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Overview
This 1981 Gay Pride Week poster has been designed within a pink triangle, one of the key symbols of the modern gay rights movement. The pink triangle originated as a badge in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War, identifying men convicted for sexual deviance, including homosexuality. It was reclaimed by the gay rights movement after the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969 as a symbol of empowerment, and for some, a symbol of remembrance for those who suffered during the war.
Visibility through Gay Pride events was a key strategy in the long fight to achieve homosexual law reform in New Zealand (achieved in 1986). Before the radical New Zealand Gay Liberation Movement began in 1972, there was very little protest to be seen in public. Annual Gay Pride Weeks saw small groups of brave individuals invested in making visible what had been previously hidden. ‘Coming out’ was as much a political act as it was personal.
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