Throwback Thursday Remembers Sex Researcher and Gay Rights Advocate Magnus Hirschfeld

When you piss off the Nazis, you know you're probably speaking truth to power. Not something people always want to hear. And gay, Jewish doctor Magnus Hirschfeld did just that. He's one of the earliest sex researchers who attempted, among other things, to overturn Germany's criminalization of homosexuality, to provide gender care for trans people, and to prove that homosexuality was worldwide and within the natural order of human sexuality.

Hirschfeld was born and died on 14 May 1868 – 14 May 1935. He was born to prominent parents in Poland and grew up and was educated in Germany. He earned his medical degree in 1892, and soon after was traveling the world. He lived for a time in Chicago where he discovered that city's gay underground. Likening it to a similar counterculture in Berlin, he began to theorize, correctly of course, that gay men and women were everywhere and wasn't an aberration of his home country. He would later claim, after studying and researching gay cultures in other countries, the England had the highest percentage of gay people.

His early medical work involved a trend he was seeing, that of gay men who suffered depression and committed suicide, a subject deemed more taboo in Germany than in the US, being regarded as "self-murder." His treatment of a soldier who would eventually take his own life, leaving behind a letter that exclaimed his desire that Hirschfeld's work "could contribute a future when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms sweetens the hour of my death" compelled Hirschfeld to found his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, his Institue for Sexual research in 1919, during the more liberal Weimar period. The work there included research into trans persons, and the phenomena Hirschfeld described as a "third sex," one which transcended male and female and "regular" sexuality, and one which was natural to humans.

This was also the period in which he gained over 5,000 signatures to repeal the oppressive Prussian statute criminalizing homosexuality. The more liberal Weimar leadership under the Social Democrats turned a blind eye to enforcing the law, making the area a haven for gay men. He co-wrote and appeared in the film Different From the Others as a propaganda technique to sway public opinion. It was the first time a gay character was written for film, and led with these words:

"The persecution of homosexuals belongs to the same sad chapter of history in which the persecutions of witches and heretics is inscribed...May justice soon prevail over injustice in this area, science conquer superstition, love achieve victory over hatred!"

But the subsequent rise of fascism between the two world wars made it difficult, and then an impossibility, to pass such a resolution despite its wide general popularity. One of the first acts after Hitler's rise to power was the destruction of the institute and the burning of his research and books.

Hirschfeld was on a speaking and book tour when this occurred, and never returned to Germany after. He toured extensively, becoming known as "The Einstein of Sex." As a money-making ploy, he "straightened up" his message of positive sexuality while traveling through America, urging American men to find their Romantic sides as European men had, in order to love their women more completely. As far as his own personal life goes, he had two important partners, both former students, Karl Giese and Li Shiu Tong, both of whom were named in his will at the time of his death in his home in Nice, France. Yes, he was in a thruple!

His legacy has followed him down through the decades, having influenced gay rights organizations as early as the 1920s, following in influence through to Harry Hay and The Mattachine Society. Modern research shows his influence on sexual opinions and change in Germany with money granted for research into Germany's LGBT community, the effects of Nazi persecution on the community, and ways to battle prejudice.

Hirschfeld's tomb in the Caucade Cemetery in Nice, France

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