White pride denied

Teen People nixes a feature on the nation's favorite preteen Aryan warblers.

Published November 28, 2005 11:27AM (EST)

Remember Lynx and Lamb Gaede, the 13-year-old white-supremacist crooners who made the news a few weeks back?

"Teen People" has reportedly killed a feature on the twins, after it became known that someone at the magazine had promised that the words "hate," "supremacist," and "Nazi" would not be used in the piece.

According to the New York Daily News, an Internet teaser for the February story referred to the sisters -- whose songs include "Aryan Man Awake" and "Weiss! Weiss! Weiss!" -- as "aspiring musicians" and compared them to the Olsen twins.

If the Olsen twins had been taught to hate minorities, played a video game called "Ethnic Cleansing" and written songs glorifying Hitler henchman Rudolf Hess, maybe. But the Teen People blurb didn't get into that angle, referring to the Gaede twins' message as a matter of simple "white pride."

People furious about the upcoming, and apparently compromised, coverage of the sister act rallied in protest outside of Time Warner, which owns Teen People.

In response, Teen People nixed the piece, and a Time Warner spokeswoman blamed the whole mess on "a junior employee" who "made unauthorized assurances to the mother of the Gaede twins regarding the prohibition of certain words in the story."

The Daily News ran their story under the headline "Mag tells 'Nazi' singers: Heil, no!"

I can't top that.


By Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister writes for Salon. She is the author of "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women" (Free Press). Follow @rtraister on Twitter.

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