I basically am now restricted from taking my top off in quite a few countries worldwide for fear of arrest. ‘ is such an open display of essentially how proud I am that I’m gay. He said: ‘I wanted something that was actually so obviously gay and a little shocking to look at. James Stannah said he wanted something super gay so he got two Tom of Finland-inspired men kissing. LGBTI people can get a myriad of tattoos that represent their gender identity or sexuality. ‘This is who I am, this is my history and I won’t be ashamed of showing it off,’ he added.īisexual people also have a version of the pink triangle with a blue triangle linked. Ingold continued: ‘Along with that, my dad once told me he wished I didn’t wear my sexuality on my sleeve so much.’ He said: ‘I got this tattoo to remember all those who came before me, who fought and died for our rights and also, to place myself in that history.’ Jeff Ingold wanted to make his triangle tattoo special so he got a triangle outline, with the date he came out in the middle. He said: ‘I got it to feel like part of a community whilst remembering the horror that had befitted some that had went before. Greg Baillie got his pink triangle tattoo on his wrist so he can hide it under his watch if he ever feels unsafe. ‘It gives me an opportunity to say out loud in public that I’m a gay man,’ he said. McGlynn is a teacher and says his pink triangle tattoo isn’t as obviously gay as a rainbow flag, so his students often ask him about it. ‘I was angry and I wanted to have my queerness permanently written on my body as a “fuck you” to the fear of being visibly queer in public,’ he said.
‘At the time, it really brought home the physical violence that’s still directed at queer people. ‘I got it after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida,’ Nick McGlynn told Gay Star News. Many LGBTI people now proudly show off their tattoo pink triangles. How LGBTI people reclaimed the pink triangle
The symbol went from being a badge of shame, to a symbol of pride. Since then, activists have used the symbol in various campaigns since, including in protests last year over concentration camps in Chechnya. The organization used it in arguably its most famous campaign poster: Silence = Death. Instead of using the upside down triangle – as the Nazis did – activist Avram Finkelstein came up with using it the right way up. In the early 80s, organization ACT-UP used the pink triangle to try to raise awareness in the midst of the AIDS crisis. The earliest accounts in America date back to 1977, where LGBTI activists in Miami pinned pink triangles to their clothes to protest housing discrimination. When eye witness accounts and personal testimonies emerged several decades later, LGBTI activists began reclaiming the symbol. They also performed dangerous experiments on them to find cures for typhus fever and homosexuality.Īccording to estimations, between 5,000 and 15,000 gay people died in German concentration camps. Nazis tortured the gay prisoners by castrating some of them and sodomizing them with items like broomsticks.
In fact, one scholar says these gay prisoners were the ‘lowest of the low’ in the hierarchy of the concentration camps. In Nazi Germany in the mid-1940s, gay prisoners in concentration camps were forced into wearing pink triangles as a badge of shame.