German doctor and sexologist, and an early advocate for gay and transgender rights. Born to a Jewish family in what is now Poland, Hirschfeld studied medicine and earned his doctorate in Berlin. He developed the idea of the universality of homosexuality after seeing the gay subcultures in Chicago and comparing them to Berlin. He was further influenced by the tragic trials of Oscar Wilde, as well the gay patients he treated, many of whom were suicidal. In 1896, he published the pamphlet Sappho and Socrates, the only writing he would ever publish under a pseudonym. A year later he founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the first ever gay rights organization, which sought to repeal Paragraph 175, the law that criminalized homosexuality in Germany. He believed that science and knowledge could cure prejudice, and argued that queer people were natural and born that way. He also believed that sexuality fell on a spectrum, and that gay rights and feminism were closely entwined. He didn’t agree with some of his colleagues who thought that famous Germans should be outed to further their cause, but he landed himself in trouble during the Harden–Eulenberg affair, when he testified as an expert witness in a libel trial that the man in question was indeed gay, and that there was nothing wrong with that. Instead of making Germans more sympathetic to homosexuality, his testimony caused a homophobic and anti-Semitic backlash. In 1919, during Germany’s permissive Weimar Republic, Hirschfeld opened the Institute of Sexual Research, which would become the world’s destination for sexuality and gender studies. The Institute housed an exhaustive library on the subject, provided education for health providers, offered medical and psychological services to patients, and performed the first modern sex reassignment surgeries on record. It even funded a film, Different From the Others, a story of a blackmailed gay man which Hirschfeld co-wrote and appeared in as himself. Also appearing in the film was Karl Giese, who would later become Hirschfeld’s partner. But with the rise of the Nazi party, it wasn’t to last. Hirschfeld left Germany for a world lecture tour in 1930, and never returned to his country. In the United States, he was heralded as “the Einstein of Sex.” He then traveled through Japan, India, Egypt, and Switzerland, learning about the local cultures’ views on sex and gender as he went. In China, he met the sexology student Li Shiu Tong, who also became his partner and traveled with him. When Karl Giese met up with them in Paris, he wasn’t happy about the relationship at first, but eventually all three of them moved in together. While Hirschfeld remained exiled in France, the Institute of Sexual Research was ransacked by the Nazis and its extensive book collection was burned. Hirschfeld became a prominent symbol in Nazi propaganda of the degenerate Jew, even after his sudden death in 1935. His final book, published a few years later, was an indictment of racism in Nazi Germany and throughout European history.
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