Pride – Freakish or Fun

I’ve always been a big one for gay pride marches, especially when there’s a bit of trans* pride in them as well, and although I’ve only been to one so far, I love the atmosphere, and I plan to get myself to two this year, so imagine my surprise when a transwoman said that she felt they were freakish.

I can sort of understand her perspective, taking a step back – it’s taking sexuality (or gender identity, but I’m focussing on sexuality right now) and running through a town absolutely parading it for everyone and anyone to see, and  I can understand why some people might prefer that it was kept private, “what you do in the bedroom is your own affair”, but calling it freakish did seem like a step too far, to say that to dress flamboyantly for a day, and parade in public for your equal rights was making yourself into a freak.

A freak, in this context, is somebody who is visibly different from the norm, but surely in this case a straight person at pride would be the ‘freak’ (I say, flippantly) because most people are there because they’re… guess what? Gay and Proud. I don’t think being gay is a particular achievement honestly, so I can see why people would be a bit leery of the idea of being proud of it, but for so long in Western culture it’s been presented as something to be ashamed of that maybe it’s right for one day to wear it proudly.

The other irritation was that this transwoman didn’t seem to realise that if being gay and wearing not-a-lot, or wearing bright colours or feathers in public was freakish, ebcause it wasn’t normal, what about being a male bodied person wearing female clothes? Surely, by her definition, that’s just as abnormal.

She went on to rant about activists. I am an activist, I don’t want to hide who I am, I want to pave the path for other people, that they might transition more easily. I’m only alive and sane now because other people have paved that path for me, and in turn I want to do it for others, I want to be a father figure to young transboys just finding their feet in the same way Michael has done for me.

To be a freak is to be abnormal. To be abnormal is deviating from the average. Surely transpeople do that in a way that few others do? And maybe it is something to be proud of, that we have the confidence and self assurance that we can walk through the streets saying “This is who I am, and you know what? I’m not going to change that”.

I was asked if I wanted to spend my life standing in the spotlight, or trying to be as normal as possible, and do you know what? I want to spotlight it, I want to do everything I can for the next generation of GBLTQ children to have it as easy as possible. If that means that my life is a level the harder, then so be it, I’ll do that, to ease it a bit more for the ones who come after.

Pink Triangle

As most everyone knows, the pink triangle is a symbol taken directly from the Nazi concentration camps. Usually when concentration camps and Nazis are mentioned, most people tend to think of Jews and the Jewish Holocaust (for good reason). But the fact that a large number of homosexual prisoners were in those same camps is an often ignored or overlooked fact of history.

The real story behind the pink triangle begins prior to World War II. Paragraph 175, a clause in German law, prohibited homosexual relations (much like many states in the U.S. today have laws against “crimes of nature”). In 1935, during Hitler’s rise to power, he extended this law to include homosexual kissing, embracing, and even having homosexual fantasies. An estimated 25,000 people were convicted under this law between 1937 and 1939 alone. They were sent to prisons and later concentration camps. Their sentence also included sterilization, most commonly in the form of castration. In 1942, Hitler extended the punishment for homosexuality to death.

Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were labeled according to their crimes by inverted colored triangles. “Regular” criminals were denoted by a green triangle, political prisoners by red triangles and Jews by two overlapping yellow triangles (to form the Star of David, the most common Jewish symbol). Homosexual prisoners were labels with pink triangles. Gay Jews- the lowest form of prisoner- had overlapping yellow and pink triangles. This system also created a social hierarchy among the prisoners, and it has been reported that the pink triangle prisoners often received the worst workloads and were continually harassed and beaten by both guards and other prisoners.

Although homosexual prisoners were not shipped en mass to the Aushwitz death camps like so many of the Jewish prisoners, there were still large numbers of gay men executed there along with other non-Jewish prisoners. The real tragedy though occurred after the war. When the Allies defeated the Germany and the Nazi Regime, the political and remaining Jewish prisoners were released from the camps (the regular criminals- murderers, rapists, etc.- were not released for obvious reasons). The homosexual prisoners were never released though because Paragraph 175 remained West German law until 1969. So these innocent men watched as their fellow prisoners were set free, but remained prisoners for 24 more years.

In the 1970s, the pink triangle started to be used in conjunction with the gay liberation movement. When people, especially public figures such as law makers, were confronted with such a symbol, they risked being associated with the Nazis if he or she were to attempt to openly limit or prosecute gays. In the 1980s, when the triangle’s popularity truly began to take off, ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) adopted the it as their symbol, but turned it upright to suggest an active fight rather than passive resignation. I’ve also been told that some people wear their triangles pointing up if they personally know somebody who has tied of AIDS. In any case, the pink triangle is definitely a symbol very closely connected to oppression and the fight against it, and stands as a vow never to let another Holocaust happen again. Like the word “queer,” it is a symbol of hate which has been reclaimed and now stands for pride.

Copyright LAMBDA website: http://www.lambda.org/symbols.htm