Bry Sharland (he/him) is an artist and art teacher. He is the creator of the Pink Triangle Portraits Project, a quest to create a portrait of every single photographed queer victim of the Nazi regime and Paragraph 175. In these works, information about the victim is researched and shared with the portrait. Back in high school, Bry first started learning about the Nazi persecution of queer people and by college he was starting to create artworks to highlight lesser known categories of people that were targeted. One fact drove his desire to tell these stories was that queer people continued to be denigrated and punished even after the fall of the Third Reich.  

 

The lack of recognition and justice for queer victims drives Bry to continue his artworks until he has completed every single one of them. Through his work, he hopes people will stop, look, and contemplate those who paved the way for our rights today, and understand just how tenuous those rights can be around the world.

 

Bry lives with his husband and dog Luna in Massachusetts.

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"To me, the work of the PTL Project aligns so well with what I have always wanted to do: spread awareness of this often little understood or taught part of the history of the World War II era," Bry says. "In my work creating portraits of queer holocaust victims, I have searched for the stories of these forgotten victims and tried to share them with a modern audience.  The Pink Triangle Legacies Project is making information about this subject widely available and accessible to new people worldwide. I had originally reached out to Dr. Newsome for advice on my work and it is only natural to want to help out the Pink Triangle Legacies Project. "

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Bry has donated his time, skills, and voice to the PTL Project by reading the essays and information on Margot Heuman and Ernst Pack. Readers like Bry help make our LGBTQ+ Stories from Nazi Germany initiative accessible to more people by providing audio versions of the essays. Bry's audio versions will be published in January 2025.