Former Ku Klux Klan poster boy  reveals new trans identity: Explosive memoir details how son of KKK Grand Wizard escaped white supremacy cult and embraced ‘gender confusion’

R Derek Black, the child of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Don Black and a onetime poster boy for the white supremacist movement, has quietly come out as transgender.

DailyMail.com can now exclusively reveal that in the epilogue of Black’s new book, The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism, they come out for the first-time as a transgender person who uses they/them pronouns.

Black, 35, was already a well-known figure by the age of 10, when they appeared on The Jenny Jones talk show alongside white power leaders from the notoriously racist and homophobic Westboro Baptist Church.

And as a boy, Black contributed to a kids’ section of Stormfront.org – the neo-Nazi hate site run his by father.

But now, Black writes that attending the famously liberal New College in Sarasota, Florida from 2010 contributed to 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 says.

Black reveals their ideological evolution continued when they started dating a Jewish woman, despite the fact that the Black family were ‘some of the most famous antisemitic activists in the country.’

Through long, often challenging conversations with Allison Gornik – Black’s now-wife – they started to take their first tentative steps away from the neo-Nazi movement. And in 2013, Black wrote a letter renouncing white nationalism.

Black is also voicing support for 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 write.

As a child, Black says, they would grow their hair long enough to ‘put behind my ears’, and enjoyed the fact that strangers constantly mistook 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.

‘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 says.

When it came to choosing a university, Black jokes that New College regularly ranked among Princeton Review’s top ten for schools with the ‘Most Liberal Students,’ ‘Most LGBT-Friendly,’ ‘Most Weed Friendly,’ and ‘Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians’.

After Black was admitted, they tried to keep their white supremacist background a secret, but it only took a semester before they were ‘outed’ on a college chat forum.

At the time, Black was attending a study abroad program in Germany and his godfather, the founder of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke came calling.

‘David Duke drove up from his home in Austria to visit me for the day,’ Black writes. ‘I met him at a beer garden, and he gave me an impromptu tour of the highlights of the early Nazi movement.

Duke reassured his godchild that he, too, had been ‘outed’ at college.

It had been for the best, Black recalls Duke saying, because afterward Duke was free to lean into his white nationalist activism.

‘Facing the outrage of your fellow students was the forge I needed to really become the most effective activist. I should really embrace the opportunity to learn how the enemy thinks, and how intolerant they can be, he told me,’ Black writes.

However, on their return to Sarasota, rather than double down on extremist politics, Black began to assimilate even more with Jewish and minority students and even regularly attend Shabbat dinners in a friend’s dorm.

Black admits they now rarely speak to their family. 

Black’s father – who served time in prison for plotting an invasion of the Caribbean island of Dominica in 1981 – still runs Stormfront.

Black and Gornik married in 2020.

‘We had qualms about what marriage symbolized,’ Black writes. ‘It had been nearly nine years since we had met… We didn’t have a first date, because we had so ambiguously transitioned from acquaintances to friends who could talk for hours to friends who stayed over nearly every night in the same bed.

‘Throughout the early months of the year, our biggest concern had been how to keep a wedding small and relatively private without offending our families.’

Then the lockdown provided the excuse the couple needed.

‘By the end of April, while everything around us remained still, we knew we wouldn’t be able to invite relatives or friends for an in-person wedding anytime soon.

‘So we found a large cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia, suddenly vacant during what was normally prime spring vacation season, and fashioned several days of our own private marriage ceremonies, laying on couches and chairs writing letters to each other, writing our own vows, and cataloging the ways we meant so much to each other.’

Black and Gornik recorded themselves and sent an announcement to friends and family. 

‘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.

‘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.’

The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism by R. Derek Black is published by Abrams Press, May 14