Ok, so here is a post by /u/kugelfang52 in which they give a good overview over the development of English language literature on the subject, mainly focusing on the aspect of the similarity or rather dissimilarity between the persecution of homosexuals and Jews.

Generally, it had been known that the Nazis had persecuted homosexuals right after the war. The way it was discussed however, was broadly speaking, a problem until the 1970s when Heinz Heger's book and the others that /u/kugelfang52 mentioned started to appear and la the ground work for serious research into the topic.

In the early years, gay men in the camps appeared mostly in political prisoners' accounts of their time in the camp and were portrayed in a rather negative light, revealing the fact that no matter how much of a staunch anti-Nazi social democrat they were – and the KPD and SPD did in fact want to decriminalize homosexuality in the 20s and 30s –, it was still hard to escape the homophobia so prevalent in the 20s and 30s and beyond. Conrad Finkelmeyer, a Social Democrat journalist, for example wrote in his recollection of his time in the camps published in 1947 that the "group of the sexually confused" prisoners in the camps was comprised "mostly of former SS- and SA-members, NSDAP- and Hitler Youth members", placing gay prisoners under general suspicion to be mostly lapsed Nazis [Conrad Finkelmeyer: Die braune Apokalypse: Erlebnisbericht eines ehemaligen Redakteurs der Arbeiterpresse aus der Zeit der Nazityrannei, Thüringen 1947]. Eugon Kogon in his recollection/sociological treatment of his own time in the camps Der SS-Staat talked about the gay prisoners as "the less important, less worthy" prisoners. He also portrays them basically as sexual predators, praying on young heterosexual co-prisoners, offering them advantages and food-stuffs in exchange for sex.

These are, as we know now, very very warped and inaccurate portrayals of the plight of homosexual prisoners in the concentration camps. However, the social climate right after the war either shaped people's opinion in line with predominant homophobic stereotypes or prevent people from discussing their experiences. There are only few recollections by homosexual camp inmates and most of them did not mention that they were in the camp as gay men. Hugo Walleitner published his book about his time in Flossenbürg Zebra. Ein tatsachenbericht aus dem Konzentrationslager in 1947 and discussed his maltreatment but neglected to mention why he was there. Leo Clasen, who published his recollections in six articles in 1954/55 under the pseudonym LD Classen von Neudegg, did discuss how life was for a homosexual victim of the Nazis and explicitly talked about his own persecution as a gay man. However, seeing as how these articles were published in magazines of the homosexual community, it is doubtful that they made a large public impact.

The big change in terms of public perception as well as perception within the community came in the 1960s in Germany and in the 1970s in the US. I will mostly discuss Germany as an example (as I am more familiar with it) but the dynamics involved are very similar: In the 1960s, mainly due to the highly publicized Auschwitz trial in West-Germany, a new interest in Nazi persecution policy arose and a new wave of historical research was done, it coincided with a new generation of gay men and women advocating for their rights. With this new social activism, various communities started to look for a sort of collective identity to be used to define oneself and define themselves as a group with a shared plight, advocating together for more rights and the decriminalization of their sexuality. Every search for identity includes writing one's own history and because their search coincided with new public interest in Nazism and its crimes and because they indeed had been a group that was persecuted as a collective, the history of persecution of homosexuals became an important staple in collective homosexual identity and their struggle.

This is where the pink triangle as the symbol for their struggle originates from. It is unknown where it first appeared but throughout the latter half of the 60s and the 70s, it became more and more public as a symbol for their oppression and their struggle. Heger's book that is mentioned above, is an example for this. The story of the persecution of gay men told as a story akin to the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich served as an important rallying cry and as an important unifying factor of the gay rights movement and its often disparate politics.

With its entry into politics, came a little later the historical research into the subject. First steps can be traced back to a 1977 study of Rüdiger Lautmann et. al., which used the International Tracing Service's identification cards of Nazi victims to trace the persecution of homosexuals. In subsequent years, a lot of local studies appeared detailing the histories of gay communities in cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Köln. These however always remained fragmentary and were under-financed due to the lack of interest on part of universities and other institution financing research.

Veering back to the US and to your question, if the public would recognize the pink triangle in 1980: The real impact and popularity of the symbol came with the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Feeling ostracized and left to die by the public and the Reagan administration, the pink triangle took on a new meaning in US discourse. The message was, like the Nazis who had killed the homosexuals, the AIDS crisis was a blatant display of the state and society silently acquiescing with the mass deaths of gay men. This was when the symbol really made a public impact and resurgence. It is no particular surprise that the texts by Lautmann and Rector /u/kugelfang52 mentioned started to really have an impact and be read during the 80s in the US because they closely related to the at the time politics of the gay rights movement.

In terms of contemporary historiography and scholarship, it needs to be emphasized that the topic of Nazi persecution of homosexuals is still heavily under-researched and fragmentary. While local and smaller studies exist, the standard monograph on the subject is still not written and while it would be highly necessary to write it, it has not been done so far. Furthermore, the vast bulk of the scholarship that does exist focuses on the situation of German gay men (and in recent years also Lesbians being mentioned as well as a few articles on transgender persons). It is so far impossible to describe the situation of homosexuals in occupied and controlled territories and if there was any sort of persecution at all for them. These are big, big desiderata that will need to be filled in the future, given that there is source material available, which I honestly do not know.

Several articles in Michael Schwartz (ed.): Homosexuelle im Nationalsozialismus: Neue Forschungsperspektiven zu Lebenssituationen von lesbischen, schwulen, bi-, trans- und intersexuellen Menschen 1933 bis 1945, which was my main source for writing this, mention the source situation and describe it in very negative terms, especially in light of German archives never having indexed their material with terms such as "homosexuality" or "gay". I sincerely hope someone will take on this subject and finally produce a monograph we can point to in regards to this subject in the future.

Sorry /u/commiespaceinvader, I expanded my original question to include not only the development of academic historical narratives, but popular understanding as well.