In remembrance

This point of the monument extends over the Keizersgracht canal. It represents the present, and faces the National War Memorial on Dam Square in the center of Amsterdam. (Don Dale 1995 photo)

I had never seen anything like it before.

I had some time on my hands after Walter and I arrived back in Amsterdam in 1995, after our cruise on the Rhine and the leisurely drive back to Amsterdam.

I had read about the monument -- in the Richmond newspaper in September 1987 when it was officially unveiled and in the Amsterdam guidebook I had bought in Richmond just before our trip. I wanted to see it for myself.

With little difficulty, I found the Homomonument, a tribute originally to gay men and women who were persecuted and killed by the Nazis during World War II.

The Homomonument comprises three pink-granite, equilateral triangles connected by an inlaid band that creates a fourth and larger equilateral triangle. The three smaller triangles symbolize the past, the present and the future.

Why the emphasis on pink triangles? During the war, gay men who were sent to Nazi concentration camps were made to wear pink triangles, one on their jackets and another on their pants. They were larger than the symbols others in the concentration camps were forced to wear, so that they could better be seen from a distance. Even in the camps there was a hierarchy, and gay men and lesbians were considered the worst of the worst.

The Homomonument was a long time coming. Efforts to establish some sort of commemoration of the Holocaust's gay and lesbian victims began almost immediately after the war ended. It took 40 years and an enormous change in attitudes toward homosexuality, first in Europe and then in the States, for the monument to take shape. In the 1970s, gay men and women began to speak out, to discuss their orientation openly, to fight for their human rights and to demand their places in society's mainstream. They began to wear the pink triangle as a symbol of pride, reversing what the Nazis had meant to establish as an emblem of shame.

It took years more for funds to be raised for the Homomonument. In the end, the government of the Netherlands paid a large portion of the cost.

The Homomonument is adjacent to one of Amsterdam's major canals, the Keizersgracht, not far from the Anne Frank House. Today it is seen as a commemoration of all gay men and women who have been or still are being persecuted. It honors those who have struggled for freedom and human rights for those with a sexual orientation that differs from what was, and let's be accurate, still is in many places, considered "normal."

I stood alone at the Homomonument for some time on that sunny, warm day in the summer of 1995 and considered the amazing changes I had witnessed during my lifetime. I watched as single men and women, couples, and groups came, presumably, to do the same. Some brought flowers. Others brought no more than their own private thoughts.

It was a peaceful place, a beautiful place, for contemplation. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before.