In 1942 Hitler's punishment for homosexuality was extended to death.Įach prisoner in the concentration camps wore a colored inverted triangle to designate their reason for incarceration, and hence the designation also served to form a sort of social hierarchy among the prisoners. Their sentence was to be sterilized, and this was most often accomplished by castration. Convicted offenders - an estimated 25,000 just from 1937 to 1939 - were sent to prison and then later to concentration camps. Paragraph 175, a clause in German law prohibiting homosexual relations, was revised by Hitler in 1935 to include kissing, embracing, and gay fantasies as well as sexual acts. The history of the pink triangle begins before WWII, during Adolf Hitler's rise to power. The pink triangle challenges that notion and defies anyone to deny history. Although homosexuals were only one of the many groups targeted for extermination by the Nazi regime, it is, unfortunately, the group that history often excludes. The pink triangle is rooted in World War II times and reminds us of the tragedies of that era. The pink triangle is easily one of the more popular and widely-recognized symbols for the gay community. In 1994, a huge 30-foot-wide by one-mile-long rainbow flag was carried by 10,000 people in New York's Stonewall 25 Parade. It is even officially recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers. This six-color version spread from San Francisco to other cities, and soon became the widely-known symbol of gay pride and diversity it is today. Due to production constraints - such as the fact that hot pink was not a commercially-available color - pink and turquoise were removed from the design, and royal blue replaced indigo.
The next year Baker approached San Francisco Paramount Flag Company to mass-produce rainbow flags for the 1979 parade. The flags had eight stripes, each color representing a component of the community: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit. Baker and thirty volunteers hand-stitched and hand-dyed two huge prototype flags for the parade. Borrowing symbolism from the hippie movement and black civil rights groups, San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow flag in response to a need for a symbol that could be used year after year.
Use of the rainbow flag by the gay community began in 1978 when it first appeared in the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade. The rainbow also plays a part in many myths and stories related to gender and sexuality issues in Greek, Native American, African, and other cultures. The multicultural symbolism of the rainbow is nothing new - Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition also embraces the rainbow as a symbol of that political movement. The rainbow flag has become the easily-recognized colors of pride for the gay community.