For this reason, the tattoo was always on the wrist where it could hide behind a wristwatch. Police had a list of names of known lesbians. Kennedy and Davis also said the local police in Buffalo, New York knew about the practise, so it was very risky. ‘This was the first symbol of community identity that did not rely on butch-fem imagery,’ they wrote. They explained: ‘The cultural push to be identified as lesbians – or at least different – all the time was so powerful that it generated a new form of identification among the tough bar lesbians: a star tattoo on the top of the wrist, which was usually covered by a watch. Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy’s 1993 book Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community explains the phenomenon. In the late 1940s and 50s, some lesbians got a nautical star tattooed on their wrist as a signal to other lesbians. ‘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.’ Jeff Ingold got a tattoo of the pink triangle with the date of his coming out. 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. Note: If someone has one of these tattoos, it does not mean they automatically identify with the explanations below 1. Here are the most common LGBTI-inspired tattoos and what it means to the people who got them. There are also examples of lesbians in the 1940s and 50s literally wearing their sexuality on their sleeve by getting a particular tattoo (but more on that later). He said: ‘I was overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of so many of these figures… as the impulse of many homosexuals to be considered more masculine – by the addition of a tattoo – grew stronger.’ Steward believes tattoos became a symbol of masculinity for gay men, closely tied with the gay leather community. He continued: ‘Following the national release of the movie The Wild One with Marlon Brando the original motorcycle film, it seemed to crystallize or release, the obscure and long-hidden feelings of many homosexuals.’ Steward said: ‘One change, however, came about in the homosexual attitude towards tattoos around 1954.’