agree, viscerally, with private education and I’m not sure I like what it produces — ie, loquacious, over-confident, sexually bewildered sociopaths. But then loquacious, over-confident, sexually bewildered sociopaths run the world, and we all want the best for our children. And when you look at what the state has to offer — at the manifest incompetence of the state educational establishment and the 90% mince-thick teachers, with their low expectations and even lower IQs and their fabulously bereft, ingrained, metropolitan liberal ideologies which cannot ever be challenged or gainsaid — well, hell, the battle is sort of lost.
"I mean, given the choice between siring a gay fascist who can read and add up and a well-adjusted illiterate imbecile, I am beginning to agree that the former is the more desirable option. Hell, please, tell me I’m wrong — I’m really hanging on here."

You are wrong.
That bizarre horse, Rod Liddle: 'My kids’ choice — be a gay Nazi or thick and right-on', The Sunday Times.
I agree that public schools turn children into dreadful people - and sending your kids to one should be seen as child abuse - but gay?

On a different tack, Johann Hari wrote an interesting piece on gay men and the far right for Salon in 1998; The Strange, Strange Story Of The Gay Fascists.