Homophobia
Homophobia is fear-based hatred, hostility, or disapproval for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) people, cultures, or (assumed or actual) behaviours/practices. Homophobia, like all other forms of bigotry, seeks to dehumanize a large group of people by denying their dignity and their personhood.

Heterosexism
Heterosexism is preferential treatment towards heterosexual people, cultures, and (assumed or actual) behaviours/practices. This preferential treatment encourages a bias against GLBT people, cultures, and (assumed or actual) behaviours/practices. Heterosexist attitudes and beliefs are often accompanied by disapproval, hostility, or aversion towards actions or individuals who are perceived as not conforming to rigid and “traditional” sex-role stereotypes. Heterosexist attitudes can be directed and injurious to both GLBT people and heterosexual people whose behaviours are not “traditionally” masculine or feminine.

Heteronormativity
Heteronormativity is the assumption that everyone is heterosexual and/or participates in and enjoys so-called “traditional” gender-roles. Heteronormativity allows for an environment to arise where homophobia, heterosexism, misogyny, and sexism can flourish. While homophobia and heterosexism are rooted in active emotions of bigotry and hatred, heteronormativity is much more passive and is, therefore, often overlooked or ignored.

Stonewall
HStonewall refers to the night of June 29, 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall gay bar in New York City, having long suffered police harassment, fought back when the bar was raided. Their uprising went on for two nights and captured the attention of GLBT people around the world.

The Rainbow Flag
The Rainbow Flag represents the diversity of the GLBT community. It’s also used by many progressive political movements such as the Rainbow/Push Coalition to signify the joining of all aspects of American society.

The Pink Triangle
During World War II, more than six million Jewish lives were lost to the Holocaust, Hitler’s genocidal crusade to rid the world “undesirables”. But Jews were not the only group targeted for extinction; another attempt by the Nazis to purify German society was their strict enforcement of Paragraph 175 of German law, a law which outlawed homosexual acts and had been all but forgotten before Hitler’s rise to power.

Early in the Nazi regime, male homosexual organizations were banned. In 1934, a special Gestapo division was established to create "pink lists" of homosexuals throughout Germany. In 1936, Heinrich Himmler created a "Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion". The prosecution of homosexuals reached its peak in the years 1937-1939. The police conducted raids on meeting places, seized address books from arrested men to identify and locate other homosexuals, and set up networks or informers to compile names leading to more arrests.

Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested under Paragraph 175, and of these, some 50,000 officially-defined homosexuals were sentenced. While most of these men spent time in regular prisons, an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 were sent to concentration camps. Inside the concentration camps, homosexuals were designated by a Pink Triangle on their sleeve in the same way that Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David.

Even after the Nazi defeat in 1945, gay Holocaust survivors continued to be persecuted. Men liberated from the concentration camps who had not completed their sentences were re-imprisoned by the victorious Allies. Since they were regarded as criminals, all were denied compensation for their suffering. Paragraph 175 remained in force in Germany until 1969. Some gay Holocaust survivors were repeatedly re-arrested in the post-war period and again jailed. In the 1950s and 1960s, the number of convictions for homosexuality in West Germany was as high as it had been during Nazi rule.

Today, the Pink Triangle is a symbol of liberation and pride that reminds GLBT people of the oppression they have suffered historically and signals their refusal to be silent victims again.