Nicky Crane was a member and organiser of the Kent branch of the extreme far-right group the British Movement (BM) throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. In 1979 he led a mob of 200 skinheads in an attack on Asians in nearby Brick Lane. Crane later told a newspaper how “we rampaged down the Lane turning over stalls, kicking and punching Pakistanis”. They had spent two days planning their attack from 28 March 1980. Soon they reached their target – a queue of mostly black filmgoers outside the Odeon cinema in Woolwich, south-east London. He was a feared skinhead with Nazi tattoos and a propensity towards racist violence, but he was also gay. He served as a steward at the London gay pride march in 1986. He was a regular at London gay clubs such as Heaven, Bolts and the Bell pub. At various times, Crane had worked as a doorman at an S&M club and in amateur gay porn films while still a neo-Nazi activist. He kept these two worlds entirely separate until appearing in a Channel 4 documentary where he openly talked about being gay for the first time in 1992. Channel 4 featured a series of documentaries about lesbian and gay life in the UK. The episode broadcast on 27 July 1992 was about the gay skinhead subculture. Its star attraction was Nicky Crane. He told the interviewer how he’d known he was gay back in his early BM days. He described how his worship of Hitler had given way to unease about the far right’s homophobia. “Adolf Hitler was my God,” he said in the 1992 television interview. “He was sort of like my Fuhrer, my leader. And everything I have done was, like, for Adolf Hitler.” He had started to feel like a hypocrite because the Nazi movement was so anti-gay, he said. “So I just, like, couldn’t stay in it.” Crane said he was “ashamed” of his political past and insisted he had changed. “The views I’ve got now is, I believe in individualism and I don’t care if anyone’s black, Jewish or anything,” he added. “I either like or dislike a person as an individual, not what their colour is or anything.”
He died in 1993 of an AIDS-related illness. He was a victim of the disease that had killed so many other young gay men of his generation. As he lingered in St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, west London, waiting to die, a young man named Craig was at his side. Craig was “one of Nicky’s boyfriends”, says John G Byrne.