The Pink Scar

The Third Reich subjected some 100,000 individuals to a pernicious anti-homosexual campaign that included censorship, surveillance, medical experimentation, and death. Credible scholarship suggests that as many as 15,000 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.

“The Pink Scar is an urgently needed book. In the face of ongoing and renewed LGBTQ+ erasure from public memory, Thomas R. Dunn’s research underscores how community members have crafted memories of Nazi persecution in inventive and purposeful ways. A scholarly authority on queer memory, Dunn expertly engages primary documents from extensive archival research and memory site visits. This book is a must-read for students of public memory and anyone interested in Holocaust and/or LGBTQ+ history.”—Pamela VanHaitsma, author of Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education

Thomas 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.

Communication Studies

           Rhetorical Studies

Gender Studies

History

           U.S.

           Twentieth-century

Rhetoric

           LGBTQ studies

           History

German Studies