LGBTQ+ Spotlight #1: Magnus Hirschfeld

A Jewish-German born in Pomerania (now Poland), Hirschfield earned his medical degree in 1892. After graduating, he travelled to visit the World's Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, where he participated in Chicago's LGBT subculture. He came to recognize similarities between that subculture and the one of Berlin, giving rise to a universalist approach to homosexuality that he retained on his return to medical practice in Berlin, 1896. It led Hirschfeld to try to understand the high rates of suicide by his gay patients, whose lives he struggled to save as a medical practitioner. He would often refer to a patient who had been a young army officer, whose struggle with coming out and eventual suicide predated Nazi Germany by almost half a century - "The thought that you [Hirschfeld] could contribute a future when the German fatherland will think of us [homosexuals] in more just terms sweetens the hour of my death."

In 1895, the writer Oscar Wilde was found guilty of "gross indecency with men", and jailed to two years of hard labour. Wilde had originally sued the Marquess of Queensberry - his lover's father - for libel, as he had accused Wilde of sodomy. The court found that the Marquess was able to both prove the accusation, and that the accusation was in the 'public benefit', and proceeded to indict Wilde. The international press coverage influenced Hirschfeld, although it would be a decade until Hirschfeld toured to England. That would allow him to meet Wilde's son, who had changed his last name to 'Holland' to avoid any association with Wilde, and attend a clandestine night-time reading of Wilde's post-imprisonment poem 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' - it was this context that Hirschfeld described as "the hell experienced by homosexuals", describing the poem as "the most earth-shattering outcry that has ever been voiced by a downtrodden soul about its own torture and that of humanity".

Hirschfeld went on to co-found the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897, aiming to repeal Germany's 'Paragraph 175', which criminalized homosexuality. In doing so, he argued that homosexuality was not a cultural failing of ostensibly-primitive societies or a racial anomaly (for instance, critising the biologically determinist theory of the 'Hottentot apron', a fictitious anatomical feature of African homosexual women), but a natural condition for many regardless of race and culture. Hirschfeld also joined the feminist League for the Protection of Mothers, campaigning for the decriminalization of abortion and for marital rights, in turn encouraging his colleagues in that organization to campaign against Paragraph 175. Though these attempts were eventually forestalled by the rise of the Nazi Party, Hirschfeld's greatest accomplishment was yet to eventuate - the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft, arguably the first explicitly pro-LGBT sexual health organization in history.

Founded in 1919, the Institut was in the position of defining a totally new clinical approach; one cognizant of LGBT+ concerns. It misstepped at first, trialling homone replacement therapy as part of a 'curative' approach to genderqueerness, with negative clinical outcomes. Instead, it soon determined experimentally that an 'affirmational' approach to LGBT+ identities would produce the desired positive impact on the lives of its patients. The Institut pioneered modern gender affirmation surgeries in the 1930s and sexuality affirmation therapy in 1924, and mixed its clinical approach with avowed public advocacy, campaigning against the de facto criminalization of cross-dressing under the presumption of involvement in sex work. Though the Institut was destroyed by the Nazis, Hirschfeld had already fled the country on a world tour, where he met his long-term boyfriend, Tao Li, whose parents blessed the relationship - his father hoping Tao would become the "Hirschfeld of China".