Navigating Allyship

The other day I was talking with a family member when they noticed both my ears had been pierced. This lead to a discussion of the 1980’s practice of signaling one’s sexual orientation by piercing only the left or right earlobe. “Nobody does that now,” I said. “If I really wanted to signal my gayness with my earrings, they’d be little pink triangles.”

“What’s a pink triangle mean?” they asked.

I was surprised, because I thought the meaning of the pink triangle was ubiquitous.

“The pink triangle was used by the Nazis during World War II to mark folks as homosexual in the concentration camps,” I said. “The symbol was reclaimed in the 70’s and 80’s, most noticeably by the AIDS activist group, ACT-UP, and paired with the slogan ‘Silence = Death’.”

The conversation veered away from the pink triangle to other “socially undesirables” and how terrible 1940’s German fascists were.

I left the conversation amazed at the power of denial and the contaminate erasure. It’s not like pink triangles were created yesterday; and I know that my family member has been aware that gay people existed ever since the character of Jack Tripper in the 1970’s sit-com “Three’s Company,” if not since my coming out in 1996 and other extended family members’ comings out before hand.

I also left reviewing a different conversation the day before I’d had with a colleague about U.S. Executive Orders and DEI, during which she reminded me, “I’m a black woman.” This jostled me out of my default observational seat at the intersection of being white, middle-class, white-collar, cis-gendered, male, and gay. I’ve concluded that I need to be less Corvallis-White-Boy Clueless and up my game as an ally.