LGBT Symbols - Triangles During World War II

Triangles During World War II

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.