The Pink Scar

How Nazi Persecution Shaped the Struggle for LGBTQ+ Rights

Thomas R. Dunn (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

220 Seiten

2025
Pennsylvania State University Press (Verlag)
978-0-271-10015-9 (ISBN)

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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.

Thomas R. Dunn is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. He is the author of Queerly Remembered: Rhetorics for Representing the GLBTQ Past and the founder and director of the Queer Memory Project of Northern Colorado.

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. | Virile and Valiant Anti-Fascists: Challenging the

Myth of the Homosexual Nazi, 1934–1935

2. | Vagrants and Outlaws: Remembering Nazi Laws

to Fight the American Gestapo, 1949–1965

3. | Habitual Skeptics: Remembering Incarceration

and Medical Experiments in Gay Nazi-Exploitation

Pulps, 1966–1969

4. | Spectral Siblings: Remembering Our Ghostly

Brothers and Sisters as Martyrs for Gay Power,

1970–1977

5. | Lambs to the Slaughter: Harvey Milk, Memories

of Shame, and the Myth of Homosexual Passivity,

1977–1979

Conclusion: Never Again, Never Forget,

1981–1987

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	22.10.2025
Reihe/Serie	Troubling Democracy
Verlagsort	University Park
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	472 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Kommunikationswissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-271-10015-X / 027110015X
ISBN-13	978-0-271-10015-9 / 9780271100159
Zustand	Neuware