05/12/2017
58 Year old Kevin Wilshaw today lives a quiet life in South East England where he is an openly gay man and has recently attended a synagogue where he said prayers for his Jewish grandfather. But this wasn’t always the case. For more than twenty years he was active in Britain’s far political right groups, including the British Movement and the National Front. The BM was more extreme than the NF and comprised more of a skinhead fraternity. Wilshaw this month talks to the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, where he explains that even though he knew he was both gay and Jewish, he joined right wing groups as a disaffected teenager. Skinheads, with their aggression and male bonding, offered an identity, in the same way that some young men today feel the need to join gangs. Eventually however, his world began to unravel. Rumours of his homosexuality began to circulate on far right websites, and he started to receive hate mail from the groups he had helped build up. Defiantly, he embraced his gay and Jewish roots, abandoned his previous friends and started working with the anti-fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate. We should point out however, that whilst there are still fascist skinheads in the UK, they have largely been eclipsed by a strong showing by left wing skins, and also the appropriation of the skin look by gay men who have spectacularly redefined the meaning of the look.
