Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust. By W. Jake Newsome

Abstract

Come to San Francisco in June and look up. On the eastern slopes of Twin Peaks, a garish pink triangle towers over the city. The symbol, which National Socialists first used to designate homosexual concentration camp prisoners, is meant to shock. Every year since 1996, activists have claimed an acre of hillside during LGBTQ Pride month to remind onlookers of the persecution that queer people continue to face. The pink triangle is one of the most recognizable symbols of queer politics, surpassed only by the iconic rainbow flag originally designed in 1978. Yet its ubiquity in the United States is also curious, a strange transposition of collective memory from across the Atlantic. That transatlantic exchange is the focus of Pink Triangle Legacies, W. Jake Newsome’s first monograph, which traces the triangle’s evolution from a symbol of persecution to one of liberation. In so doing, it not only delves into the history of postwar LGBTQ activism, but also asks about the specific ways that memory interacts with and even constitutes modern politics. Weaving together archival research, oral histories, and the findings of other scholars, Pink Triangle Legacies is a lovingly written book by a public historian committed to ensuring that this past will not be relegated to the ash heap of history. That is, it is both an analysis of the political uses to which memory of Nazi persecution has been put and one such political use in its own right.