Queer Romances with Fascism

The claim that there may be a privileged connection between male homosexuality and fascism has been persistent, and has recently been renewed in some surprising quarters. It is an ahistorical assertion, however, because it relies on a sense that both fascism and homosexuality are fixed terms. This essay considers the erotically charged figure of the skinhead and his connections with neo-Nazism. It offers readings of two recent subcultural works – the Danish film Brotherhood and Max Schaefer’s novel Children of the Sun – but also provides a historicisation of the skinhead that situates him in relation to both Nazi ideology and its contradictions, and the shifting conditions of postwar Britain. Beyond this, the essay interrogates the terms of the skinhead’s ‘queer’ appropriation, and takes issue with the supposedly progressive, yet indeterminate, principles of antinormativity.