page_title: Pink triangle
section_title: Gay rights symbol
hierarchical_section_title: Pink triangle / History / Gay rights symbol
caption_attribution_description: English: ACT UP 30th Anniversary Gathering Rally at the NYC AIDS Memorial at St. Vincent Triangle Park at 200 - 218 West 12th Street in the West Village in Manhattan, New York City, NY on Thursday afternoon, 30 March 2017 by Elvert Barnes Protest Photography. Follow Thursday, 30 March 2017 ACT UP 30th Anniversary MARCH &amp; RALLY event at www.facebook.com/events/204115296734664. Elvert Barnes Protest Photography at elvertbarnes.com/protestphotography
context_page_description: A pink triangle has been a symbol for various LGBTQ identities, initially intended as a badge of shame, but later reclaimed as a positive symbol of self-identity. In Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, it began as one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, distinguishing those imprisoned because they had been identified by authorities as homosexual men, a category that also included bisexual men and transgender women. In the 1970s, it was revived as a symbol of protest against homophobia, and has since been adopted by the larger LGBTQ community as a popular symbol of LGBTQ pride and the LGBTQ rights movement.
context_section_description: In the 1970s, newly active European and North American gay liberation advocates began to use the pink triangle to raise awareness of its use in Nazi Germany. In 1972, gay concentration camp survivor Heinz Heger's memoir Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel (The Men with the Pink Triangle) brought it to greater public attention. In response, the German gay liberation group Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin issued a call in 1973 for gay men to wear it as a memorial to past victims and to protest continuing discrimination. In the 1975 movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the bisexual, transvestite character Dr. Frank N. Furter wears a pink triangle badge on one of his outfits. In 1976, Peter Recht, Detlef Stoffel, and Christiane Schmerl made the German documentary Rosa Winkel? Das ist doch schon lange vorbei... (Pink Triangle? That was such a long time ago...). Publications such as San Francisco's Gay Sunshine and Toronto's The Body Politic promoted the pink triangle as a memorial to those who had been persecuted.
  In the 1980s, the pink triangle was increasingly used not just as a memorial but as a positive symbol of both self and community identity. It commonly represented both gay and lesbian identity, and was incorporated into the logos of such organizations and businesses. It was also used by individuals, sometimes discreetly or ambiguously as an "insider" code unfamiliar to the general public. The logo for the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was a silhouette of the US Capitol Dome superimposed over a pink triangle.
  Taking a more militant tone, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) was formed by six gay activists in New York City in 1987, and to draw attention to the disease's disproportionate impact on gay and bisexual men, and the apparent role of "genocidal" homophobia in slowing progress on medical research, adopted an upward-pointing pink triangle on a black field along with the slogan "SILENCE = DEATH" as its logo. 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.
  In the 1990s, a pink triangle enclosed in a green circle came to be commonly used as a symbol identifying "safe spaces" for LGBTQ people at work or in school.
  The pink triangle served as the basis for the "biangles", a symbol of bisexual identity which consists of 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.
caption: An ACT UP member displaying the organization's trademark protest sign with an inverted, upward-pointing pink triangle.
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