The former poet laureate for the city of Philadelphia was revealed this week to be a former band member of a punk group that advocated white supremacy and white nationalism.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Wednesday that Frank Sherlock, the city’s poet laureate from 2014-2015, previously played in the group “New Glory” and described the group’s racist agenda to a British magazine in the 1980s.
{mosads}“We are white nationalists,” Sherlock said in 1988, according to the Inquirer. “Subsequently, we hold our beliefs of white power for white people. The Aryan people must forge their own destiny, free from the rule of an alien occupational government that serves no representation to the American white masses.”
Sherlock confirmed his past membership of the group in an interview with the Inquirer and said that he was “mortified” by his past views.
“I’m mortified, and not just that somebody found out, but that it happened at all,” he told the newspaper.
“I got into other bands that were a little more right-wing,” Sherlock continued. “Unity is the theme, and then it’s like pride, and the next step is like, you know, just wanting to have your own thing and blaming other people for your problems. It’s like the transition that we see today. All those dog whistles are the same.”
Sherlock was given the title of poet laureate in 2014 by the city’s black mayor, Michael Nutter (D), whose office did not return requests for comment from the Inquirer. His past membership in the band was revealed originally by Amy Saul-Zerby, another poet in the city, after she discovered the information and had a contentious argument with him at a bar, according to the Inquirer.
In a statement, Saul-Zerby said that she was “troubled by the fact that it had been hidden from his closest friends.”