metroactive payback

unintentional irony?

from les back's "wagner and power chords: skinheadism, white power music, and the internet" (94-132) in out of whiteness:

While the global dispersion of racist skinhead style was at its highest point, the culture was being transformed in its metropolitan cradle. Since the 1980s the style has become increasingly popular among gay men in London. As mentioned previously, there have been gay skinheads from the inception of the culture, but during the 1980s and 1990s the style became ubiquitous in gay nightclubs. Murray Healy argues that the gay appropriation of skinhead style is a complex combination of homoerotic desire, kitsch, and a masculinization of gay culture. The nuances of his argument are beyond the present discussion, but he claims that the pervasive gay adoption of skinhead style is starting to change associations in London at least. He quotes a gay skinhead who is an active member of the White Power music scene, Blood and Honour: "When I first became a skinhead and was walking down the street, you might get a bit of hassle from people, you know, 'Nazi Bastard,' that sort of thing. Nowadays they say 'Batty man.' It doesn't matter who you are--they've never seen you before, you could be covered in White Power tattoos--that's their first image. You get that reaction from straight blokes. For me, the gays have fucked up the Nazi skinhead image."

Such combinations of sexual trangression and racial authoritarianism are no less complex than the Jewish Nazi discussed earlier. Healy argues that the growing public awareness of gay skins has corrupted the association between the skins and a conservative, white racist, straight masculinity. It is interesting that the skin quoted above invoked the association between skin style and gay London through the Creole homophobic epithet "Batty man." The fear of being identified as gay is being augmented here because these associations are being directed at white skins from a black location. It may be that, just as skinheadism is being globalized, its hypermasculine straight image is being decoupled at "home." However, this may well be confined to London, and there is little evidence to suggest that skinhead style has lost its currency as sartorial racism elsewhere in Britain. (108)