Queer History Poll
Do you know the history of the pink triangle as a symbol?
Yes
No
Do you know the history of the black triangle as a symbol?
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No
The Black Triangle, a non-exhaustive and non-academic introduction:
Disclaimer: I am not a historian or scholar and am open to being corrected if there's anything I misunderstood or mispresented.
The black triangle, just like the more well known pink one, was part of the identification codes used by the Nazis in their concentration camps. The pink triangle signified „sexual deviants“, in the eyes of the Nazis anybody who didn’t fit into their rigid, fascist ideas of what „healthy“ sexuality looked like (for the most part that was so called „race hygiene“ and the hatred of anything considered abnormal including some expressions of what we’d call queerness today).
The black triangle meanwhile stood to signify „asocials“, meaning any social outcasts, sex workers, the chronically unhoused, Sinti and Romaa, people unable to keep steady employment (many due to disability or mental illness) and anybody else that the Nazis considered “harmful elements that didn’t contribute to the Reich“.
While many of those trialed under the infamous Paragraph 175 which outlawed homosexuality and sexual deviancy who were then marked with the pink triangle were not released upon the end of the Nazi regime due to the fact that their trials were still considered legitimate because of the continued existence of said paragraph the survivors eventually gained a sliver of recognition after many decades of continued persecution and disregard.
The Nazis however did not consider female homosexuality to even exist.
Female „deviants“, meaning what we’d now consider queer women, transmasculine people and trans men weren’t regarded as that by name.
This doesn’t mean the didn’t experience harsh persecution or imprisonment, a misrepresentation that even some historians perpetuated for a long time.
Those parts of what we’d now regard as the queer community were most often sent to the camps under the symbol of the black triangle, regarded as deviants by choice and enemies of the Reich’s ideas of an ideal society by their “deviant way of life” in the same vein as the mentally ill, those unfit to work or those unable or unwilling to keep stable housing.
People regarded as women who didn’t fit the rigid norms of what the ideal „Aryan woman“ was supposed to look like and how she was supposed to behave were considered deviants and many were additionally persecuted for other aspects of their background like their ethnicity or origin.
The Nazis never formally referred to these individuals as „sexual deviants“ because to them that sort of deviancy wasn’t something women were even capable of but they nonetheless persecuted what they considered abnormal behavior harshly and imprisoned and killed among many social outcasts, ethnic minorities, queer people, deviant women and trans ancestors under that lense.
Some further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_triangle_(badge) https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/classification-system-in-nazi-concentration-camps https://dirkdeklein.net/2024/11/04/the-black-triangle-the-forgotten-victims/
