THE EINSTEIN OF SEX

The making of a gay activist.

Journalist Brook celebrates German Jewish psychotherapist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), renowned in his own time for groundbreaking research on gender identity. Hirschfeld, who knew he was gay from adolescence, grew up in Bismarck’s Germany when the punitive Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code outlawed homosexuality. Focused on studying sexuality, he pursued medical studies in Strasbourg and Berlin. Although he passed his medical licensure exam, he chose first to become a cub reporter, sailing to the U.S. in 1893 to visit his brother, cover the Chicago World’s Fair, and lecture on natural medicine. America proved puzzling: Although he exulted in the lively queer culture of cities like Chicago, he was struck by rampant racism. Returning to Germany in 1894, Hirschfeld set up a medical practice that increasingly attracted queer patients. Besides protesting against the vile Paragraph 175, he co-founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, aiming to educate the public on the reality of sexual orientation. From anonymous surveys that he sent to high school students and metalworkers, he found evidence of a range of sexual proclivities and identities, which supported his efforts to champion gay rights and gender dysphoria. The construct of a gender binary, he believed, was “a figment of his society’s imagination.” Late in his career, for his theory of sexual relativity, he was dubbed by an imaginative PR man “the Einstein of Sex.” In 1919, his Institute for Sexual Science opened in Berlin, offering gender-affirming treatments and counseling; its Hirschfeld Museum displayed, among many sex-oriented exhibitions, an extensive display of fetishes. Brook examines Hirschfeld’s influential writings, such as The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1914) and Racism, published posthumously. He died in exile, forced from his beloved Berlin by Nazi persecution, his institute brutally destroyed.

A well-informed life of a scientist worth remembering.