Thanks for that history, and for the book recommendation. I would like to pick up Richard Plant's The Pink Triangle.

The translator of The Men with the Pink Triangle, David Fernbach, wrote his own book the following year (1981) called The Spiral Path. It's free on archive.org and I'm halfway through it. Under the rubric of "gay liberation," he advocates for dismantling the gender binary — this is the point of his book — and much of his language is quite interesting to me. On the other hand, he throws trans people under the bus (citing a famous anti-transgender screed) and suggests that people wouldn't/couldn't be trans if the gender binary didn't exist. That is something I do not love at all. It is particularly disappointing given that he had just translated a gay man's concentration camp memoir, yet he turned around and tried to math out the types of queer/trans that could or should exist in his liberation future. Likely I'll put up a second article with my complicated ideas about The Spiral Path — tonight, if I can.

That is my personal update on being less thrilled with early-1980s David Fernbach (having read the second book) than I was yesterday (having read only one book). He also has some newer Marxist work I haven't read, and I've just learned he made the first English translation (1980) of Mario Mieli's Towards a Gay Communism, which has more recently been retranslated/enhanced by Evan Calder Williams.