triangles-roses.org. La persécution des homosexuels sous le régime nazi.

 

 

 

 

actualité de la répression dans le monde - juin 2003

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28 juin 2003 - San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Pink Triangle Park honors Gay Holocaust victims

 
Gloria H. Lyon, a Hungarian Jew, was 14 when she arrived with her father during World War II at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz/ Bergen-Belsen.

There, she had the number A-6374 tattooed onto her left forearm, where it is still visible today.

Lyon remembers men and women at the camp with pink triangles on their striped prisoners' uniforms, signifying that they were homosexual.

"We saw them work hard," Lyon, who is not gay, said in impromptu remarks to about 100 people gathered for the dedication on Monday of the Pink Triangle Park and Memorial on 17th Street just west of Castro Street.

"We saw them being abused," Lyon told the crowd of Holocaust survivors, neighbors and luminaries, such as Supervisors Susan Leal and Tom Ammiano and immigration attorney Robert Jobe. "We saw them being deprived of their rights. We saw them being starved to death. We saw them being beaten."

Eureka Valley and Castro neighbors, city politicians and local historians say lesbians and gays who died in concentration camps now will be honored by the park, the overall design of which encourages reflection and remembrance -- and reaching for meaning in chaos.

"I think it means San Francisco is reaffirming its commitment that pink triangles will never be a symbol that is negative, that they, in fact, can become an inspiration" for activism against discrimination, Mayor Willie Brown told The Chronicle after dedicating a plaque at the park on Monday.

The 3,000-square-foot Pink Triangle Park rests on what used to be a litter- filled area in the shadow of the former City Athletic Club (now a gay youth shelter). A 15-pylon sculpture created by Oakland artist Susan Martin and San Francisco artist Robert Bruce flanks a footpath at the park's east end.

Each 5-foot-tall triangular pylon is composed of Sierra granite and topped with an inset pink granite triangle. Taken together, the pylons form a triangle when viewed from the base of the large rainbow flag at Market and Castro streets.

The rest of the park is laid out with brown Forest Floor Bark, said Richard Sullivan, who owns Enchanting Planting, a landscaping business. Sullivan oversaw installation of the park, which was designed by architect Jason Rowe. The garden includes shrub roses (some blooming in pink), native California sages with purple blossoms, blue oak grass under the sculpture pylons, New Zealand flax and Australian fuchsia, a ground-covering shrub with pink blossoms.

The footpath is inset with a large triangle with small bits of pink quartz that Sullivan's crew spent hours chipping off, using mason's lump hammers.

The park was conceived two years ago by Joe Foster, a resident of the area and treasurer of the Eureka Valley Promotion Association, which played a key role in its development.

Foster says he was inspired by an exhibit created by the Gay Museum of Berlin, called "Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945," and by the documentary "Paragraph 175," produced by award-winning San Francisco filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. The film premiered at the 2001 San Francisco lesbian and gay film festival.

At that time, the park area had been decorated with 60 pink rosebushes -- donated by Reagans Nursery in Fremont as part of a cleanup effort through the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Beautification. Wendy Nelder, the beautification office's director, unearthed $60,000 of city money for the area.

That helped pay for the pylon sculpture, which was completed last summer.

Foster says there was a general feeling the sculpture wasn't working well aesthetically with the rosebushes, so he suggested a memorial to those lost in the Holocaust. Neighbors agreed, and ground was broken on the memorial in December. Monday's event, Foster said, was "the completion of the physical landscaping and sculpture, and the beginning of a way to tell the full story of the pink triangle."

That's a key element of public memorials, according to San Francisco historian Gerard Koskovich, a board member of the local Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Historical Society and the general delegate for the United States to the French organization Memorial de la Deportation Homosexuelle, one of many groups worldwide ensuring that the pink triangle story get its due.

"Any form of public history is about finding the crucial meaning in the past that we can use to live in the present," said Koskovich, noting that similar memorials exist in Amsterdam and Frankfurt, Germany. Others are planned for Berlin and for Strasbourg, France. "It's about transforming individual memories into collective memory."

Koskovich said that cultural neglect (and revulsion) stemmed the telling of pink triangle story for years after the war -- a thought not surprising to Ammiano, who is gay.

"We're always afflicted . . . by being invisible and having our trauma denied," Ammiano told The Chronicle at Monday's event. "Today is a very important symbol that that can change."

Becoming visible is, in part, about social contact, and Eureka Valley Promotion President Gustavo Serina said the experience of creating the park "shows what neighbors working in partnership with the city can accomplish."

He added, "We've reclaimed this awful piece of dirt and turned it into something that's very welcoming and beautiful. It's also a part of reclaiming our history."

-- Dave Ford, SF Chronicle
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Site Internet du Pink Triangle Park :
www.pinktrianglepark.org
 
26 juin 2003 - Associated Press

U.S. Supreme Court strikes down ban on gay sex

 
The Supreme CourtThe Supreme Court struck down a ban on gay sex Thursday, ruling that the law was an unconstitutional violation of privacy.

The 6-3 ruling reverses course from a ruling 17 years ago that states could punish homosexuals for what such laws historically called deviant sex.

Laws forbidding homosexual sex, once universal, now are rare. Those on the books are rarely enforced but underpin other kinds of discrimination, lawyers for two Texas men had argued to the court.

The men "are entitled to respect for their private lives," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote.

"The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime," he said.

Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer agreed with Kennedy in full. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor agreed with the outcome of the case but not all of Kennedy's rationale.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.

The court "has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," Scalia wrote for the three. He took the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench.

"The court has taken sides in the culture war," Scalia said, adding that he has "nothing against homosexuals."

Although the majority opinion said the case did not "involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter," Scalia said the ruling invites laws allowing gay marriage.

"This reasoning leaves on shaky, pretty shaky grounds, state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples," Scalia wrote.

Thomas wrote separately to say that while he considers the Texas law at issue "uncommonly silly," he cannot agree to strike it down because he finds no general right to privacy in the Constitution.

Thomas calls himself a strict adherent to the actual words of the Constitution as opposed to modern-day interpretations. If he were a Texas legislator and not a judge, Thomas said, he would vote to repeal the law.

"Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources," Thomas wrote.

The two men at the heart of the case, John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner were each fined $200 and spent a night in jail for the misdemeanor sex charge in 1998.

The case began when a neighbor with a grudge faked a distress call to police, telling them that a man was "going crazy" in Lawrence's apartment. Police went to the apartment, pushed open the door and found the two men having anal sex.

"This ruling lets us get on with our lives and it opens the door for gay people all over the country," Lawrence said Thursday.

Ruth Harlow, one of Lawrence's lawyers, called the ruling historic.

"The court had the courage to reverse one of its gravest mistakes and to replace that with a resounding statement," of gay civil rights, Harlow said.

"This is a giant leap forward to a day where we are no longer branded as criminals."

As recently as 1960, every state had an anti-sodomy law. In 37 states, the statutes have been repealed by lawmakers or blocked by state courts.

Of the 13 states with sodomy laws, four -- Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri -- prohibit oral and anal sex between same-sex couples. The other nine ban consensual sodomy for everyone: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia.

Thursday's ruling apparently invalidates those laws as well.

The Supreme Court was widely criticized 17 years ago when it upheld an antisodomy law similar to Texas'. The ruling became a rallying point for gay activists.

Of the nine justices who ruled on the 1986 case, only three remain on the court. Rehnquist was in the majority in that case -- Bowers v. Hardwick -- as was O'Connor. Stevens dissented.

"Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today," Kennedy wrote for the majority Thursday.

Kennedy noted that the current case does not involve minors or anyone who might be unable or reluctant to refuse a homosexual advance.

"The case does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other, engaged in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle. Their right to liberty under (the Constitution) gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government."

A long list of legal and medical groups joined gay rights and human rights supporters in backing the Texas men. Many friend-of-the-court briefs argued that times have changed since 1986, and that the court should catch up.

At the time of the court's earlier ruling, 24 states criminalized such behavior. States that have since repealed the laws include Georgia, where the 1986 case arose.

Texas defended its sodomy law as in keeping with the state's interest in protecting marriage and child-rearing. Homosexual sodomy, the state argued in legal papers, "has nothing to do with marriage or conception or parenthood and it is not on a par with these sacred choices."

The state had urged the court to draw a constitutional line "at the threshold of the marital bedroom."

Although Texas itself did not make the argument, some of the state's supporters told the justices in friend-of-the-court filings that invalidating sodomy laws could take the court down the path of allowing same-sex marriage.

The case is Lawrence v. Texas, 02-102.

ANNE GEARAN
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, June 26, 2003


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