Horacio Villalobos/Corbis/Getty ImagesĪfterwards, it began cropping up in other LGBT circles around the world. Memorial plaques for homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Wehrmacht deserters are placed where once stood one of the demolished barracks in Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. “At its core, the pink triangle represented a piece of our German history that still needed to be dealt with,” Peter Hedenström, one of HAW’s founding members said in 2014. The next year, post-war Germany’s first gay rights organization, Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin (HAW), reclaimed the pink triangle as a symbol of liberation. In 1972, The Men with the Pink Triangle, the first autobiography of a gay concentration camp survivor, was published. The early 1970s was also when the gay rights movement began to emerge in Germany. (The law was not officially repealed until 1994.) Even after World War II, both East and West Germany upheld the country’s anti-gay law, and many gays remained incarcerated until the early 1970s. “There was no solidarity for the homosexual prisoners they belonged to the lowest caste,” Pierre Seel, a gay Holocaust survivor, wrote in his memoir I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror.Īn estimated 65 percent of gay men in concentration camps died between 19. Corbis/Getty ImagesĪt the camps, gay men were treated especially harshly, by guards and fellow prisoners alike. (Brown triangles were used for Romani people, red for political prisoners, green for criminals, blue for immigrants, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses and black for “asocial” people, including prostitutes and lesbians.) Homosexual prisoners at the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany, wearing pink triangles on their uniforms on December 19, 1938.
Just as Jews were forced to identify themselves with yellow stars, gay men in concentration camps had to wear a large pink triangle. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates 100,000 gay men were arrested and between 5,000 and 15,000 were placed in concentration camps.
As part of their mission to racially and culturally “purify” Germany, the Nazis arrested thousands of LGBT individuals, mostly gay men, whom they viewed as degenerate. Homosexuality was technically made illegal in Germany in 1871, but it was rarely enforced until the Nazi Party took power in 1933. It wasn’t until the 1970s that activists would reclaim the symbol as one of liberation. In Nazi Germany, a downward-pointing pink triangle was sewn onto the shirts of gay men in concentration camps-to identify and further dehumanize them.
You’re now looking at the modified version that was created in Colorado in 2017 by the University of Northern Colorado poly community, according to their website.Pink Triangle Affixed to Gay Men’s Clothes in a Nazi Concentration Campīefore the pink triangle became a worldwide symbol of gay power and pride, it was intended as a badge of shame. The history: It can be traced all the way back to Jim Evans in 1995, who “wanted to create an anonymous symbol for the polyamorous community,” according to the Gender & Sexuality Resource Center at University of Northern Colorado. “The infinity heart sign represents the infinite love for multiple partners at the same time,” according to the Gender & Sexuality Resource Center at University of Northern Colorado. And the infinity heart sign on top of all the colors is truly where you see its meaning. “Polyamory is a form of consensual nonmonogamy that emphasizes emotional connection among multiple partners,” says Elisabeth Sheff, PhD, author of The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-Partner Relationships and Families, who previously told Cosmopolitan.
The meaning: First, it’s important to understand the term.