(Pink Triangle with text "SILENCE = DEATH") The local variants I have seen of this flag ( Baltimore and District of Columbia, United States) are black with an inverted pink triangle.Ī similar design is the organizational symbol of Queer Nation. Queer Nation's transgender focus group, Transgender Nation, created T-shirts and banners based on the pink on white version. The triangle, flown as a "gay" flag, is usually shown on white. The use now is an attempt to turn a stigma into a mark of pride. The pink triangle was never used, at least for gays, before the Nazis, as far as I know. The pink triangle dates from Nazi-era stigmatization of homosexual prisoners by forcing them to wear the pink triangle much as Jews had to wear the yellow star. The rainbow is a symbol of gay pride, as opposed to gay liberation, which used the pink triangle on various colored fields.Īlthough it was first used in Nazi Germany to identify gay males in concentration camps, the pink triangle only received widespread use as a gay pop icon in the early 1980s.