It’s an under-statement to say that I can’t see why anyone would be a Nazi. And I certainly don’t understand why people who have suffered at their hands can admire them. But, sadly, there are a few of these unfortunate individuals out there and, even more sadly, some of them identify as LGBT.

One such unfortunate was Russell Veh in California. Veh clearly decided that we shouldn’t read too much into the torture and murder of tens of thousands of LGBT people during Hitler’s reign, or the ongoing attacks by neo-Nazis. He set up the National Socialist Party, which restricted membership to gay Nazis.

Veh seems to have devoted most of his energies towards recruiting other deluded queens who got their kicks from the homo-erotic imagery that underpins so much Nazi propaganda. However, in 1983, he ran into trouble when he tried to market one of the Third Reich’s most notorious propaganda films, Jud Suss. This movie was central to the Nazi’s murderous agenda, portraying all Jewish people as low-life vermin who deserved nothing more than extermination. Unsurprisingly, there was an outcry, but it seems the thing that really brought him unstuck was that he didn’t have permission to reproduce the movie!

But Veh’s actions were far from the worst example of the sick mentality of LGBT Nazis. In that same year in Ohio, a man called Frank Spisak was brought to trial for a murderous shooting spree that included the deaths of two black men and one ‘liberal’ college worker. Far from being repentant, Spisak merely responded to the news of his sentence by giving the Nazi salute and shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’.

If he was expecting to be acclaimed as a hero by his fellow Nazis, he was quickly disappointed: a few years earlier, American Nazis had proclaimed openly Nazi Fred Cowan a hero after he murdered three black men, one Asian man and a police officer in cold blood. But Spisak, however, was transgender and, to no one’s surprise but his own, was quickly brushed under the carpet by his fellow Master Race members. The Party had no place for queers, no matter how murderous they might be.

But this still didn’t stop queers wanting to join, apparently, In the UK in the late 70’s and early 80’s, for example, the neo-fascist National Front ran a specific membership drive in gay pubs. (Meanwhile, other National Front members were out queer-bashing around the country.) In Germany, gay skinheads went around gay cruising sites with recruitment literature!

And it continues today. In the UK, for example, there’s an LGBT section of the National Front’s successor, the English Defence League.

Russian Neo-Nazis torture a young gay man then brag about it on the Internet.

Obviously these seriously misguided queers still believe that, despite several decades of incontrovertible evidence, neo-Nazis are our friends. Perhaps they should open their eyes and look at what’s currently happening across Eastern Europe, where LGBT people are again being tortured and murdered at the hands of neo-Nazis.