I still run into people who have no idea what the pink triangle means. I had a long conversation with a very educated Jewish person a few months ago who thought me anti-semitic for equating the struggle for queer equality to the struggle for acceptance and equality for Jewish people.

I told him about the time my late Jewish partner invited Richard Plant to dinner, and I cooked for us.

Richard was the author of "The Pink Triangle," the first widely distributed history of the symbol for the general reader.

He was a gay Jew who fled Germany for Switzerland when the Nazis came to power. Eventually, he emigrated to the U.S. and taught history at Columbia, which is how my husband met him.

I told my Jewish interlocutor (the one who accused me of anti-semitism) that Richard sat at our dinner table that night fortunate that he escaped the Nazis, who would have murdered him for being either gay or a Jew.