The Pink Triangle

The Pink Triangle was a publication focused on strengthening the gay liberation movement. It provided a platform for radical issues in New Zealand such as queer rights, Māori land rights, abortion, feminism and much more.

The Pink Triangle was a lesbian and gay newspaper published in New Zealand by the National Gay Rights Coalition of New Zealand (NGRC). Beginning officially in May 1979, original editors Hugh Gaw and Jan Gee chose the name to identify with the persecution of gays and lesbians during the Holocaust by the Nazis. The symbol had moved “from a symbol of degradation to a symbol, it has been adopted by the international gay community as a symbol of pride.”[1] Having chosen their name, they sought to spread their message throughout the gay community in New Zealand and raise political awareness for liberated gays and lesbians.

Pink Triangle’s pages were littered with advertisements and notices for other lesbian and gay groups throughout New Zealand and the world. The National Gay Rights Coalition advertised the names and locations of their constituent groups throughout New Zealand and how often they met, in an effort to build their network and membership.[3] Pink Triangle also attempted to build more global coalitions and look beyond lesbian and gay activism in New Zealand. Their subscription notices list prices for both the United Kingdom and the United States, aiming to grow and support gay movements abroad. They also published news about homosexuality in different countries, spanning from warrants for the arrest of Ayatollah Khomeini to news about homosexuality in China and London.[4]  

Because Pink Triangle drew its ideas and theory from US gay liberation, feminism formed an important part of its ethos in the earliest issues. Attempts to give equal weight to lesbian and gay issues are clear, as well as the institutional setting of having two editors, one gay man and one lesbian woman. The editors noted “we now have two editors… this is an encouraging move in the co-operation of all gay people against the fight against the oppression of sexism.”[5] This coalition did not always produce a fruitful or cordial alliance. Reflecting earlier patterns of lesbian-feminist separatism in the United States, lesbian feminists who read Pink Triangle challenged gay men on their sexism, and at one point issued a stark warning to gay men “unless male homosexuals seriously consider the questions lesbian-feminists are posing, there can be no united homosexual movement.”[6]

Commitment to a wide range of radical causes at the time permeated the pages of Pink Triangle, including radical and lesbian feminism but also environmental conservation, Māori land rights, and international student rights. In a tirade against the government’s ignorance of a Human Rights Commission report, the editors railed against the “anti-woman laws on abortion, the government’s vicious activities on Māori land rights, and racist policies on fees for international students.”[7] They also published contact details for groups like Greenpeace, making clear their commitment to a broad range of issues that intersected but were not explicitly linked to their own cause.[8]

Pink Triangle also published material in support of trans rights groups, promoting separate trans groups seeking to achieve their own goals, rather than direct coalition-building with them. They reproduced materials from Hedesthia, a trans rights groups in New Zealand, and provided clear information for their readers who might not have understood trans issues as well as they did homosexuality.[9] Hedesthia’s messaging focused on the constructed nature of gender and its separateness from sex, helping to break down male-female dichotomies within the gay community. Over the years the style and print variety of Pink Triangle changed significantly as editors and priorities changed. Throughout the mid-1980s, Pink Triangle published a large amount of coverage of the homosexual law reform bill, to shore up support for the bill and encourage people to come out in support.[10]

In other periods it focused more on society and culture, rather than explicit political engagement, with issues on the cover not advertising political activity but rather “an erotic guide to gay men” and “Italianissimo! Food and Fashion”.[11] Over time, Pink Triangle shifted to produce a much more holistic guide to gay and lesbian life in New Zealand, a sharp change from their radical political origins. Feminism became less prominent in Pink Triangle as time went on. The emphasis on gay male lifestyle after 1986 meant that little of the content was concerned with lesbian life, as some pointed out in letters to the editor.[12] But in its beginnings Pink Triangle blazed a radical gay liberationist trail, linking homosexual oppression to patriarchal oppression and attempting to build radical coalitions with like-minded people to achieve positive outcomes. Though it followed the commercial trends of the later 1980s and liberalization of gay politics generally, it made a significant contribution to promoting a litany of radical gay and lesbian voices in the early 1980s.