Sébastien Tremblay is the titular of a M.A. in Global History from the Freie- and Humboldt Universität and a B.A. in History and German Studies from the Université de Montréal in Canada. His master thesis explored the convergence of US- militarized masculinities and homosexualities in the early German Federal Republic and his present dissertation project looks at the gay and lesbian transnational and transatlantic cultural communication networks from the 1970s to the 1990s and focuses on the "Pink Triangle" as a marker of identity in LGBTQI+ activist circles.

Sébastien also held various student positions at the John-F-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies and has worked as a historical consultant for the Berlinale's 31st TEDDY Awards. He already published on homophile emotional transatlantic ties in the 1950s in the local student journal of Global History at Freie Universität Berlin: Global Histories.

His research on transatlantic history has earned him the TSA Halle Foundation prize in 2017 at the TSA annual meeting in Cork, Ireland. His research has received funding from the Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft, the DAAD and the IREF in Montreal.

“The Proudest Symbol We Could Put Forward?”: The Pink Triangle as a symbol of transatlantic homosexual identity from the 1970s to the1990s

My present dissertation project looks at gay and lesbian transnational and transatlantic cultural communication networks from the 1970s to the mid-late 1990s and focuses on the pink triangle as a marker of identity in LGBTQI+ activist circles. I focus on new trends of Intellectual History and traces the Visual Conceptual History of the pink triangle as a multi-layered symbol and multi-temporal aesthetic of a presumed international queer subculture. Doing so, I also explore the exclusion of identities connected to the presupposed universality of the story of the “men with the pink triangle”. Consequently, following the work of queer scholars like Heather Love, I use the pink triangle’s early key moments in the FRG and the USA as a case study for an analysis of the entanglement of queer utopias, collective memory, cultural trauma and a certain longing for the past. So doing I try to combine the psychic complexity of shame, well-known narratives of pride and their connection to homonormative discourses, and homo- and neo-nationalism.

contact: sebastien.tremblay@fu-berlin.de