I wore a pink triangle on almost all my clothing for over a decade, because both Act Up and Queer Nation adopted the pink triangle as symbols of resistance. But to this day there remains very little public consciousness of what the symbol means.

Even for people who know, it’s not always a full knowledge.

I corresponded just the other day with a curator of a well-known art museum who wrote an article for his institution about the Holocaust. He included the pink triangle and mentioned that gay and trans people had been interred in the death camps — which is great, because that often gets left out of popular histories.

I wrote to ask him in future articles to please mention that people wearing the pink triangle were not liberated from the death camps but were instead handed over to German civil authorities as criminals.

He wrote back quite graciously and told me he would do so, but then he said something that honestly astonished me.

He didn’t know. I was the first person to point that out to him.

This man has a PhD in art history and curates historical art exhibits at one of the nation’s top museums. Yet somehow in his entire educational and professional life, he had never run across that historical fact.

It’s gobsmacking in a way.