FIRST GAY HOLOCAUST COMIC RELEASED
A ground-breaking French graphic novel has been released depicting the persecution of gays by the Nazi regime during the Second World War.
Titled Triangle Rose (or Pink Triangle), it tells the story of Andreas, a “cheerful and romantic” gay designer and art teacher in 1930’s Berlin.
As laws are enacted against homosexuality, he is imprisoned and later forced to marry a lesbian woman.
The comic book was created by Michel Dufranne, Milorad Vicanovic-Maza and Christian Lerolle and is described by the site Graphivore as an accessible, well-plotted “cartoon history” in sepia tones, drawn with deep sincerity.
The exact number of people who were persecuted during the holocaust because of their sexual orientation is unknown, but some estimates suggest that about 54,000 homosexuals were arrested by Nazis with 7,000 to 10,000 killed in concentration camps.
The pink triangle symbol, now used by the gay rights movement, is based on the pink triangle used to mark homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that, after the liberation of the concentration camps, the gays were re-arrested and made to complete their sentences in jail under Paragraph 175 of the German law (funny how Nazi law was still considered to have its place). They also didn’t receive any compensation offered to other groups. It also took until 1994 for the law to be repealed, and about another 10 for the German government to apologise, by which time most of them were dead.