Teen Poet
The Pink Triangle by Tim Henderson was the winning poem from 2008’s Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival.
The poem, shared here from the Chicago Public Radio Louder Than a Bomb audio project, will be featured tonight along with other works about the LGBT experience and gay rights as Impact Chicago and Young Chicago Authors present An Evening with Cleve Jones: The Struggle for LGBT Civil Rights. The event serves as a fundraiser to provide buses from Chicago to the upcoming National Equality March to take place in Washington, DC October 10-11th, 2009.
Sixty years ago, in the spring of 1945, Allied forces liberating Europe found evidence of atrocities which have tortured the world’s conscience ever since. As the troops entered the German concentration camps, they made a systematic film record of what they saw. Work began in the summer of 1945 on the documentary, but the film was left unfinished. 
*Queer Visions Supplement: The Third Reich considered homosexuals common criminals; many were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Once there, they were forced to wear a pink triangle as a brand of their supposedly ’special’ perversion. Given the fear many gay people lived under back then, it is little wonder how little of their experiences in the death camps is known. However, it is thought that their death rate was higher than any other group.