Why the Pink Triangle?
   The wearing of the Pink Triangle stems from the Holocaust.
   You may remember that the Jews were forced to wear yellow stars of
David on
   their sleeves to alert everyone to their Status as Jews. You may
not be aware
   that the Stars of David were not the only symbol that people were
forced to
   wear. Gay men were forced to wear the Pink triangle, and Lesbians,
prositutes,
   and other "socially undesirable" women were forced to wear a black
triangle.
   By marking their victims in this manner, the Nazis made it easy to
find their
   targets in the crowd.
   [...]

    While all Jews had to wear a the Yellow Star always (often with a
capital J distorted to remind one of Hebrew writing in the center),
all the triangles wer used only in the concentration camps.  They
established sort of a hierachy within the prisoners as well, with the
green ones (regular criminals) at the top and the pink ones at the
bottom.

    Jews accused of some other ``crime'' carried there two triangles,
the one indicating their crime, point down, an atop of it a yellow
one, point up.--All these signs had to be worn at the top left of the
chest and, in the CCs, on the outside of the left trouser leg.

    A good account of gays in the CCs is given in Robert Plant's book
``Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals'' (H. Holt & Co.,
ISBN 0-8050-0600-1).  The author, a gay leftist Jew, escaped from
Germany in the early thirties, first to Switzerland, then to the USA.
There he was secretary of Klaus Mann and worked with the military
propaganda during WWII.  Today he's retired and lives in New York (I
think).  (I think our friend Louie Crew knows him.)

    The publication of this book caused Martin Sherman to write his
play ``Bent'' about gay men in the concentration camps (Amber Lane,
ISBN 0-906 399-09-2).--A personal account of what's happened to gays
in the CCs is given in Heinz Heger's ``The Men with the Pink Tri-
angle'' (Alyson, ISBN 0-932 870-06-0).

 - Wilhelm