But it’s home to something that’s global, and it means something to a lot of people around the world. “You see that flag up at Castro and Market Street, and you think that’s Gilbert’s flag.
“It was born here,” Gilbert Baker Foundation President Charley Beal said Friday at the flag’s unveiling at the GLBT Historical Society Museum. Now, after a four-decade-long journey from a leaky storage unit to a dusty closet, a piece of the original fabric is returning home to San Francisco. embassies and symbolizing inclusivity across the world. Since its first flight above the United Nations Plaza during San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Parade, the rainbow flag has grown to global significance, painted on city crosswalks, flown at U.S. In 1978, San Francisco resident Gilbert Baker stitched a new symbol: a striped rainbow flag of pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue and purple. After a heterosexual neo-Nazi chat room called the "Racialist Club of America" expelled "practicing homosexuals" recently, one gay man wrote, "e will never win this war as long as they are considered the NORM of white pride groups.For decades, the primary LGBTQ symbol was a small pink triangle - first displayed on the uniforms of prisoners at Nazi concentration camps who had been labeled as homosexual. Today, life remains tough for the committed gay neo-Nazi. Long-time neo-Nazi Harold Covington, revealing his own homophobia, put it this way: "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." This reality has been acknowledged by some white supremacists. Before disappearing in the 1980s, the group put out a journal - NS Kampfruf - complete with explicit photographs and racy advertisements. In 1974, the first openly gay American neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist League, was formed in Los Angeles by Russell Veh. In fact, Kaplan writes, gays made up a "significant" - if carefully hidden - part of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party in the 1960s. 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. 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. They are raping our country."Īlthough it will come as a surprise to many, there has long been a fascist gay subculture. BOTTOM LINE! Instead of letting the white race go extinct because of worthless races such as the african race or the mexican race popping out literally millions of babies a day, we have to fight this f - up shit they are doing. Or, in the posted message of a rare lesbian: "Even if you are gay and white, or retarded and white, YOU ARE WHITE. "The Gay Aryan Mann must rise up," writes one impassioned man in the "Gay Aryan Resistance" chat room, "and destroy ZOG and end the Semitic homophobia imposed on our Kultur!"
Similar messages appear on sites like Gays Against Semitism, and especially in chat rooms with names such as "Gay Nazi Sex," "Gay Nazi WP Fetishists," "Gay Aryan Neo-Nazi Skinheads," "Nazi Muscle" and, most curious of all, "Diapered Skinheads." 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. Tom Metzger, who leads the White Aryan Resistance, offers up for his part cartoons that depict gay men being beaten to death. Or consider Fred Phelps, the radical Topeka Baptist. The title of his 1993 book, Death to all Homosexuals, leaves little to the imagination. Take Pete Peters, a leading ideologue of the racist Christian Identity religion. 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.Īfter 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. They inhabit, by definition, the outermost fringes of our society. 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.