This article was published in The Gazette.
The pink triangle symbolizes the violence that LGBTQ people have faced and continue to face. At the same time, it symbolizes how our communities have come together again and again to demand our rights and celebrate our lives and our loves.
A history of the pink triangle could begin in 1871 when Paragraph 175 became part of the criminal code of a newly unified German state. For nearly 100 years, German law enforcers used Paragraph 175 to define the sexuality of gay men and trans women as immoral and dangerous.
Or it could begin in 1933 when Nazis began sending men and trans women arrested under Paragraph 175 to concentration camps. All prisoners were ordered to sew badges onto their uniforms. Jewish badges were yellow; the Roma were brown; political dissidents, red; Pink triangles were given to the estimated 7,000-10,000 men and trans women arrested under Paragraph 175. Lesbians, classified as “asocial,” wore black triangles.
On the other hand, a history of the pink triangle could begin in the late 1960s when gay men in Germany rose up to call for an end to Paragraph 175 and for reparations for the gay and trans survivors of the Nazi Holocaust.
Or, in 1979 when the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Rights Coalition established Pink Triangle Day as an annual celebration on Feb. 14. Or, in 1987 when activists across North America added the slogan SILENCE = DEATH to the pink triangle to call for better treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS.
Some of these historical starting points remind us to take the rising threats to LGBTQ communities very seriously. Others remind us that LGBTQ pride and capacity for action are formidable. I feel the value of all of them.
But on this Pink Triangle Day, I am looking again at a family photograph taken 99 years ago. My grandmother is 12, just a bit younger than my kids are now. She and her older cousin Lotte Eifert are at a costume party. Lotte was one of the 5,000 Jews who would survive the Holocaust in hiding in Berlin.
My grandmother is wearing a black corset over a white blouse. Lotte is in a tie and lederhosen. Standing side by side, they look sort of like a traditional southern German couple.
In 1926, when this photo was taken, the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin was making tremendous strides in the care of minority genders and sexualities. The Institute pioneered the first gender-affirming surgeries in the world and partnered with the Berlin police to issue certificates to protect trans Germans from arrest.
A few years later, around the same time that the Institute for Sexual Science was raided and shut down by the Nazis, my grandmother and her immediate family left Germany forever. Lotte was already established as a high school teacher by then. When Lotte received a notice demanding that she report to the fascist authorities, her friends and colleagues took her aside and said, “Don’t go, we’ll take care of you.” They got her new identification papers and shared their rations with her.
Nazis gave pink triangles only to people assigned male at birth so Lotte wouldn’t have been made to wear one as a young woman even if she had been caught. Did she choose to wear one later in solidarity with growing gay and lesbian rights movements? I have no idea.
But Lotte’s story is very much on my mind as new waves of transphobia and homophobia are surging in the U.S., Canada and around the world. I’m thinking of Lotte’s courage, yes, but how her courage would have been next to useless were it not for the courage of her friends and colleagues who understood the hateful German laws for what they were and who, at the risk of their own lives, refused to comply.
Thus my wish for LGBTQ people and our allies everywhere today: May we be as lucky as Lotte. May we be as courageous as Lotte’s friends.
Danielle Bobker is professor of English and fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University. She is author of The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy.
