Neo-Nazi Quits Movement After Revealing He’s Gay — And Part Jewish
Image by Channel 4/YouTube
By Aiden Pink October 17, 2017
A prominent British white supremacist has announced that he is renouncing his extremism and is coming out of the closet as a gay man with Jewish ancestry.
Kevin Wilshaw was a leader of the National Front group in the 1980s, frequently spoke at nationalist rallies and was arrested for making racist online statements as recently as this March. But he told Channel 4 that he could no longer stand by his past actions.
Blaming actions on “the Jews” as a group is “the generalization that leads to six million people being deliberately murdered,” he said. He disclosed that his mother was part-Jewish with the maiden name Benjamin.
He also said that because of his sexuality he had “been the recipient of the very hatred of the people I want to belong to … if you’re gay it is acceptable in society but with these group of people it’s not acceptable, and I found on one or two occasions when I was suspected of being gay I was subjected to abuse.”
Channel 4 correspondent Paraic O’Brien wrote that “Mr. Wilshaw admits that being a Nazi who is gay – but with a Jewish background – is a contradiction.”
Wilshaw admitted that he was concerned about stepping aside from a movement that had been so central to his life. “I am going to find it difficult, granted, to fill a void that has occupied my life since childhood,” he said.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
