Perth based electronic musician Nick Bertke, aka Pogo, has posted a video to Facebook outlining his hatred of gay people.
Betke has amassed more than 110 million views on YouTube with his compositions that sample sounds from film and television programs, but his latest video has very different content.
As a teenager when he first started out on YouTube Bertke named his channel ‘Faggotron’, later changing his moniker to Pogo. Bertke explains he chaose the name because he thinks homosexuals are an abomination.
“I’ve always had a very thorough dislike of homosexuals,” Bertke said. “I’ve never liked a grown man acting like a 12-year-old girl. I’ve always found that to be quite disgusting. And so I thought to myself, how best can I express to the world that gays are just an abomination?”
Bertke says Australians, like Americans, like to call homosexuals faggots. “I think nothing encapsulates the sissyness of a gay quite like the word faggot.”
“I have a fairly robust resentment of the gay community.” Bertke says before going on to praise the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
“I don’t want to really get into this, but when there was the Orlando shooting and the guy was shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ or something I was like (pumps fist). But yeah, I’ve got to be a bit careful with that because well, you know, I don’t like gays, but I don’t want to see people getting killed in nightclubs either. But still, I mean, it’s just fantastic.”
“It amazes me the see the west actually welcoming in a culture through the flood gates that wants gays dead.” Bertke said breaking into a laugh. “I think its fantastic.”
The video was posted on 2nd May, as it was categorised as unlisted it did not appear in the stream for his popular YouTube channel. The video only came to public attention after it was highlighted on a Reddit discussion.
Here’s the video Nick Bertke posted.
Many of Bertke’s videos feature samples from Disney movies and up until now many LGBTI people have praised his work.
Drag star Jinkx Monsoon took to Twitter to share her views on the video.
“You’re entitled to your willfully ignorant thoughts, but I’d love to know why, without any real provocation, you decided to alienate your majorative fan base with hate speech. Nick Bertke, good luck selling your music without the queer community. It’s 2018. Wake up asshole.” Monsoon posted.
UPDATE
Bertke has subsequently posted another video to a different YouTube video channel explaining that he created the first video to ‘grind people’s gears’.
The musician recalls a trip to San Francisco where a gay executive from Disney once questioned him the name of his channel. Bertke said as a teenager growing up in Perth the phrase ‘faggotron’ had a different meaning and was not a gay slur.
Bertke says he is actually opposed to “the kind of people who demand safe spaces” as argues that he created the video as a response to them.
“There is a culture of people, who have made themselves very known, especially around the time of Trump’s election, who are the sort of people who demand safe spaces, they demand trigger warnings at Universities, they call themselves adults but they require an environment akin to a creche.” Bertke said.
“These are people who are all over Twitter, anyone who has visited Tumblr in the past several years knows about this sort of person, the person who will advocate for understanding, and tolerance, and peace and love – and then the moment they hear something that they think is disagreeable they’re jumping all over the death threat button.”
Bertke said he deliberately says things that will “grind people’s gears” to draw such people “out into the open.” The musician said his video about gay people was in the same vein as previous derogatory posts he’d made about women.
Bertke says he has many friends and supporters are gay, and he was inspired to make his video after watching the work of late comedian Andy Kaufman.
“I took it too far.” Bertke said. “There is no pinch of salt big enough to be taken with what I said. It’s all good and well for me to open a valve and draw people out into the open, people I don’t like, hypocrites etc, but I feel very strongly it’s been very naive behaviour on my part.”
“If I’m going to tuck my tail between my legs and admit anything, it’s that these posts and these videos and these things I’ve made for the sake of being edgy have not contributed to any productive conversation.” Bertke said.
Bertke said he was a fan of controversial speaker Milo Yiannopoulos, but often questioned the methodology that Yiannopoulos uses.
The music producer said he was more of a fan of other right wing voices like Jordan Peterson, Stefan Molyneux, Chrsitina Hoff Sommers, Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan, and said he hoped he could become more like these people.
OUTinPerth has reached out to Bertke for additional comment.
Update: 01-06-18 17:45 YouTube have deleted the video for violating their hate speech policy.
OIP Staff
