Nicholas "Nicky" Crane, (1958-1993) British neo-Nazi and homosexual. His case demonstrates the falsity of the idea that Nazism is incompatible with homosexuality.
Crane was born on 21 May 1958 in Bexley, south-east London, to a lower-middle-class family with ten children. His Italian mother, Dorothy née Ambrosio, originally named him "Nicolà Vincenzo". They soon moved to Crayford, Kent. As a teenager he was drawn into a gang of "skinheads," disaffected working-class white youth. He then joined the openly neo-Nazi British Movement, led by Michael McLaughlin. He became the Kent organizer and was one of McLaughlin's personal corps of bodyguards. Six feet two inches in height, and covered in tattoos, he was an intimidating figure.
Crane told a TV interviewer in 1992 ""Adolf Hitler was my God,"". His occupation at this time was as a refuse collector.
In 1978, he was convicted for taking part in an assault on a black family at a bus stop in Bishopsgate, east London, using broken bottles and shouting racist slogans.
The following year he led a mob of 200 skinheads in an attack on Asians in nearby Brick Lane. A similar attack took place in 1980 at the Woolwich Odeon and in 1981 Crane was jailed for four years for his part in an ambush on black youths at Woolwich Arsenal station. As the sentence was read out, his supporters in the court made the Nazi salute. He served three jail terms, the last in a top-security prison on the Isle of Wight.
In 1981 a photograph of Crane, with shaven head and muscular torso, appeared on the sleeve of an Oi! music compilation album called Strength Through Oi, and made him into a icon, literally a poster-boy. His nazi tattoos had been airbrushed out of the photograph at the last minute. When the Daily Mail published a piece revealing his identity, a controversy erupted, with the record's complier, Garry Bushell (a newspaper columnist and then a self-declared socialist) arguing that he hadn't known of Crane's identity until after the record had been released. He also claimed that he hadn't known that "Strength Through Joy", the phrase that the title references, was a Nazi slogan.
In June 1984, Crane and his BM supporters disrupted a pop-concert held for charity by permission of the Greater London Council, and started a major riot.
In April 1985, an anti-fascist magazine called Searchlight did an article about Crane's violent activities and mentioned that he was a frequenter of the Heaven gay disco in Charing Cross. This was a well-known homosexual meeting-place. Crane was able to brush off thee rumours because of his long-standing reputation as a committed neo-nazi, and because his fearsome reputation for violence made other neo-nazis wary of confronting him. He claimed to prominent neo-nazi Ian Donaldson that his employers had sent him to Heaven to work as a bouncer there on contract, and he hadn't been able to refuse. Far from hiding his inclinations from his Nazi friends, Crane set up a group of homosexual skinheads. Towards the end of the 1980s, Crane began to drift further and further from organized neo-nazi activity, in part because of the violent response from antifascists to the British Movement.
In 1986, Crane and a bunch of his homosexual skinhead friends attended a "Gay Rights" March in Kennington, London, where their Nazi tattoos and affiliations caused considerable friction with other participants.
Crane starred in a series of skinhead-themed homosexual pornography videos.
In 1987 Crane joined with Ian Stuart Donaldson, singer of the neo-Nazi rock band Skrewdriver, to set up a group called Blood & Honour. It was a music club for White Power supporters and ran a highly profitable mail-order business supplying skinhead and punk paraphernalia.
January 1990, Crane was spotted at a Bloody Sunday commemoration event in Kilburn, north-west London, and was beaten up by three Antifascist activists. They were later caught and jailed.
Crane worked in London as a bicycle courier and lived in a bedsit in Soho. On 27 July 1992, he appeared on a Channel 4 TV program to discuss his homosexuality and said that he had changed his former racist views. he explained that he felt like a hypocrite to participate in a fascist movement that targeted gay people for persecution, mentioning that some other members of the British Movement would go "queer-bashing". Although he admitted his homosexuality, he did not mention the fact that he was by then HIV-positive.
On 7 December 1993, Crane died of broncho-pneumonia, a side effect of AIDS. [1]
See also Ernst Rohm, Michael Kühnen, Michel Caignet, Kenneth Mieske, Martin Webster.