Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love

by Laurie Marhoefer

Overview

In 1931, a sexologist arrived in colonial Shanghai to give a public lecture about homosexuality. In the audience was a medical student. The sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, fell in love with the medical student, Li Shiu Tong. Li became Hirschfeld's assistant on a lecture tour around the world.

Racism and the Making of Gay Rights shows how Hirschfeld laid the groundwork for modern gay rights, and how he did so by borrowing from a disturbing set of racist, imperial, and eugenic ideas.

Following Hirschfeld and Li in their travels through the American, Dutch, and British empires, from Manila to Tel Aviv to having tea with Langston Hughes in New York City, and then into exile in Hitler's Europe, Laurie Marhoefer provides a vivid portrait of queer lives in the 1930s and of the turbulent, often-forgotten first chapter of gay rights.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487523978
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	05/04/2022
Pages:	334
Sales rank:	463,479
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Laurie Marhoefer is the Jon Bridgman Endowed Associate Professor in History at the University of Washington.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Maps

Introduction: Manila Bay, Philippines, July 1931

1. "Einstein of Sex": Magnus Hirschfeld at the End of the First Century of Gay Rights, North Atlantic Ocean, November 1930

2. The Empire of Queer Love: Berlin, Sometime between 1910 and 1914

3. Hirschfeld and Li Shiu Tong Meet: Feminism and Queer Attraction at the China United Apartments, International Settlement, Shanghai, May 1931

4. The Fight against Sexual Oppression is a Fight against Empire: Jawaharlal Nehru's house, Allahabad, India, 1931

5. Are Homosexuals Like a Race? Analogy and the Making of the Sexual Minority

6. Magnus Hirschfeld's Theory of the Races

7. Tea with Langston Hughes: Hirschfeld's Anti-Blackness and Queer Black New York: Winter of 1930

8. Making Jews White: Tel Aviv, Palestine, Winter of 1932

9. Magnus Hirschfeld's Queer Eugenics: Berlin, Germany, Manila, Philippines, Pasadena, California, United States, and Bondowoso, East Java, Indonesia

10. "And What about Women?"

11. The Exile: Athens to Nice, 1932 to 1935

12. Li Shiu Tong's Queer Masculinities: The Hotel Baur au Lac, Zurich, Late 1930s

13. Li Shiu Tong's Defiant Sexology: Vancouver, British Columbia, 1974 to 1993

Conclusion: Li Shiu Tong's Berlin and Magnus Hirschfeld's America

Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

Jennifer Evans

"In this stunning new analysis of Magnus Hirschfeld's writing and legacy, Laurie Marhoefer asks what might have been had the sexological giant opened himself up to the anti-racist arguments in his midst. We will be sorting these questions for years to come. A trenchant critique of the myths surrounding Magnus Hirschfeld, asking us to wrestle with the implications of a queer life built on anti-black racism and empire."

Katie Sutton

"This is the book that German history and queer history need right now. Racism and the Making of Gay Rights will be a hugely important intervention."

Leila J. Rupp

"This beautifully crafted narrative weaves together the story of the relationship of Magnus Hirschfeld and Li Shui Tong with a brilliant analysis of Hirschfeld's complex but ultimately racist thinking about homosexuality, race, and empire. It's hard to do justice to the power of this book. Let me just say that once you open it, you'll have trouble tearing yourself away, and not only because you'll want to know what happened to Li's manuscript."

Angela Zimmerman

"Racism and the Making of Gay Rights decentres Magnus Hirschfeld, long revered as a 'founding father' of gay liberation, by revealing the racist and imperialist investments behind his overfocus on white, cisgendered men, a still-too-common feature of queer representation. Crucially, Laurie Marhoefer introduces the possibility of a better, queerer liberation in the thought of Hirschfeld's Chinese research assistant and perhaps lover, Li Shiu Tong. This is queer history for a better future."

Jonathan Ned Katz

"Fascinating, important, pioneering! Homophobia and queer liberation, racism and anti-racism, sexism and anti-sexism, colonialism and anti-colonialism — they're all profoundly entangled in Marhoefer's lively, original study of Magnus Hirschfeld's life and times."

Editorial Reviews

"This beautifully crafted narrative weaves together the story of the relationship of Magnus Hirschfeld and Li Shui Tong with a brilliant analysis of Hirschfeld's complex but ultimately racist thinking about homosexuality, race, and empire. It's hard to do justice to the power of this book. Let me just say that once you open it, you'll have trouble tearing yourself away, and not only because you'll want to know what happened to Li's manuscript."—Leila J. Rupp, Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California Santa Barbara
"Fascinating, important, pioneering! Homophobia and queer liberation, racism and anti-racism, sexism and anti-sexism, colonialism and anti-colonialism – they're all profoundly entangled in Marhoefer's lively, original study of Magnus Hirschfeld's life and times."—Jonathan Ned Katz, author of The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams
"Racism and the Making of Gay Rights decentres Magnus Hirschfeld, long revered as a 'founding father' of gay liberation, by revealing the racist and imperialist investments behind his overfocus on white, cisgendered men, a still-too-common feature of queer representation. Crucially, Laurie Marhoefer introduces the possibility of a better, queerer liberation in the thought of Hirschfeld's Chinese research assistant and perhaps lover, Li Shiu Tong. This is queer history for a better future."—Angela Zimmerman, Professor of History, George Washington University and author of Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South
"In this stunning new analysis of Magnus Hirschfeld's writing and legacy, Laurie Marhoefer asks what might have been had the sexological giant opened himself up to the anti-racist arguments in his midst. We will be sorting these questions for years to come. A trenchant critique of the myths surrounding Magnus Hirschfeld, asking us to wrestle with the implications of a queer life built on anti-black racism and empire."—Jennifer Evans, Professor of History, Carleton University
"This is the book that German history and queer history need right now. Racism and the Making of Gay Rights will be a hugely important intervention."—Katie Sutton, Associate Professor of German and Gender Studies, Australian National University

From the Publisher

“Marhoefer's achievement in Racism and the Making of Gay Rights is not just to place Li back into the lecture halls and the steamships of their shared journey, but also to brilliantly reframe Hirschfeld as a man of his era, a man who developed and popularized the concept of 'homosexuality' in a world that was shaped by the fact of empire ... This book should be required reading for anybody with a professional, political, or personal interest in the 'homosexual.'”

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences - Lauren Stokes