Triangles During World War II
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One of the oldest of these symbols is the pink triangle, which originated from the Nazi concentration camp badges that male homosexuals were required to wear on their clothing. Many of the estimated 5–15,000 gays and lesbians imprisoned in concentration camps died alongside the 6,000,000 Jews whom the Nazis killed during The Holocaust. For this reason, the Pink Triangle is used as an identification symbol and as a memento to remind both its wearers and the general public of the atrocities that gays suffered under Nazi persecutors. AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) adopted the inverted pink triangle to symbolize the “active fight back” against HIV/AIDS “rather than a passive resignation to fate.”
The pink triangle was used exclusively with male prisoners—lesbians were not included under Paragraph 175, a statute which made homosexual acts between males a crime. However, women were arrested and imprisoned for "antisocial behavior," which included feminism, lesbianism, and prostitution, and was applied to women who did not conform to the ideal Nazi image of a woman: cooking, cleaning, kitchen work, child raising, and passivity. These women were labeled with a black triangle. Lesbians reclaimed this symbol for themselves as gay men reclaimed the pink triangle.
| Pink Triangle | Black Triangle | Pink & Yellow Triangles | Nazi Chart |
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Read more about this topic: LGBT Symbols
Famous quotes containing the words triangles, world and/or war:
“If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides.”
—Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689–1755)
“It is clear that everybody interested in science must be interested in world 3 objects. A physical scientist, to start with, may be interested mainly in world 1 objects—say crystals and X-rays. But very soon he must realize how much depends on our interpretation of the facts, that is, on our theories, and so on world 3 objects. Similarly, a historian of science, or a philosopher interested in science must be largely a student of world 3 objects.”
—Karl Popper (1902–1994)
“... it is a commonplace that men like war. For peace, in our society, with the feeling we have then that it is feeble-minded to strive except for one’s own private profit, is a lonely thing and a hazardous business. Over and over men have proved that they prefer the hazards of war with all its suffering. It has its compensations.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)