IDEOLOGY OF GAY RACIALIST SKINHEADS AND STIGMA MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES*

Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Summer 2006 by Waldner, Lisa K, Martin, Heather, Capeder, Lyndsay

GAY RACIALIST MESSAGE BOARDS

Because the amount of information on static websites is limited and does not allow for clarification, we also looked for message boards devoted to gay racialists. Gay Racialist message boards tend to be transient with forums closing down and members migrating to other boards. Boards differ in whether or not message archives are publicly available and whether or not a membership is required to read and post messages. Furthermore, some message boards have open membership allowing anyone to join by clicking the join button while others are "closed" groups requiring potential members to fill out a membership form with the group facilitator deciding whether or not to admit a member. The primary author joined "Gay_Neo_Nazi Skinheads" hosted by a popular Internet service provider from November 2005 until the message board was disbanded in December 2005. Because this group had an open membership policy, we also had access to the message archives. We also analyzed the public archives from "Violent_Gay_Neo_Nazis" hosted by the same Internet service provider. This group was created in February 2006 and of this writing is still in existence.

Limiting our investigation to public content and joining only non-membership groups did affect the amount of data that we were able to gather. However, this was necessary to meet the conditions of approval mandated by our university's Institutional Review Board. Additionally, we were not comfortable deliberately misleading online facilitators by pretending to be gay male skinheads or racialists. Because we hope to continue this investigation and ultimately interview gay racialists, we decided that the best approach was to avoid situations where we would be tempted to be dishonest in order to gain information.

FINDINGS

AMERICAN RESISTANCE CORPS

Websites change due to updating and sometimes disappear altogether. We printed the content of ARC (http://www.geocities.com/ARCOrg/) from two different points in time (Spring 2005 and Spring 2006) to analyze ideology with an emphasis on language that might explain the combination of gay and racialist. Other than graphics updating and other formatting changes, there was little, if any, change in content. We will describe the history and structure of the ARC website and then discuss ideology.

HISTORY OF AMERICAN RESISTANCE CORPS (ARC)

According to ARC's website, this group began in 1999 when two skinheads wanted to respond to the "extremism" in the skinhead scene from both gay skinheads who denied racialism and skinheads who advocate homophobia. One of the founders is identified on the website as Wyatt Powers. Membership rules were modified to expand beyond working class skinheads to include professional racialists as well. No estimates of membership are given but ARC claims to have had both an American and European division, which split so each could focus on differing goals. ARC describes itself as a group of "thoughtful, dedicated, smart racialists who want to make a difference and contribute towards the future of all fellow whites."