The former poster child for white nationalism has quietly come out as transgender in their debut book — in which they reminisced about being mistaken for a girl while working with their father’s KKK chapter.
R Derek Black revealed in the epilogue of their new memoir, “The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism,” that they identified as LGBTQ and used they/ them pronouns, according to an excerpt obtained by the Daily Mail.
Black, 35, became famous in 1999 at the age of 10, when they appeared on salacious daytime talk program “The Jenny Jones Show” to peddle the backward beliefs of their father, Klu Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Don Black and godfather, former Grand Wizard David Duke.
It wasn’t until they attended the famously progressive New College in Sarasota, Florida, in 2010 that they came to terms with their “emerging understanding of my gender identity” and disillusionment with the white supremacist movement.
“[New College’s] culture and the people I met there helped me accept that I fit under the trans umbrella,” Black wrote in the book, set to be released May 14.
According to the memoir, Black experienced gender dysphoria since they were a child, but didn’t have a grasp on what it meant.
While spouting racist rhetoric on “The Jenny Jones Show” and even in pictures of them as a child dressed as a Confederate soldier, Black sported a long, flowing haircut that seemed inconsequential at the time, but the youngster was harboring a secret joy for strangers constantly mistaking them for a girl.
“I liked the gender confusion, except in public bathrooms, where adult men always took it upon themselves to compliment my looks before telling me I was in the wrong room,” Black said.
“After puberty started, I kept my hair long, but I was able to use the bathrooms in peace, and was relieved to stop getting the inappropriate comments.”
Black’s ideological evolution grew during their college years as they began dating a Jewish woman and attending Shabbat dinners in a friend’s dorm, despite their family being “some of the most famous antisemitic activists in the country,” they wrote.
They lived a double life for the first semester of college at the New College, which Black joked regularly ranked among Princeton Review’s top 10 for schools with the “‘Most Liberal Students,’ ‘Most LGBT-Friendly,’ ‘Most Weed Friendly’ and ‘Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians.'”
Black kept their gender identity a secret from their family, and their history as an outspoken white nationalist from their school friends, despite regularly hosting the neo-Nazi radio program, the “Don and Derek Black Show” with their father on weekday mornings.
Black’s college friends discovered their dirty secret and ostracized them immediately, but Black continued hosting the radio show until 2013, when they finally publicly disowned their history of white nationalist activism.
The former racist reached their breaking point after they engaged in long, challenging conversations with their now-wife, licensed clinical psychologist Allison Gornick.
The pair married in 2020, using the lockdown as an excuse to not invite the Black family, whom they rarely speak with.
“Allison entered my life at a moment that I felt least like someone worthy of being trusted or loved. I had known even then that my loyalty to the community that raised me had led me to betray all the people who’d chosen to be close to me,” Black wrote.
“It’s impossible for me to imagine my own life story without her intervention. She showed me that I could love other people fully and unafraid, and I showed her how wide the world is and that we could experience all of it together.”
Now, Black is working as an “advocate for antiracism,” according to their social media.
In their epilogue, Black said they are concentrating on supporting other trans people “whose rights are now under vicious, loud attack in Florida.”
“I can’t imagine how horrible it would have been to grow up in the current political environment as a child who, until puberty, was quite happy about being often perceived as a girl, and who then hid that part of myself,” they wrote.
Black’s father, who served time in prison for plotting an invasion of the Caribbean island of Dominica in 1981, still runs Stormfront.