Alright, since there's obviously still a lot of fixation on this and because I'm procrastinating, I'm just going to go ahead and tell the full Nazi story: Spoiler I met the guy in a bar in February, so most of the time he was wearing a leather jacket. At some point he did take off his jacket and was wearing this punk band T-shirt so I did see he had two full sleeves of tattoos, but between the jacket and the shaggy hair and the beard I just assumed he was like every other hipster in New York. It was dark and I was drunk and I didn't exactly examine them too closely. He was here on a visa from Uruguay and was getting his degree in something having to do with computers and was working as a contractor to pay the bills. It was all a very normal conversation. I think I pretended to care about soccer for a lot of it. I brought him back to my place, never thought to turn the lights on, so no opportunity there. I am usually very anti-sleepover, but it was so late by the time we were done we both just passed out. The next morning, I wake up, it's super bright in my room, the first thing I see is a girl's name tattooed on his inner arm. So, when he wakes up very shortly after that and immediately wants to have sex again, I spend most of my time checking out his tattoos because I hate mornings and don't like morning sex and was just kind of hanging out as he was doing his thing. Like I've mentioned, there wasn't any glaringly obvious swastikas or anything, so I had been looking at them for a while before this one started kind of tugging at me in a - wait, doesn't that one mean something? - kind of way. It was an 88. It finally hit me, while he was still fucking me, what it meant, and it was like one of those Beautiful Mind scenes where all of a sudden the other two Nazi ones stuck out for what they were (I think it was a cross and lightning bolts, but I also fell deep into a Nazi symbolism internet spiral later that day and I'm not completely confident which ones I just saw online and which ones he actually had). It was actually extremely traumatizing and terrifying because, I don't have the Jewiest of apartments, but there's enough around that I was panicking that he was going to start looking around, realize what happened, and that I could be in danger. I don't have a mezuzah and it wasn't the time of year where I had a menorah out or anything, but I have a bunch of things I've painted hanging on my bedroom wall and one of them is of women at the Western Wall, another is a still life that has an object with a Star of David on it, there's a postcard with Hebrew on it on my closet door. There are photos of my trip to israel in my living room, and plenty of books on my bookshelf indicating that I'm Jewish. Etc. So I basically had to just lie there waiting for him to finish while I was trying not to puke or cry or let on that anything out of the ordinary had happened or anything had changed because if I started acting weird I didn't think I could pull off getting out of it without blurting out that I was Jewish. So, pretty much right after it ended, I told him I had brunch plans and managed to very calmly get him out of my apartment just like with any other one night stand I had no expectations of seeing ever again. I have no idea how I managed to pull it all off without even a hint of nerves. Later that day, as I was in the depths of my internet spiraling over IDing Nazi tattoos, he texted me asking if he could see me again. (We had exchanged numbers at the bar when it seemed like we were parting ways before just saying fuck it and bringing him home.) I wanted him to know exactly why I didn't want to see him again, so instead of just ignoring it I wrote back saying something about his tattoos. And that launched this stream of texts that was a hundred different versions of "please, let me explain, give me a chance, I'm sorry, I really like you, it's not who I am, I just want to see you again" etc etc etc. So then I told him I was Jewish, and there was this long pause, and he said "I don't care that you're Jewish, I like you a lot, I just want to see you again. Please give me a chance." So then my curiosity and journalistic instinct kicked in and I thought, you know, when am I ever going to get a chance to talk to a Nazi again? So i basically interviewed him for about a week. I found out all about his life, growing up in this dirt poor area of Uruguay with no real opportunities beyond farming or driving trucks. When he was a teenager, he made friends with this group of skinheads in the punk sense of the word, and they offered basically his only shot at expanding his life out of his little town and having some excitement. They were extremely anti-Communist, which I'm not exactly familiar with Uruguayan history but apparently fit right in with the political climate of the time there, and as they got more and more political and started travelling around the country more, that led to his group starting to come together with this larger Neo-Nazi presence, and that's where shit started going awry. I don't exactly think he's a not-racist and am fully aware he could've been sugar-coating any racial aspects out of it, but all of the stories he told me for him it was largely fueled by anti-Communism and he was very anti-immigration, although he insisted that the anti-immigration stuff was because their largest immigrant population was from some Communist country (I forget which one and am, again, not exactly familiar with Uruguay's history) and it was really just about hating Commies. (I did indeed point out the hypocrisy of hating immigration while talking to me in the U.S, where he has at least temporarily immigrated to.) When I asked him if he had ever gotten violent with it, he said that he was in a couple of brawls and had spent a couple days in jail over them. But the Neo-Nazi element was wanting to get him involved in bigger and more dangerous stuff, and a big part of why he came to the U.S was because he was starting to get freaked out and wanted to put all of that behind him and start fresh and get a new direction in life. He was always good at fixing computers, thought he'd give that a shot, had an uncle in New York, and that's how he ended up here. I then asked him, okay, he's been telling me this whole story about being mostly this punk anti-Commie skinhead, but the tattoos he chose to have are very specifically related to Hitler, and I'd looked up the band he told me he was in back home and while I didn't understand Spanish enough to get the lyrics, I did understand the WW2 references in some of the song titles. So was he really going to sit there and tell me this all didn't have anything to do with anti-Semitism? He said that he didn't think much about the Jews at all, that he was 33 and I was the first Jewish person he'd met or spoken to. He likened it to how people can tattoo the devil or 666 on themselves but not literally worship Satan, that he just thought of it as some kind of signal that he was tough and dangerous and fit in with this group of people. He didn't really understand the significance of it until things started taking a turn before he left. I'm not sure how much I believe that, but he started asking me a lot about Judaism and being Jewish and wanting to know what it meant to me and all these things that did just make him come off more as clueless than anything else. Whether or not that cluelessness resulted in hatred at any point in his life, I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised either way. I'm not going to go into too many details over how we stopped talking because it converged in a really nutty way with what happened with my roommate soon afterward, but needless to say we did. Then, later in the year, as Nazis and white supremacists and white nationalists and the KKK started to have more and more relevance in the news again, I for obvious reasons kept thinking about him. He had tried to friend me on Facebook that week we were talking and I never accepted it, but pretty much all of his posts were public and I did a deep dive into it back then and decided to look him up again just to see what he was posting now. There was a definite change. There was a lot of anti-violence and anti-gang stuff related to Uruguay. There was a lot of anti-Trump stuff. Most of it was just soccer. After the election, I looked him up again and saw he was moving back to Uruguay with this long screed about how he'd come to the U.S with a certain idea of what the country's direction was and what its values were and he saw it was changing and he just wanted to get home and take what he learned here and try to apply it towards making a better life there instead. I checked in on him again earlier this year and he has this very normal life and I saw some stuff that was pro immigration for Uruguay. So, the thing about my vagina making him not be a Nazi anymore was always obviously tongue-in-cheek, he was clearly heading in that direction before he met me. But he is actually not a Nazi anymore. So, yeah, it was just this crazy thing that happened. It was very upsetting in the moment but like with all things after a few months I could just turn it into another story and play it for laughs. It was a hit at a storytelling show , and I almost made it onto the Risk podcast with it. Talking to him was pretty fascinating and I'm glad I did it and, if anything, I learned a lot about Uruguay.
Clearly, you need to have sex with as many white supremacists as possible to heal the nation. Good luck. We're all counting on you.
Banging your political/philosophical enemies and interviewing them in the after glow is a column I'd read. Audrey you got a good angle here, you could be the next Carrie Bradshaw!
If she infiltrates and bangs one of them, that could easily go in rolling stone or some huge publication.
I'd pitch her first story to Vice, they love click baity subject lines. It's also got the economically put upon immigrant angle to boot. It's got everything they love. "I banged a Nazi, and only sort of regret it."
I hate to say this, but the the Jewish side needs to be played up to make it even more controversial and click bait worthy
That's actually more credible. The one and only good thing about this hurricane/flood is that Joel Osteen is getting dragged. I don't even care why or how, just the fact that everyone is hating on him is like an early birthday present.
Ok fill me in on this one. I thought he was like the least offensive of all the televangelist. Yes, he's making a fuck ton of money off of people, but hey he's just selling God them, and merchandise and tickets, and probably loans, and probably accepts tithings, and DVD's.
I hate anybody that lies while selling an invisible product. The guy is the definition of hypocrisy and nobody in his cult seems to care.
In an Audrey-esque move I ended up dating a girl that was huge into him. It was during my basket weaving elective years in college and I had expressed to her I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do with myself. She went to her bookshelf and picked up his book that I hadn't noticed. It was filled with post-it notes and highlightings, more than I've ever seen a book marked up. I knew she was in a choir at one of those proud to be progressive churches that are filled with homosexuals but she was no where near overtly religous. I didn't imagine she'd be that into someone like Joel Osteen. So, she was litterally a Nazi. I'd have married that girl if I had the chance.