The Misuse of "Sacred Iconography": Recuperating the Pink Triangle from Gay Liberation to Homonationalism

Since its recuperation by the second German homosexual emancipation movement during the mid-1970s, different groups have used the pink triangle in different manners. It is usually taken as a given that the symbol was used by activists, but historians have ignored the alterations in discourses surrounding its connection to identity, semantics and collective memory. In gaining transatlantic popularity over the last 40 years, we have seen a striking shift in the use of the pink triangle as a symbol of a leftist-oriented movement to its appropriation by gay groups that support right-wing, nationalist policies. This paper will examine this shift to articulate the place of collective memory in the making of homonationalist politics in Germany and the United States.

In his 2002 book L’image Survivante: Histoire de l’Art et Temps des Fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Didi-Huberman maintains that Warburg has been too easily discredited in Art History and that his idea of Nachleben (survival) is important to understand the multiple layers of meanings of an image. This paper argues that using Nachleben, historians could not only look at the visual intellectual history of the triangle, but also reconcile visual culture with Koselleck’s idea of the contemporaneity of the non- contemporaneous. Mixing Warburg and Koselleck, it is possible to make a visual conceptual history of the triangle’s multiple layers of meaning. In that sense, this paper examines the Nachleben of an indexical and symbolic image with Nazi origins, recuperated by various factions of the New Left in a transatlantic and transnational perspective, only to be ironically rediscovered by homonationalist groups at the turn of the millennium. Using present day groups like the US-American Pink Pistols and a critical approach to identity politics, this paper maps the links between the importance of queer temporalities, a future oriented form of activism and homonormativity.