User:Strand/Pink triangle

In Nazi Germany, a pink triangle (Rosa Winkel) was used as one of the Nazi concentration camp badges.

A pink triangle was used to identify queer prisoners who were homosexual men or transgender women.

Intended as a badge of shame, the pink triangle has since been reclaimed as an international symbol of LGBTQ pride and the LGBTQ  rights movement.

Nazi prisoner identification
In Nazi concentration camps, each prisoner was forced to wear a triangular concentration camp badge on their chest, the color of which identified the reason for their imprisonment. Men who were gay or bisexual and women who were transgender wore a pink inverted equilateral triangle. Lesbians and trans men wore a black triangle.

If a prisoner was also identified as Jewish, the triangle was superimposed over an inverted yellow second triangle to resemble the Star of David.

While the number assigned a pink triangle in German concentration camps is hard to estimate, Richard Plant gives a rough estimate of the number convicted for homosexuality "between 1933 to 1944 at between 50,000 and 63,000."

After the camps were liberated at the end of the Second World War, many of these prisoners were re-incarcerated by the Allied-established Federal Republic of Germany. For instance, an openly homosexual man named Heinz Dörmer, served 20 years total, first in a Nazi concentration camp and then in the jails of the new Republic. The Nazi amendments to Paragraph 175, which turned homosexuality from a minor offense into a felony, remaining intact in East Germany until 1968 and in West Germany until 1969. West Germany continued to imprison those identified under Paragraph 175 until 1994 under a revised version of the Paragraph, which still made sexual relations between men up to the age of 21 – as well as male homosexual prostitution – illegal. While law suits seeking monetary compensation have failed, in 2002 the German government issued an official apology to the LGBT community.

On August 3, 2011 Rudolf Brazda, one of the last known concentration camp survivors arrested under Paragraph 175, died at the age of 98.

Gay rights symbol
By the end of the 1970s, the pink triangle had begun to be adopted as a symbol for gay rights protest. Some academics have linked the reclamation of the symbol with the publication, in the early 1970s, of gay concentration camp survivor Heinz Heger's memoir The Men with the Pink Triangle.

By the 1980s, it was widely used – sometimes discretely, as an "insider" code – as a symbol for gay and lesbian organizations, businesses, and individuals. The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) adopted an upward-pointing pink triangle along with the slogan "SILENCE = DEATH" as its logo shortly after its formation by six gay activists in New York City in 1987. Some use the triangle in this orientation as a specific "reversal" of its usage by the Nazis. The Pink Panthers Movement in Denver, Colorado adopted a pink triangle with clawed panther print logo, adapted from the original Pink Panthers Patrol in New York City.

A pink triangle enclosed in a green circle was adopted as a symbol identifying "safe spaces" for LGBT people.

The pink triangle served as the basis for the "biangles", a symbol of bisexual identity which consists of a pink and blue triangles overlapping in a lavender or purple area. The pink and blue symbolize either homosexuality and heterosexuality, or female and male gender, reflecting bisexuals' attraction to both.

Monuments and memorials
The symbol of the pink triangle has been included in numerous public monuments and memorials. In 1995, after a decade of campaigning for it, a pink triangle plaque was installed at the Dachau Memorial Museum to commemorate the suffering of gay men and lesbians. In 2015 a pink triangle was incorporated into Chicago's Legacy Walk. It is the basis of the design of the Homomonument in Amsterdam and the Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial in Sydney. In San Francisco it inspired both the Pink Triangle Park in the Castro and the 1 acre Pink Triangle on Twin Peaks that is displayed every year during Pride weekend. It is also the basis for LGBT memorials in Barcelona, Sitges and Montevideo, and the burial component of the LGBT Pink Dolphin Monument in Galveston.

Until 1985 there was an unofficial ban on placing pink triangle wreaths at the United Kingdom war memorial the Cenotaph, and such wreaths were removed as soon as they were found by officials.

In popular culture
In the 1975 movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the transvestite main character Dr. Frank N. Furter wears a pink triangle badge on one of his outfits.