Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust

By William Jake Newsome

Pink Triangle Legacies traces the transformation of the pink triangle from a Nazi concentration camp badge and emblem of discrimination into a widespread, recognizable symbol of queer activism, pride, and community. W. Jake Newsome provides an overview of the Nazis' targeted violence against LGBTQ+ people and details queer survivors' fraught and ongoing fight for the acknowledgement, compensation, and memorialization of LGBTQ+ victims. Within this context, a new generation of queer activists has used the pink triangle—a reminder of Germany's fascist past—as the visual marker of gay liberation, seeking to end queer people's status as second-class citizens by asserting their right to express their identity openly.

The reclamation of the pink triangle occurred first in West Germany, but soon activists in the United States adopted this chapter from German history as their own. As gay activists on opposite sides of the Atlantic grafted pink triangle memories onto new contexts, they connected two national communities and helped form the basis of a shared gay history, indeed a new gay identity, that transcended national borders.

Pink Triangle Legacies illustrates the dangerous consequences of historical silencing and how the incorporation of hidden histories into the mainstream understanding of the past can contribute to a more inclusive experience of belonging in the present. There can be no justice without acknowledging and remembering injustice. As Newsome demonstrates, if a marginalized community seeks a history that liberates them from the confines of silence, they must often write it themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501765490

Book preview

Pink Triangle Legacies

Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust

W. Jake Newsome

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For my grandfather,

Richard Dick Moseley, who was a master storyteller

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: "Beaten to Death, Silenced to Death

1. They Are Enemies of the State!: The Fate of LGBTQ+ People in Nazi Germany

2. For Homosexuals, the Third Reich Hasn’t Ended Yet: Paragraph 175 and the Nazi Past in West Germany

3. The Only Acceptable Gay Liberation Logo: The Reclamation of the Pink Triangle in West Germany

4. It’s a Scar, but in Your Heart: The Pink Triangle in American Gay Activism

5. Remembrances of Things Once Hidden: Piecing Together the Pink Triangle Past on Stage and on Page

6. We Died There, Too: Commemoration and the Construction of a Transatlantic Gay Identity

Epilogue: Remembering Must Also Have Consequences

Appendix A: Timeline of Key Events

Appendix B: Memorials to Gay Victims of the Nazi Regime

Appendix C: Memorials with Pink Triangle for LGBTQ Victims of Violence

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I’ve heard it said that historical research is a lonely endeavor. It’s true that I spent a lot of time alone in front of the computer, with my nose shoved in a book, or rummaging around in archives. But one of the most rewarding parts of researching and writing this book has been meeting so many wonderful and insightful people who passionately gave their time and knowledge. This work is truly a reflection of and tribute to a collaborative spirit, a culmination of voices that transcend decades, continents, and languages. It is my genuine honor to acknowledge my gratitude to the following people who made this book possible.

Over the past ten years, I worked with some outstanding archivists and librarians who are committed to preserving America and Germany’s LGBTQ+ history. I owe a debt of gratitude to the following individuals: Rainer Hoffschildt (Schwullesbische Archiv, Hanover); Albert Knoll (Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site) and the rest of the team at the Forum Queeres Archiv München (Munich); Friedrich-H. Schregel (Centrum Schwule Geschichte, Cologne); Jens Dobler, who was at the Schwules Museum in Berlin at the time; Andrew Elder and Libby Bouvier (the History Project, Boston); Paul Fasana (Stonewall National Museum and Archives, Fort Lauderdale); Marjorie Bryer (GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco); and Morgan Gwenwald (the Lesbian Herstory Archives, New York). I’m especially grateful to my friend Jo-Ellen Decker (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC) for her assistance in navigating the Arolsen Archives to piece together the documentation necessary to tell the stories of men arrested under Paragraph 175 in Nazi Germany.

I will always remain thankful to my doctoral advisory committee at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) for their guidance and keen insights: Andreas Daum, my adviser and friend; Susan Cahn, who patiently helped me appreciate gender and sexuality as a way of approaching history and understanding the human experience; and Sasha Pack, who prompted me to think about what the pink triangle can teach us about European history more broadly. I’m also thankful to Geoffrey Giles, who provided invaluable feedback throughout my research and writing of the manuscript.

I also want to thank the professors at Valdosta State University who so greatly influenced me as a student, a scholar, and a person. Charles Johnson was my undergraduate adviser and taught me the discipline it takes to write history. He also taught me to look up from the books and learn from the world around me. In many ways, I owe my outlook on life as a scholar and as a person to Matthew Richard. His cultural anthropology courses taught me to think critically and approach questions with an interdisciplinary mind-set. Most importantly, though, Matthew instilled in me a deep conviction that education should be a form of activism, a force for positive and meaningful social change in the world. Words can’t capture my appreciation for Ofélia Nikolova, a larger-than-life character with a keen intellect and a heart as good as gold. I’ll always be thankful for Ofélia’s encouragement, which made this boy from rural southwest Georgia feel confident enough to stand before crowds of scholars and present his ideas.

This book would not have been possible without the following people who agreed to give their time and share their memories with me during interviews: Patrick Carney, Jok Church, Eli Erlick, Avram Finkelstein, Jose Gutierrez, Peter Hedenström, Gerard Koskovich, Jörg Lenk, Corbyn Lyday, Crystal Mason, Klaus Mueller, Roland Müller, Nancy Nangeroni, Joan Nestle, Lesléa Newman, Ted Phillips, Mark Segal, and Martha Shelley. In addition to sitting for interviews, the following folks helped me above and beyond by connecting me with other sources and providing feedback over the course of months as I sifted through new information: Morgan Gwenwald, Jonathan Ned Katz, Jim Steakley, David Thorstad, Brian Howard, and the other members of the Silence = Death collective who reviewed passages of the manuscript.

The following folks helped decipher material, recommended leads, and helped me think through ways of understanding and talking about experiences that I’ve not been through: Robert Beachy, Tiffany Florvil, Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, Craig Griffiths, Dominique Grisard, Anna Hájková, Samuel Huneke, Jay Irwin, Sébastien Tremblay, Angelika von Wahl, Richard Wetzell, and Wiebke Haß (and the other members of the Initiative of Autonomous Feminist Women and Lesbians from Germany and Austria who read and provided feedback on key passages of material). Thank you for your exchange of ideas.

The members of my grad school writing group provided friendship, feedback, and support in this project’s earlier iteration: Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Elisabeth George, Maggie Magdalena, Kathryn Lawton, and Colin Eager. In addition to colleagues, we were all friends, exploring Buffalo together, making our presence known on the local trivia circuit (Citation Station all the way!), and singing until we were hoarse on karaoke nights. Proud Mary, keep on burning.

I am thankful for the keen eye and sound advice of the following scholars who read my manuscript (in part or in its entirety) or discussed it with me at length, providing invaluable feedback: Debórah Dwork, Dagmar Herzog, Annette Timm, Jennifer Evans, Laurie Marhoefer, Betsy Anthony, Sara Brinegar, Kierra Crago-Schneider, Alexandra Lohse, Dallas Michelbacher, and Katharine White.

I would like to thank Mrs. Anne Tirone, whose endowed fellowship funded my research and writing. Miz Anne is a kind and philanthropic soul, and I am deeply grateful for her continued friendship over the years. Several organizations provided financial support at different stages of this project: The German Historical Institute (Washington, DC), the University at Buffalo (UB) College of Arts and Sciences, the UB Department of History, and the UB Graduate Student Association’s Mark Diamond Research Fund.

I am thankful to Emily Andrew, who started out as my editor at Cornell University Press, for seeing the potential in this project before I did and for motivating me to submit a manuscript proposal. I am also grateful to Allegra Martschenko at Cornell for her observant eye and critical perspective as we navigated the process of image selection for the book. And to the wonderful team at Cornell —Jennifer Savran Kelly and Glenn Novak in production and copyediting, Rebeca Brutus, Mia Renaud, and Brock Schnoke in marketing, and Scott Levine in design—thank you for your belief in and dedication to this project. The insightful feedback from my manuscript’s anonymous readers led to revisions that truly made this a better book. As any scholar knows, an index is an invaluable component of a book. I am thankful to Lisa DeBoer for her expertise in crafting this book’s index. And finally, to my editor at Cornell, Bethany Wasik, thank you for your skill and guidance in bringing this book to print.

I also appreciate the support of my friends. Slaton Whatley has been my best friend since the second grade and has been enthusiastic about this project from its infancy to publication. To the Guthrie Gang: thank you for supporting me and Dennis and for always listening to my impromptu history lectures on our street happy hours. To Kim Blevins-Relleva, Becca Cook, and Kerry Phipps: You are my chosen family. It is no exaggeration to say this book would not have made it over the finish line without you. In addition to reading passages and providing feedback, brainstorming new ideas, and loving this project as much as I do, you selflessly hyped me up and gave love, laughs, and optimism, which were especially needed during the global pandemic. Thank you.

Words cannot express how thankful I am to my family. My mother, Tammy, has taught me many things about life, but I am always humbled by her deep sense of compassion for humanity. And in my opinion, a good work of history is an act of compassion; it gives a voice to those who have been silenced and marginalized. My father, Clay, who comes from a long line of farmers, supported my decision to become a historian. He and my stepmother Christy instilled in me perseverance and a strong work ethic. To my brothers, Luke and Cayden, thank you for always making me laugh. Studying the Holocaust is a dark endeavor, but you always give me something to smile about. My grandmother, Nanny Judy, nurtured my love of the past, and if I ever complained in high school that history was boring, she insisted that either the teacher wasn’t teaching it right, or I wasn’t really paying attention. As usual, she was right. This book is dedicated to my late grandfather, Papa Dick, who taught me to love hearing and telling stories. I can’t count how many times we would be piddling around in the barn only for something to cause him to stop, smile, and say, That reminds me of a story. And after all, one of the primary privileges of a historian is to be humanity’s storyteller. My great-aunt Dale and my late great-aunt Cheryl taught me what it’s like to have groupies! Any time I was in Florida for research or to give a lecture, they would drive to see me, no matter where in the state I was. They both modeled a selfless and fierce love.

My son, Roman, came into this world just as I was sending this manuscript off to the publisher. Thank you for making me a papa. And then there’s my husband, Dennis. We met during my first semester in the PhD program, and he has been with me (and this project) from the very beginning. He has participated in hours upon hours of impromptu lecturing and brainstorming, read countless drafts of chapters, expressed (feigned?) excitement over every new discovery in the archives, and attended more history conferences than he ever thought he would … all while being an IT specialist. I have no doubt he is as much an expert on this history as I am, whether he wants to be or not. Dennis, thank you for having confidence in me and for loving me, especially on the days when I felt I couldn’t escape the darkness of this history. But, above all, thank you for taking me on surprise adventures along the way, for dancing in the kitchen with me, for daydreaming about our future together, and for simply being you. I love you.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Beaten to Death, Silenced to Death

It was a brisk evening with a blanket of stars overhead as we walked across campus. It was mid-February, but the palm trees, fronds gently rustling, were a reminder that winter had no bite in south Georgia. Picturesque Valdosta State University had been my home for four years, and although it had only been two months since I graduated, I was excited to be back on familiar ground and point out to my family the history department, the best place to grab a burger on campus, and my favorite spot to sit and read on the front lawn. Checking my watch, I guided us to the science center, which housed the largest auditorium on campus. As we entered the building, I could not have anticipated that the lecture I was about to hear would ultimately shape the trajectory of my life.

The room was packed with faculty, students, and members of the local community. As we settled in seats near the top of the room, a projector beamed the title of the lecture onto the screen: Suppressed, Silenced, and Shunned: The Story of the Pink Triangle Prisoners in Hitler’s Reich. The speaker—Dr. Susan Eischeid, a professor on campus—provided a detailed history of the fate of gay men and lesbians during the Third Reich. When the Nazis came to power, they sought to crack down on all expressions of gender and sexuality that did not conform to their ideals. Of all LGBTQ+ people, gay men were viewed by the Nazis as the most dangerous threat to their plans for a new Germany, so they ruthlessly enforced a national law that they had inherited, which criminalized unnatural indecency between men. They quickly amended the existing statute, Paragraph 175, giving themselves unprecedented legal authority in their campaign against homosexuality. Ultimately, the Nazi regime arrested one hundred thousand men for violating Paragraph 175. Between seven thousand and ten thousand men were sent to concentration camps, where their uniforms were marked with a pink triangle.¹ Lesbians and others whose sexuality or gender existed beyond the norms of the time were not subject to arrest and prosecution under Paragraph 175 but faced other forms of persecution as the Nazis destroyed the vibrant and dynamic societies that queer Germans had built for themselves during the Weimar Republic. While lesbians were not targeted as a group, their ability to live openly was shattered, as they were expected to conform to the Nazi expectations of German motherhood and womanhood. Apart from the occasional gasp or sniffle brought forth by the horrors of the history narrated by Eischeid, the audience in the south Georgia auditorium remained silent, too stunned to shift in their seats or whisper among themselves.

At the conclusion, my family and I exited the auditorium, but there was no light banter. I was lost in thought, mired in a state of confusion. As an undergraduate student, I had taken every course at Valdosta State on World War II, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. By my final year, I was quite confident—with a certainty that only comes with the self-assuredness of youth and inexperience—that I knew everything there was to know about the Third Reich and the Holocaust. As we walked to our car that February night in 2010, I wondered how I had studied this history for four years and never learned about what happened to people we would today call members of the LGBTQ+ community.² Of course, homosexuals had been included on the obligatory list of other victims in the Holocaust history books I had read, but it became embarrassingly clear that I did not know anything beyond that. Why hadn’t I learned more? Why had I never thought to ask about the fate of this community, especially as a young, gay man in the process of figuring out my own identity and connection to the LGBTQ+ community?

When I followed up on these inquiries, the answer I repeatedly found was deceptively simple: homosexuality had remained illegal and such a strict taboo after the Holocaust that no one, neither historians nor gay survivors themselves, spoke about the fate of queer communities in Hitler’s Germany for decades. It seemed that queer people were among the so-called forgotten victims of the Nazi regime, and knowledge about their lives was lost to a deafening historical silence. As frustrating as this answer was, it made sense to me at the time. How could we know something that had never been documented? How could historians write a history with evidence that simply was not there?

With the same level of self-assuredness and naïveté, I began my doctoral program driven by the conviction that I would be the one to break the silence and force society to remember what it had either forgotten or never acknowledged. In preparation for my research, I discovered that a handful of scholars (mostly gay and lesbian themselves) had been researching and publishing on this topic since the late 1970s. As my German language skills improved, a whole body of research became available to me. I realized that generations of scholars before me had made great strides in documenting what happened to queer people in the Third Reich. But what about the three decades between the end of World War II and the publication of the first scholarship on the topic? I traveled to German archives to explore what led to the supposed postwar silence. When I arrived, I did not expect to find any material from the decades after Nazi Germany’s defeat.

To my surprise, I found mountains of material: court records, compensation applications, police files, military reports, and even a handful of firsthand accounts from queer survivors themselves. It quickly became apparent that no one had forgotten the Nazis’ gay victims—not the Allies governing Germany during the occupation period, not West German government officials who rejected gay concentration camp survivors’ petitions for recognition, not the public who repeated rumors and stories they had heard, not the generations of mainstream scholars who wrote exclusionary histories, not the archivists who destroyed files on gay victims to make room for more archive worthy material,³ and not the denazification commissions that wrote letters to gay survivors explaining that only seven months in a concentration camp did not constitute sufficient suffering to qualify for compensation.⁴ The wave of West German gay activists, journalists, and researchers who, beginning in the 1970s, forced their society to acknowledge this part of their nation’s past had clearly not forgotten either. Where I had expected to find silence, I found a cacophony of voices, a full orchestra of memories. But it was an orchestra without echo in the mainstream historical narratives.

This revelation led me to an entirely new set of questions. Why had the work of queer scholars about queer people not been integrated into mainstream education about the Holocaust, even by the time I was studying it in the first years of the new millennium? What were the implications of this selective telling of the past? What does it mean to forget the suffering of an entire community? These questions were the impetus for the project that became this book, and the answers led me in surprising directions. What began as an interest in what happened to queer people in Nazi Germany evolved into an investigation of memory making, social activism, and the inner workings of historical scholarship that spanned decades and continents.

As much as my research revealed about a set of certain historical events, it also illuminated the morals, values, and priorities of societies that chose to forget those events. This book, however, is not just about the individuals and institutions that used their authority to decide who should be considered a victim of Nazi injustice. At the heart of the book are the queer people whose voices the mainstream had silenced and ignored. This is a history of people who tapped into their own courage and chose to risk their reputations and their lives by coming out, building communities, acting in solidarity, and writing themselves into history. The following pages trace their resilience as they found ways to navigate the tools of silence—social taboos, legal oppression, governmental bureaucracy, and moral condemnation—to articulate their voices, share their stories, and preserve the memory of Hitler’s gay victims. If my work is about the destructive force of silencing, it also illustrates the inspiring and creative power of remembering.

This book is a comparative study of how governments and citizens in West Germany and the United States simultaneously mediated the meaning of the Nazi past and the understanding of the present through public debates, museum exhibits, governmental policies, and the construction of memorials. It chronicles a history of agency, action, and meaning making. During the second half of the twentieth century, the history of the Nazi persecution of queer people became a site of negotiation about the definition of sexual identity, victimhood, and justice in relation to the rights and privileges of citizenship. This is the first book to use a transnational approach to trace how personal and collective memories about the fate of queer communities in the Holocaust helped establish historical roots that nourished the formation of a modern, transatlantic gay identity.

The pink triangle holds unique significance in the LGBTQ+ community. Yet this book delineates phenomena that resonate beyond a particular group. Tracing the financial, legal, and social repercussions of the initial denial and eventual acknowledgment of Hitler’s gay victims lays bare how conceptions of the Holocaust era and the Nazis’ victims changed over time in Germany and the United States.

This book traces stories that traverse oceans and span nearly ninety years. To tell this long and complex history, I chart the transformation of a symbol at the heart of it all: the pink triangle. Originating as a concentration camp badge, the pink triangle was used by the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel) to identify men imprisoned in concentration camps for being gay. For those men, the pink triangle meant torture, degradation, humiliation, and in all too many cases, death. Decades later, gay activists—first in West Germany and then in the United States—imbued the symbol with new meaning as they fought for legal and social equality. Embodied in the pink triangle, history became a tool to combat discrimination in the present as gay activists used it to press the governments of West Germany and the United States to distance themselves from the violent and murderous antihomosexual policies of the Third Reich. In the context of gay activism, queer communities transformed the pink triangle from a badge of damnation, shame, and imprisonment into a visual marker of resistance, pride, and liberation. The specter of the Nazi past empowered a transnational social movement for the rights of queer citizens on both sides of the Atlantic. As the use of the pink triangle spread across western Europe and North America, so too did a sense of shared historical roots, which helped lay the foundations for a modern gay identity that transcended national boundaries.

Sources

To write this book, I stand on the shoulders of scholars who have dedicated their careers to researching the experiences of LGBTQ+ people during the Holocaust in a time when one could still face discrimination and hostility for doing so: Rüdiger Lautmann, Hans-Georg Stümke, Günter Grau, Claudia Schoppmann, Burkhard Jellonnek, Elizabeth Heineman, Geoffrey Giles, Laurie Marhoefer, Rainer Hoffschildt, Anna Hájková, and so many others whose work made my own possible.⁵

My work contributes to the foundation of new scholarship on the postwar legacies of the Nazis’ violent campaign against homosexuality. Recently, researchers have explored specific manifestations of pink triangle memories, a shorthand I use throughout to refer to collective remembrances of the Nazi persecution of queer people. These studies focus, for example, on the role of the pink triangle in social activism, the development of fictional accounts of queer people in the Holocaust, and the construction in Berlin of the national memorial to the Nazis’ gay victims. Each of these studies provides invaluable insight into the creation of these acts of remembrance. This book deploys a broader lens, however, and builds on the pioneering work of Jennifer Evans, Dagmar Herzog, Erik Jensen, Dorthe Seifert, and Angelika von Wahl, as well as the recent innovative work by a new generation of scholars, like Craig Griffiths, Samuel Huneke, Sébastien Tremblay, Christopher Vials, and Christiane Wilke, among others.⁶ I analyze the politics of pink triangle memories in a comprehensive temporal and spatial context. Only by examining these memory practices together over time and space is it possible to discern the deeper and most significant transformations of memory, citizenship, and identity formation, and the transatlantic nature of these transformations, none of which is reflected in the current literature.

I draw upon a wide range of source materials to construct and analyze the legacies of the pink triangle: autobiographical accounts, the gay and mainstream presses, novels and stage plays, parliamentary debates, political manifestos, and social activist posters and flyers. I also conducted interviews with over twenty-five individuals in Germany and the United States to learn how the pink triangle resonated with people from diverse backgrounds and experiences as men, women, gay, bi, lesbian, nonbinary, cisgender, transgender, white, and persons of color.⁷ This range of sources allows me to showcase queer voices from the archives and in their own words.

In each of the chapters, I unpack the unique conditions that led to specific expressions of pink triangle memories. In examining these cultural artifacts collectively, it becomes apparent that the particular pink triangle memories, whether in the form of Broadway plays or historical scholarship, are part of broader legal and cultural debates about homosexuality, victimhood, national belonging, and identity among queer communities and the wider public in the former West Germany and the United States.

Although this originates as a West German history, members of the gay liberation movement in the United States also began to discuss and politicize the Nazi past in the 1970s. As these activists wrote letters to their West German counterparts and traveled to meet in person, they shared stories, gossiped, swapped political strategies, and pieced together a gay history that queer people could claim as their own, no matter one’s nationality. The establishment of this history was vital to the formation of a collective queer identity. Mark Segal was only eighteen at the time of the famous Stonewall riots in New York City. He immediately joined the Gay Liberation Front in 1969. Our whole purpose was to create our own identity and to begin to create our own community. For Segal, gay liberation in the present went hand in hand with exploring the gay past. Part of community building was beginning to look at our history. How do you have pride in yourself unless you know your history and what you’ve contributed to civilization? And part of that is knowing: What has civilization done to you?⁸

All the while, activists on both sides of the Atlantic created and distributed buttons, T-shirts, stickers, banners, and posters emblazoned with the pink triangle. Thus, the pink triangle—as a political symbol and collection of memories—became a visible marker of personal identity, gay history, and social activism that fostered a sense of solidarity and shared roots among queer communities across national contexts.

Grafted Memories

The transfer of ideas, memories, and historical information is not static. Understandings of a topic change as they are introduced in a new setting and to new audiences. As we seek to make sense of ourselves and our place in the world, we collect bits and pieces of memories, narratives, and histories, bringing them together into a constant state of reassessment and transformation as we mold the boundaries of our identities. Our understandings of the past help root who we are in time and place. As historian Robbert-Jan Adriaansen writes, Identity has to be actively constructed by recalling past events, through which individuals or collectives can ‘fixate’ themselves in time by emphasizing historical continuities or discontinuities.⁹ In our process of fixating our identities in history, we pull from a myriad of sources: personal experiences, books, movies, anecdotes from friends or family, national myths, and even common knowledge that we may not even know where we learned in the first place.

Scholar Marianne Hirsch offers the concept of postmemory to help explain how individuals and communities seek to establish a relationship with the past by embracing the memories of previous generations, even though they themselves did not experience those memories firsthand. Hirsch writes, Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by [personal] recall, but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.¹⁰ Recent scholarship by Sébastien Tremblay illustrates how this process is reflexive. As history and memories of previous generations help shape identities in the present, the process of identity formation can also influence understandings of the past. As West German gay activists established a collective political identity, they also sought to articulate a newly-discovered, collective gay past.¹¹ Beginning in the 1970s, the gay movement integrated pink triangle memories into gay activism, history, and identity in West Germany, even though none of the activists themselves had lived through the Nazi regime.

Hirsch’s postmemory is useful in explaining how a generation of West German gay activists in the 1970s sought to relate to previous generations of queer Germans who lived and suffered during the Nazi regime. To understand the complex, transatlantic processes that allowed gay communities in the US to adopt German memories as their own, I offer the concept of grafted memories. The metaphor implies that although memories may originate externally, they ultimately become enmeshed in one’s own subjective memory and sense of place in history.¹² As memories of Nazi persecution were grafted to fit an American context, they were enriched with meanings that were both common to and distinct from their German origins. But, like medical grafts, grafted memories only function successfully if they are a good fit. These memories of a gay German history fit American activists because they, too, were gay. Historian Michael Rothberg writes that the complex nature of memory is a source of powerful creativity, offering the ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones.¹³ As West German and US gay activists grafted pink triangle memories into new contexts, they not only connected two separate national communities. They used this powerful creativity to build something new. The formation and grafting of transnational pink triangle memories helped form the basis of a shared gay history, indeed a shared gay identity, that transcended borders.

These gay activists claimed to represent the demands of all gays and lesbians as an international political minority. In reality, they represented just one, specific idea of what it meant to be gay. Rooted in local understandings of selfhood, sexual identity, community, and social activism, theirs was a definition that not all people with same-sex desires, orientations, or identities accepted. There were people who were attracted to the same sex—and who may have lived openly as such—but who felt that this facet of their lives did not define them as a person; therefore, they did not identify with the gay rights movement. However, the coming out of individuals, the formation of gay organizations, and the adoption of a gay liberation logo all created an awareness among gay and lesbian people that there were others like themselves throughout the nation, indeed the world, who shared not only similar sexual desires or orientations and a long history of persecution, but an aspiration to engage in political activism as well. For countless queer West Germans and US Americans, the pink triangle came to represent the process of coming out and publicly claiming a gay identity. Thus, tracing the dispersal of the pink triangle—worn by individuals in gay rights marches and appearing on flyers plastered on park benches, train station walls, and throughout university campuses—also tracks the spread of a certain, politically active gay identity.

In the process of formulating this political gay identity and its corresponding pink triangle past, the politics of memory within the queer community itself resulted in the marginalization of specific voices. In focusing so heavily on the role of Paragraph 175—which applied only to men—and the experience of gay men in concentration camps, gay activists and scholars explicitly or implicitly excluded the stories of lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and other queer people from the pink triangle memories that began to proliferate in the 1970s. Later, gay male historians and activists concretized this trend through scholarship and commemoration ceremonies that focused only on the men with the pink triangle. Amid the discussions over memorials to the Nazis’ gay victims—especially the national memorial in Berlin—many gay men asserted that only gay men should be memorialized since the Nazis did not use a specific law to target lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Just as queer voices had been erased from the history of the Holocaust, gay male scholars and activists marginalized the history of lesbian, bi, and trans people from pink triangle memories. Despite the tireless efforts of lesbian activist-scholars beginning in the 1980s, the narrow focus on the fate of gay men shaped the common understanding of gay history during the Holocaust and the other pink triangle legacies for decades.

Although the pink triangle originally represented a specific expression of what it meant to be gay, the wonderfully polyvalent nature of symbols meant that other individuals could claim and use the pink triangle as a marker for queerness, and then imbue the symbol with a meaning of their own choosing. Ultimately, the pink triangle resonated with LGBTQ+ people from diverse experiences and backgrounds. This book captures some of those stories that demonstrate the pink triangle was never simply a political tool. It had a much more profound meaning for people like gay Latino activist Jose Gutierrez. The symbol’s history made it powerful and compelled him to wear it beginning in the 1980s. "The triángulo rosa is a burning memory. It’s a scar, but in your heart. It may be healed, but it’s a reminder of the pain that the LGBTQ community has gone through in history."¹⁴ Others felt that the pink triangle did not represent their queerness or their sense of self at all. This book charts the creation and evolution of this now iconic symbol through time, even as it acknowledges its limits.

A confluence of historical factors converged in such a way that queer people in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, former East Germany) engaged to a lesser extent with the transnational history and identity embodied by the pink triangle. Some East German gay activists used the pink triangle during demonstrations, but this occurred far less frequently than in West Germany or the US. The specific context of the socialist GDR meant that gay East Germans navigated another set of political and cultural realities in addition to different expectations and understandings of the relationship between sexuality, selfhood, society, and the state.¹⁵ Gay activists using the pink triangle in West Germany and the United States could relate to the new transatlantic gay identity in a way that those in the GDR did not. As historians Josie McLellan, Scott Harrison, Samuel Huneke, and Teresa Tammer have