A Forgotten Past: The Pink Triangle
How did a symbol that represents pride and power against adversities start off as a form of segregation and humiliation?
The Nazi regime is regarded as one of the most dreadful periods in history, if not the worst.
Events that we have all learned in schools such as the Holocaust — in which the death toll was 11 million people — and the living conditions in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Mauthausen-Gusen, and Buchenwald are thought of with great horror and fear.
The end of World War II on September 2nd,1945 marked the culmination of an era.
Yet, the constant fighting continued for many and even nowadays some people have to hide part of who they are to protect themselves from being oppressed.
A symbol is just a symbol if you don’t know where it comes from and what it represents in the present. As my father says “write anything you think is worth telling”, so here I’ll bring you — and him — the history and the momentous change in gay activism during the 20th century that the pink triangle brought, and why it's important to speak up about this.
From The German Unification To Hitler
The roots of Nazi persecution of gay people can be traced back to 1871 when the German Unification took place.
A section of the country’s criminal code, better known as ‘Paragraph 175’, addressed intercourse between men in the following way:
“Unnatural sexual acts committed between persons of the male sex, or by humans with animals, is punishable with imprisonment; a loss of civil rights may also be sentenced.”
As the term unnatural sexual acts meant literally sexual relations between gay people, the law was difficult to enforce because individuals had to be caught red-handed if police were to arrest and punish them.
During the first two years of the Nazi regime, the law remained unchanged.
However, in 1935 the German — well, Austrian — dictator Adolf Hitler rewrote the penal code for it to contain more radical reforms as an effort to ‘purify Germany’ from all the degenerative or feebleminded that were seen as a threat to his Aryan race. This was the German eugenics movement.
“A man who commits sexual acts with another man, or allows himself to be misused for sexual acts by a man, will be punished with prison.”
The 1935 revision of ‘Paragraph 175’ implied that apart from two men engaging in sexual activity, being an outlaw was when two individuals of the same sex were either looking or touching each other in a suggestive way.
(not to mention if a gossiping neighbor started making rumors regarding your sexuality you were imprisoned right away)
This was not all.
Bars, clubs, and other places that were known to have a sizable demographic of gay people were shut down. Scientific papers about the study of sexuality were burned. Every form of expression against the Nazi Party was in flames.
Life In Concentration Camps, “The Lowest Of The Lowest”
If Jewish people were forced to wear a David Star sewn on their striped uniform, gay men wore an inverted pink triangle to distinguish them.
Prisoners in the concentration camps were segregated into eight groups and to tell each minority apart they were obliged to wear symbols with different colors.
- Jews: a yellow star
- Romani: a brown triangle
- Political prisoners: a red triangle
- Criminals: a green triangle
- Immigrants: a blue triangle
- Jehovah witnesses: a purple triangle
- Asocial: a black triangle
- Gays: a pink triangle
(prostitutes and lesbians were set in the asocial group)
Gay people were at the bottom of the camp hierarchy, being treated brutally by guards and the other prisoners. They were subjected to inanition and harsh labor.
Many were the guinea pigs for inhumane pseudoscientific experiments carried out to find a cure for homosexuality. One of the treatments was giving them testosterone in order to make them straight.
Some were even castrated.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), 100,000 men were arrested for breaking this law between the years 1933 and 1945 — about half of them terminated in prison.
It is estimated that 5000 to 15000 men were sent to concentration camps due to their sexuality and 65 percent of them perished there.
When in 1945 the Nazi regime concluded, ‘Paragraph 175’ was still enforced.
Post-war Germany: Abolition of Paragraph 175
The war had ended — for most people.
As mentioned the Nazi’s version of ‘Paragraph 175’ stayed in place after the fall of Hitler’s regime. East and West Germany stopped implementing that version in 1968 and 1969 respectively.
The 1871 version wasn’t abolished until 1994.
Even decades after everything happened, gay people still were not regarded as victims of the war.
It finally happened in 2002, the German government apologized to the LGBTQ community and annulled the convictions of homosexual men under the Nazi regime.
This was followed by the European Parliament in 2005 when it submitted a resolution including them as part of those persecuted during the Holocaust.
Within that time, a load of things happened.
Gay activism was quite present in West Germany during the 1970s, and the pink triangle began to be used as a symbol as a reminder of the painful history of the country’s anti-gay violence.
The pink triangle caught global attention in the 1980s when AIDS — before known as Gay-related immune deficiency (GRIDS) — hit the United States.
A collective called the Silence=Death Project located in New York uses the pink triangle pointing upwards to raise awareness of the AIDS crisis.
Homosexuals were rejected from medical care as it was thought that they were the source of the epidemic. The cultural prejudices against them were a barrier to receiving any kind of HIV services.
The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) used the inverted version of the triangle with the same aim as the Silence=Death Project: as a sign of defiance and resistance in face of adversity.
Once A Badge Of Shame, Now A Symbol Of Pride
Although its meaning was utterly different from its original intention, the inverted pink triangle is a symbol widely used by the LGBTQ community to show off our pride, power, and to inform about the events that will never be repeated.
Monuments such as The Pink Triangle Memorial in San Francisco (USA), the Memorial for LGBT Victims of the Nazi Persecution in Tel Aviv (Israel), and the Pink Triangle Monument in Barcelona (Spain) are some examples of how LGBTQ history is honored these days.
For an often murky and obscure world, for the thousands of people who are still being persecuted for not fitting in their society, and for the ones who have forgotten the atrocities that occurred in our human history, this is a reminder that at the end of a series of horrors a brighter change comes.
