Located in Berlin is an unassuming concrete box with a single window and a small screen inside. This is the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism. It recognizes gay men, and men accused of being gay, who were targeted under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. The old law criminalized sexual relationships between men, but in 1935 the Nazi regime expanded it and turned it into a broader weapon of persecution. The law did not work alone. It had help from a society already conditioned to believe gay people were immoral, diseased, predatory, or defective. Once that belief took hold, punishment could easily be made to look like order. Humiliation could be dressed up as morality and violence could be explained as consequence. Thousands of men were arrested. Many were imprisoned. Men were forcibly castrated. Most were sent to concentration camps, where gay prisoners were often forced to wear a pink triangle, a symbol. The end of the Nazi government did not mean freedom for every gay man imprisoned under Paragraph 175. Some men liberated from concentration camps were re-arrested and sent back into prisons. The Nazi-expanded version of Paragraph 175 remained unchanged until 1969. It was not fully repealed until 1994. The regime had fallen, but the boogeyman it helped create was still useful. A government does not have to begin with mass violence to do enormous damage. It can begin by telling the public that a small, vulnerable group is a threat to children, families, faith, order, or civilization itself. Once people believe the threat is real, they will excuse almost anything done in response. That same machinery is still familiar today. When governments, churches, and institutions describe LGBTQ people as threats to children, families, faith, morality, or social order, they are not simply expressing concern. They are teaching the public who to fear, who to blame, and whose mistreatment can be justified as protection. Pride is not a celebration of wickedness. It is a refusal to let shame do its old work. It is a refusal to become the boogeyman someone else needs in order to feel righteous. It is what happens when people choose visibility.