"I was abhorred by the fact that the discrimination and dehumanization continued simply because they were homosexual. "A big motivation and inspiration for keeping the annual San Francisco Pink Triangle display going was learning that after the camps were liberated, and all of the other prisoners were let go, the gays were then put back in prison," he explains. "It was particularly disheartening because it happened during the 40th anniversary of New York's Stonewall Riots, which are generally regarded as the beginning of the modern LGBT rights movement," Carney recalls.Īfter 20 years of installing the triangle, we asked Carney what keeps him motivated. The placards explaining the triangle's significance were also vandalized. In 2009, the Pink Triangle was struck by an arsonist who burned approximately 20-30 feet of tarp in the middle of night. We like to stay back and observe people reading the signs which describe the project and hear how they all universally seem to say, 'I didn’t know that.' It means the education process is working."
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"We install numerous placards along the edge of the tourist overlook, which is a few feet above the top edge of the triangle. "Although The Pink Triangle is now large, perhaps the most gigantic aspect of the display is not its size, but how many people it has hopefully educated and inspired," Carney says. You might be able to catch a glimpse of the goat in a few days when they are sent back up there to clear out the area again." "In order to take care of this, The Mayor's office asked DPW last year to send up some goats to eat some of the weeds and poison oak. "After doubling in size the first time, it was moved north into what was then a meadow." Carney notes that there's been a bit of an issue with non-native plants taking over the area. "When the Triangle was first installed back in 1996, it was aligned more directly with Market Street," Carney tells Hoodline. The intense wind on the hill shreds the tarps over time, though 12-inch spikes and washers help to hold it all down.
It has grown in size many times, requiring more and more hands with each expansion, and now takes up nearly an acre of hillside on Twin Peaks. The Pink Triangle is made up of 175 bright pink tarps and two pieces of 200-foot by four-foot pink sail cloth. "In the 1930s and '40s, the pink triangle was used by Nazis in concentration camps to identify and shame homosexual prisoners and differentiate one 'undesirable' group from another." Carney realized that in using the symbol, he could spread knowledge about its history while appropriating it for good. "To many people, the pink triangle is a brightly colored graphic image which has come to represent the LGBT movement, and there is often no connection to the tragic history of how the symbol came about," he explains. In working on the project, Carney realized how many people were unaware of the symbol's use in Nazi Germany. Just a few weeks later the Pink Triangle of Twin Peaks was born." "We noticed a huge blank canvas right outside the window: Twin Peaks. "My friends and I were sitting in a restaurant on Market Street, wondering how we could spread the weekend's festivities to other parts of the city," recalls Carney, an architect and San Francisco resident of 35 years. Carney tells Hoodline that the triangle started as an attempt to add a little extra color-pink, it turned out-to the 1996 Pride Parade. The triangle was founded by Thomas Tremblay, Michael Brown, and Patrick Carney.
For every Pride since 1996, the Pink Triangle has appeared as if by magic to overlook the celebration juxtaposed against the weekend's revelry, some may not know that the symbol-200 feet across and visible from over 20 miles away-was used to label homosexual prisoners under Nazi Germany before becoming a mark of local LGBTQ pride. Pride weekend, held this year on June 27-28, will mark the 20th Pink Triangle installation on Twin Peaks.