From: cjmchale@dsg.cs.tcd.ie (Ciaran McHale)
Subject: Re: question about the triangle
Organization: DSG, Dept. of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 21:15:52 GMT

In <1993Jan24.130204.10122@iscsvax.uni.edu> weaverli0469@iscsvax.uni.edu writes:
>Just a quick question : What does the triangle stand for? I see them every so
>often at the bottom of people's notes...

This would make a good candidate for inclusion in the FAQ posting.

In the Nazi concentration camps, during WWII, one or more coloured
triangles, about 6cm along a side, were sewn into prisoner's clothing.
The colour of the triangle signified what that person's crime was. Pink
was used to indicate homosexual men and yellow for Jewish men. If a
prisoner was a gay and Jewish then the triangles overlapped---one up,
one down---to form a Star of David. There were other colour categories
too for gypsies, political prisoners, common thieves etc. There was no
specific category for lesbians so they were given the same coloured
triangle, black, as another group (I forget which group this was).

From this origin of oppression, the pink triangle has been reclaimed to
be a symbol of gay pride. The black triangle has been similarly
reclaimed but it not as well-known as its pink counterpart.

Somewhere along the line, the pink triangle as a gay pride symbol was
modified to produce a bisexual pride symbol. The result is
overlapping pink and blue triangles, with the pink one being in
front and slightly to the right. On some versions, the overlapping
part of the triangles is shaded in whatever colour you get when you mix
pink and blue together.

If you are interested, the following book provides some more details.
It includes a table on page twenty-something or thirty-something which
gives the triangle colour coding scheme used to designate prisoner
categories.

@book{history-2,
          author =	"Heinz Heger",
           title =	"{The Men With the Pink Triangle}",
       publisher =	"GMP Publishers Ltd.",
         address =	"P.O.~Box~247, London~N15~6RW, England.",
            year =	"1986",
          series =	"Gay Modern Classics",
            note =	"ISBN~0-85449-014-0. ISBN~0-907040-03-9~paperback.
			\pounds 3.95",
	   blurb =	"A unique first-hand account of the life and death of
			homosexual prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps",
	  annote =	"Very enlightening. This book paints a very different
			picture of concentration camps to that which I had
			previously seen. It is also an account of the use of
			the pink triangle in concentration camps."
}

I know that there is another book which deals with gay men in
concentration camps, but I do not know what it is called.

Coloured triangles cannot be reproduced on ASCII terminals, but you may
sometimes see triangles in the .signatures at the end of postings. Some
bisexual posters try to reproduce the overlapping triangle effect while
others use a sinle triangle with "bi" written inside it, as follows:

	----
	\bi/
	 \/


Ciaran.
-- 
---- Ciaran McHale (cjmchale@dsg.cs.tcd.ie)
\bi/ Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland.
 \/  Telephone: +353-1-7021539 FAX: +353-1-6772204
Newsgroups: soc.bi