Nowadays, one of the many symbols the gay community uses to showcase our power and pride is the Upside Down Pink Triangle. But that's the exact opposite of the reason it was created.
Back in 1871, homosexuality was made illegal across Germany, but the police hardly ever arrested anyone for being gay back then.
That was until the Nazi party rose to power in 1933, in the beginnings of what would later be known as World War Two. The Nazi Party believed in what's called the Aryan race, meaning they believed everyone should have blonde hair, blue eyes, and they wanted to radically and culturally purify Germany.
In their movement to do so, they arrested millions of people, including LGBTQ individuals who they viewed as degenerate. But in order to tell one community apart from another in their concentration camps filled with millions of prisoners, the Nazis came up with symbols sewn onto everyone’s shirts to tell everyone apart.
The Upside Down Pink Triangle
Jews were forced to wear yellow stars, brown triangles for Romanian people, red for political prisoners, green for criminals, blue for immigrants, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, black for asocial people, including prostitutes and lesbians, and a pink upside down triangle for gay men and women.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates around 100,000 gay men were arrested and up to 15,000 were placed in concentration camps. And a majority of those who were sent to these camps never survived. In fact, an estimated 65% of the gay men who were sent to these camps were murdered immediately after arrival.
But at the camps, gay men were treated as the lowest class citizens by, both, the Nazi prison guards and other prisoners of war.
Even after the war was over, the gay men and women in these concentration camps, and other gay men who were taken prisoner at the time, were never released until the early 1970s, more than 25 years after all other prisoners of war were let go free.
In 1973, the Pink Triangle was reclaimed as a symbol of homosexual liberation by Germany's first gay rights organisation called the 1.
Nowadays, the pink triangle and all of the LGBTQ victims of World War Two are honoured at Memorial around the world, including Tel Aviv, Israel, Manchester, England, Berlin, Germany, Sydney, Australia, Amsterdam, Netherlands. And Frankfurt, Germany.
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