While I quite agree with the basic thrust of your article, I feel the need to clarify just a little about pink triangle activism.

While those activists in Miami in 1977 did wear pink triangles on their lapels, that was not a common practice among gay men in the United States for self identification.

A more common method of self-identification in the 1970s was wearing a Greek lambda lapel pin, though not even that was was terribly common.

I think if most U.S. gay men had seen a pink triangle in the 70s and early '80s, they would not have known what they were looking at.

Bent began increasing awareness quite a bit when it came out, as did Richard Plant’s book, which I think had more of an impact on U.S. gay people then earlier works did.

But Richard (who was a close friend of my husband and me) wasn’t able to find a publisher until the pink triangle had really soared into public awareness because of the AIDS crisis.

It really was Act Up’s adoption of the pink triangle as its primary branding symbol that thrust the icon into everyday public awareness.

That awareness turned publishers on to the commercial possibility of Richard’s book, which in turn created a lot of awareness among LGBT people who weren’t necessarily intersecting with AIDS activists.

Sorry to thrust these observations in under your article, which is really about something else of course, but I did just want to provide a little bit of historical perspective.