The Pink Scar

How Nazi Persecution Shaped the Struggle for LGBTQ+ Rights

Thomas R. Dunn

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780271100722
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Holocauste

The Third Reich subjected some one hundred thousand individuals to a pernicious anti-homosexual campaign that included censorship, surveillance, medical experimentation, and death. Credible scholarship suggests that as many as fifteen thousand were interned in concentration camps, though the actual names and numbers of all those who suffered and died will never be known.

Today, prevailing historical narratives hold that the persecution of homosexuals under Hitler was "discovered" in the 1970s by a post-Stonewall gay and lesbian community, who were the first to use these tragic events—emblematically symbolized by the pink triangle—to advance the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights around the world. The Pink Scar tells a different story. This book shows that Americans had ample opportunity to learn about this persecution before and during the war and explores how activists in the United States made Hitler's anti-homosexual campaign a central, animating force in their arguments at almost every major turning point in the lesbian and gay struggle since 1934.

Victims of the Nazi regime were among the most important and the most contested symbols in the history of lesbian and gay rights rhetoric—perhaps even more contested than the pink triangle itself. This book shows us how, nearly one hundred years after Hitler came to power, remembering the people persecuted by the Nazi regime is once again essential for defending LGBTQ+ rights in a new age of growing fascism and anti-queer/trans oppression.

Table of contents

• COVER Front
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Chapter 1: Virile and Valiant Anti-Fascists Challenging the Myth of the Homosexual Nazi,1934–1935
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Chapter 2: Vagrants and Outlaws Remembering Nazi Laws to Fight the American Gestapo, 1949–1965
• Notes to Chapter 2
• Chapter 3: Habitual Skeptics Remembering Incarceration and Medical Experiments in Gay Nazi-Exploitation Pulps, 1966–1969
• Notes to Chapter 3
• Chapter 4: Spectral Siblings Remembering Our Ghostly Brothers and Sisters as Martyrs for Gay Power, 1970–1977
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Chapter 5: Lambs to the Slaughter Harvey Milk, Memories of Shame, and the Myth of Homosexual Passivity, 1977–1979
• Notes to Chapter 5
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index