The vastly wealthy “Southern Poverty Law Center” (SPLC) is best known today (aside from its deceptive “poor mouth” fundraising pitches to gullible liberals) for its obsessive campaign to punish Bible-believing Christians and Jews for opposing sexual perversion. But SPLC leaders were once (ostensibly) more focused on racism — an emphasis I applaud (and wish they would return to, though apparently it is not as lucrative for them).
SPLC’s last high-profile case in that realm was the takedown of White Supremacist leader Tom Metzger after his Skinhead follower Ken “Death” Mieske and two others beat Ethiopian graduate student Mulugeta Seraw to death on the streets of Portland, Oregon in 1988. This week marks the third anniversary of the death of “Ken Death” in the Oregon State Penitentiary.
The dirty little secret that the SPLC never revealed was that Ken “Death” Mieske was “gay” (at least part-time).
I was living just a few blocks from the site of the Seraw murder when it occurred, and was very familiar with the “mean streets” of Portland since I had only two years previously accepted Christ and been delivered from 16 years of bondage to alcoholism and drug addiction. Before that I spent a lot of time with the “dopers” at Pioneer Courthouse Square and other transient venues in the downtown area. We all knew that many of the boys and young men on the streets, including Skinheads, were male prostitutes.
In those days Portland was notorious for pederasty (“gay” sex between adult men and young teens). I remember, for example, that the adult male director of one of the city’s homeless shelters was arrested for exploiting runaway teen boys for sex during that time. In the late 80s my wife worked as a volunteer for the Salvation Army in a program for street kids and was told that many of the teen boys were “graduates” of a string of “floating brothels” of pre-teen boys. (Once they got too old to appeal to the rich male Portland pedophiles they were kicked out on the street.) In more recent years the pederast culture has reached even into the city government, where “gay” Mayor Sam Adam’s seduction of a 17 year-old male intern became a major public scandal http://www.kgw.com/news/Timeline-Mayor-Adams–126427298.html. But, of course, in liberal-Utopia Portland, Adams neither resigned nor was recalled.
Portland is also the home of famous “gay” filmmaker Gus Van Sant, whose work often explores (surprise) “gay” teen sex, including My Private Idaho, about young male street-prostitutes (like Mieske probably was) who fall in love with each other http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Own_Private_Idaho.
Importantly, just one year before the Seraw murder, Van Sant took a close personal interest in the young skinhead, Ken Mieske, upon his release from prison for burglary, even making a short film about him titled “Ken Death Gets Out of Jail.”
In a March 31, 1998 interview with The Advocate magazine, Van Sant said “The subjects of my films… were about gay characters. They were what brought me out of the closet… The films brought me out. That’s what my interest was. These gay characters and gay stories. And I was gay. My private life became my public life.”
http://www.nndb.com/people/551/000022485…
This seems to be a fairly clear identification of Ken Mieske as “gay” (though he had a girlfriend at one time) and a possible admission of pederasty by Van Sant, though I am not asserting as fact that Mr. Van Sant ever had sexual relations with minors. Interestingly, however, in my capacity as a newly-minted Christian social activist there in 1989 or 90 I received an anonymous call from a man who insisted that Mieske had been Van Sant’s “house boy” at one time before the murder. I don’t know whether that is true.
What is true is that the Southern Poverty Law Center almost certainly knew that the murderer Mieske was “gay” when they pursued their litigation against Tom Metzger. The most elementary due-diligence as attorneys in the facts of their case would have educated them on that score. And as late as 2000, SPLC was admitting in their own newsletter that there is a “significant” incidence of homosexuality among White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis (see below).
Three years ago this week, “Ken Death” died of complications from viral hepatitis, a blood-bourn disease which is very common among male homosexuals. http://www.cdc.gov/msmhealth/viral-hepatitis.htm. To the end, his fellow White Supremacists embraced him as their own, declaring him a “prisoner of war.”
This obscure anniversary is an appropriate setting to challenge the hypocrisy of the SPLC which is raising piles of money on the theme that faithful Christians and Jews are dangerous homophobic bigots without any rational basis for our opposition to homosexuality, when they know better than most the truth that the genuine hate groups — the ones their organization was created to oppose — are rife with homosexual perversion.
So, in memory of Ken “Death” Mieske, I offer the SPLC’s own words on the matter as a proof of their mendacity.
Gay Aryan Nations Members (Southern Poverty Law Center, Fall 2000, Issue #100)
“Although it will come as a surprise to many, there has long been a fascist gay subculture. Hitler’s paramilitary SA storm troopers had a significant gay element…”
,”…gay neo-Nazis dotted the European landscape after the war, while in America homosexuality continues to be a ‘secret of postwar American National Socialism’, according to Jeffrey Kaplan, a well-known scholar of extremism.
“In fact, Kaplan writes, gays made up a ‘significant’ — if carefully hidden — part of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party in the 1960s. In 1974, the first openly gay American neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist League, was formed in Los Angeles by Russell Veh. Before disappearing in the 1980s, the group put out a journal — NS Kampfruf — complete with explicit photographs and racy advertisements.”
And to that add the following jaw-dropping Huffington Post article: “The Strange, Strange Story of the Gay Fascists” which I personally sent by email to SPLC’s Mark Potok: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-strange-strange-story_b_136697.html
I rest my case.
Postscript: A day after publishing this article, I obtained a copy of Elinor Langer’s A Hundred Little Hitlers about Ken Mieske and the Seraw murder. In it, I found additional confirmation of Mieske’s homosexual relations with older “gay” men. From page 60:
“The relationship [in Portland] between the thirty-year-old Jim* and the fifteen-year-old Ken has so much the form of scandal — ‘Man Seduces Boy!’ — …but… if there was any seduction to begin with it is a likely to have been the other way around — ‘Boy Seduces Man!’ — because when they met Ken was struggling for survival on the streets of Seattle for several years and had seen and done a lot while Jim was a sheltered Roman Catholic former policeman who was still in the closet. However it was, the interest was mutual.”
Jim is a pseudonym used by the author to protect the identity of the source, who is essentially confessing to “gay” statutory rape. Clearly sympathetic to “Jim” she spins his motives and actions in a very positive light and seems oblivious to the nature of predatory pederasty, but that’s an aside.
