GLR January-February 2026

Hirschfeld was not publicly “out.” He was in a decades-long relationship with a young archivist, Karl Giese (1898–1938), who lived with him at the Institute. In 1931, Hirschfeld also became involved with a young Chinese medical student, Li Shiu Tong (1907–1993). He met Li during his Asian travels and groomed him to be his successor at the Institute. Li, Giese, and Hirschfeld seem to have become an ami cable throuple until Hirschfeld died of a stroke in 1935. He probably did not want to risk discrediting his sexological and ad vocacy work by publicly identifying him self as homosexual. Yet his publication and activism history leaves little doubt about his sexuality. His first (pseudonymously) published defense of homosexuality, Sap pho und Sokrates (1896), was prompted by tragedy: “[I] was moved to write [this

tute would be one of the first clinics to pro vide medical and surgical services to those wishing to achieve their inner gender through somatic interventions. It was thanks to this pioneering work that he ap pears in Transparent . In all these publications, Hirschfeld ar gued for the naturalness of these “atypical” people, and their potential to be talented and respectable citizens—if only society did not condemn them. Persecution only led to depression and suicide, or forced marriages. As a firm believer in eugenics (meaning “improvement of the race through birth selection”), Hirschfeld feared that the offspring of these forced marriages were at risk of poor health. Arising in the late 19th century, eugenics began as a mainstream, scientific, progressive move ment. Margaret Sanger, the birth control

THE EINSTEIN OF SEX Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin by Daniel Brook W. W. Norton. 320 pages, $32.99 RACISM AND THE MAKING OF GAY RIGHTS A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love by Laurie Marhoefer Univ. of Toronto. 334 pages, $36.95 THE INTERMEDIARIES A Weimar Story by Brandy Schillace W. W. Norton. 352 pages, $31.99

book] by the suicide of a young officer, one of my patients, who shot himself on the night he married, and left me his confes sion.” Paragraph 175 led to shame, deception, blackmail, and suffering. The work follows the lead of the pioneering legal defender of homosexuality, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895), in pre senting same-sex love as a congenital, biological variant of na ture rather than an immoral sin, sexual perversion, or mental disorder. Ulrichs initially used the term “Uranian” for men born with a feminine nature. Invoking venerated figures from Clas sical Greece, Hirschfeld made the case for the antiquity and re spectability of same-sex love. His biological model (which he would keep developing through his research) was that sexual nature is a combination of physical and neuropsychological fac tors between the “full female” ( Vollweib ) and “full male” ( Voll mann ). Since he viewed these poles as somewhat Platonic ideals, really all individuals are sexual intermediaries ( sexuelle Zwischenstufen). He was generalizing a common late-19th cen tury medical model that viewed “sexual inverts” as “psycho sexual hermaphrodites.” He launched into data collection to support his theories with a series of psychosexual questionnaires of polytechnic students and metalworkers. Although response rates were not great, he still found that more than one percent of respondents were pri marily homosexual and three times as many were attracted to both sexes. His next book, Berlin’s Third Sex ( Berlins drittes Geschlecht , 1904), took readers on a tour of the city’s already thriving and colorful gay nightlife. This would grow exponen tially during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) (memorably de picted in Cabaret and Babylon Berlin ). In 1910 he coined the word “transvestite” when he published Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (trans lated only in 1991 as The Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress) . As was typical of medical texts at the time, it uses case studies to describe a spectrum of “sexual minorities” (a concept he also coined): people who cross-dress as homosexu als as well as out of a deep cross-gendered drive. A decade later, he would go on to coin the word “ transsexualismus ” (though in the context of “intersexual constitution”). Until 1933, his Insti

activist and founder of Planned Parenthood, was a supporter of women’s reproductive rights with the goal of selective breeding and racial improvement. As mentioned earlier, the SHC held eugenics as one of its main planks—with the support of many other early women’s rights activists. § G IVEN THE COMPLEXITIES and contradictions of Hirschfeld’s life, career, and activism, it’s not surprising that the three recent books on him present a range of interpretations. For readers completely unfamiliar with Hirschfeld, journalist Daniel Brook’s The Einstein of Sex is a good place to start. Brook admits he’d never heard of Hirschfeld before 2009 and lacks fluency in Ger man. He approaches his subject with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a new discovery and assumes no one else knows him. This is a fairly chronological biography and the most hagiographic of the trio. Brook is rightly impressed by Hirschfeld’s courage in advocating for homosexuals and as a martyr of Nazi anti-Semi tism. He takes the “Einstein of Sex” moniker seriously, depict ing Hirschfeld as developing an Einsteinian theory of sexual relativity with the spectrum model of sex. He provides a great deal of helpful political-historical context for this turbulent first half of the 20th century. Already in 1920 Hirschfeld was heckled by hooligans— probably equally for his “decadent” views on sexuality and for being Jewish. In Munich he was so severely attacked by fas cists that The New York Times published an (erroneous) obit uary announcing the assault by an “anti-Jewish mob.” It was an early warning about the rising Nazi threat. The Institute was notoriously ransacked by Nazi students in May 1933 as an ex ample of decadent Jewish activity. Storm troopers later seized valuables and held a well-publicized book burning of its li brary and archives—tossing in a bust of Hirschfeld. Fortu nately, he wasn’t there to witness the destruction of his life’s work (as dramatically depicted in Transparent) . Instead, he learned of it in self-imposed exile, watching a movie newsreel inZurich. Brook’s volume is very readable, with engaging novelistic speculation about dramatic moments in Hirschfeld’s life. He

TheG & LR

26