In the landscape of queer historiography, the intersection of the Holocaust and American LGBTQ+ activism has often been treated as a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. In The Pink Scar, Thomas R. Dunn challenges this temporal boundary, arguing that the memory of Nazi persecution has been an “incendiary force” (4) within American queer discourse since as early as the 1930s. Published as part of the “Troubling Democracy” series, Dunn’s work investigates how a “uniquely American understanding” (3) of the Holocaust provided a vital rhetorical and political resource for mobilization long before the Stonewall Riots. This volume fits into a burgeoning field focusing on continuities from the pre-Stonewall era, such as Eric Cervini’s The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. The United States of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), yet it distinguishes itself from works like Jake Newsome’s The Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Cornell, 2022) or Sébastien Tremblay’s A Badge of Injury: The Pink Triangle as a Global Symbol of Memory (DeGruyter, 2023), by focusing exclusively on the pliability of US-American collective memory.

Dunn’s methodological framework rests on a sharp distinction between history and memory. While the former seeks an objective reconstruction of the past, Dunn treats memory as an interdependent, often malleable re-telling of events used to advance specific political goals. To ground this analysis, the introduction provides a factual overview of the persecution of homosexuals, lesbians, and transgender individuals under the Third Reich, establishing a baseline against which he compares later American interpretations.

The book is structured into five chronological chapters, each examining a different era of remembrance. Chapter 1 focuses on the 1930s through the writings of Henry Gerber, the German American founder of the Society for Human Rights. Dunn reveals that Gerber’s 1934 writings were frequently inaccurate, curiously glorifying Ernst Röhm as a figure of masculinist tradition even while condemning Hitler. By the 1950s, as explored in Chapter 2, the focus shifted within the homophile movement, specifically in publications like the Mattachine Review and ONE Magazine. Here, the victim was no longer the high-profile Nazi officer but the ordinary gay man, mirroring the anxieties of a McCarthy-era community plagued by fear of police harassment and government conspiracy. As the movement evolved toward decriminalization and de-medicalization in the 1960s, Chapter 3 highlights a shift toward themes of incarceration and medical abuse. In a refreshing departure from traditional academic sources, Dunn utilizes gay pulp fiction to assess the historical consciousness of a less politically active stratum of the queer community.

The narrative then moves into the mid-1970s in Chapter 4, where figures like the controversial Reverend Mikhail Itkin framed those who wore the pink triangle as “martyrs” (31) for liberation. However, this interpretation of martyrdom proved fleeting, soon eclipsed by the conservative backlash of the early 1980s and the onset of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Finally, Chapter 5 examines the late 1970s, arguing that the era’s political tensions necessitated more “active” all-American heroes, as exemplified in Harvey Milk’s 1978 “Gay Freedom Day” speech, which moved away from idolizing foreign victims in favor of confrontational activism. The book’s primary strength lies in its meticulous reconstruction of what information was available to queer communities at specific times. Utilizing digitized news archives and special collections, Dunn successfully dismantles the “newfound history” (22) narrative promoted by scholars like Alan Bérubé and Erik N. Jensen, who suggested that Holocaust remembrance only emerged in the late 1970s. Dunn demonstrates that information regarding Nazi persecution was widely available in nationally syndicated newspapers as early as the 1930s and 1940s. He convincingly argues that the historical lack of public outcry was not due to ignorance but to a pervasive anti-homosexual climate in the United States that precluded sympathy for these victims.

However, the volume is not without its limitations. Dunn acknowledges a significant archival bias: the book focuses overwhelmingly on white, cisgender masculinity. This is attributed to the overrepresentation of white men in the early homophile movement and a lack of documented engagement from lesbian and transgender groups with this specific history before the 1980s. More problematic are specific biographical and historical characterizations. For instance, Dunn describes homophile activist Lilli Vincenz as a “lesbian immigrant from Nazi Germany” (2). This makes it sound as if she was a queer refugee fleeing the regime, which is arguably misleading while born in Hamburg in the late 1930s, Vincenz was a child when her parents emigrated for economic reasons in 1949. Furthermore, Dunn’s treatment of Henry Gerber’s political leanings is somewhat reductive. He dismisses the idea of Gerber as a Nazi sympathizer on the basis that Gerber was “an avowed Communist” (35). Yet, as this reviewer notes, Gerber’s documented antisemitism, anti-capitalism, and admiration for Blüher’s völkische Männerbund ideas might align him more closely with the “Strasserite” socialist wing of early Nazism than with orthodox communism of the 1930s.

From a scholarly perspective, the book’s brevity and its omission of archival details from the main text, relegating them to the acknowledgments, suggest a target audience of either highly specialized peers or a community-based readership less concerned with reproducibility. There is also a notable lack of historical critique regarding nomenclature; Dunn uses Nazi racial categories such as “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” without the distancing of quotation marks, a choice that stands in stark contrast to his careful devotion to the nomenclature of sexual minorities.

Ultimately, The Pink Scar is a compelling study of how the American LGBTQ+ community has looked into the “dark mirror” of the Holocaust to define its own struggle. By tracing the dynamic and often rhetorical use of this history, Dunn provides an essential contribution to our understanding of how collective memory functions as a political tool. Despite some historical oversights and a narrow demographic focus, the book serves as a powerful reminder that the “pink scar” of the past continues to shape the political imagination of the present.