Racism and the Making of Gay Rights
by Laurie Marhoeffer
University of Toronto Press ££22.38

THERE is so much wrong with Laurie Marhoeffer’s attempt to give an account of the life of Magnus Hirschfeld, and his relationship with the Chinese medical student Li Shiu Tong, that you shouldn't mistake it for history. Rather it is a case-study in why LGBTQI studies gets a bad name. It is spurious, sensationalist and blind to the epoch it purports to describe.

Hirschfeld was a German physician who was so appalled by the stigma attached to homosexuality and the shocking number of suicides that it caused that he became an outspoken advocate for the human rights of what he came to call “sexual minorities.”

He invented the scientific study of sexuality, founded the first gay rights movement – the Scientific Humanitarian Committee – in 1897, and in 1919 created the Institute for the Science of Sexuality in Berlin that became a Mecca for gay men throughout Europe.

Among many luminaries WH Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Harry Whyte visited from the UK, Sergei Eisenstein came from Soviet Russia, and Andre Gide from France.

It was destroyed in 1933 by Hitler’s fascists, and the famous photos of Nazi book-burnings in central Berlin depict the public incineration of Hirschfeld’s library.

Hirschfeld had seen this coming and in 1930 he undertook a series of lectures in the US with the intention of establishing a new base of operations. Defeated by American prudery, he travelled on for the next five years, until his death.

He wandered the world giving lectures, advising governments and gathering evidence of the variations of human sexuality in the many cultures he encountered.

He gathered the findings of this unique odyssey in three books: The World Journey of a Sexologist, Sex in Human Relationships, and lastly Racism, a denunciation of racial discrimination that was unique in its time.

It is no mean feat to take this remarkable achievement and to misrepresent it, but the strategy of Marhoeffer is to denigrate the well-known Jewish Hirschfeld at the expense of his effete and inconsequential sidekick Li Tong.

Because Hirschfeld couldn’t be open about his relationships with men, an impossibility in cultures where homosexuality was a crime, she accuses him, quite unjustly, of bourgeois hypocrisy.

Because he was Jewish, she accuses him of conflating the Jewish need to assimilate with the homosexual community, and characterising the latter with the “Jewish” aspiration an exclusively white identity. This is surely wrong, as well as anti-semitic.

While all this smacks of someone riding on the coat-tails of a famous person and trying to steal their celebrity, it is not the principal act of intellectual dishonesty in this flawed vision of history. The real blind spot, and the unforgivable misrepresentation, is her complete indifference towards the politics of the time.

There is a gaping hole in the book, the size of the Soviet Union. The relationship of sexual liberation to the Soviet Revolution exercised Hirschfeld, but such is Marhoeffer’s anti-communist prejudice that she simply doesn't want to know.

And yet, for all that the infamous Article 175 criminalising homosexuality remained in the German Constitution until 1994, similar laws had been abolished by the Bolsheviks, and the Soviet Penal Code of 1922 legalised any sexual relationship between consenting adults.

The Soviet Minister of Health, Nikolai Semashko, visited Hirschfeld in Berlin in order to learn from his scientific approach to the varieties of human sexuality. Communism offered equality, and a sexual revolution.

All this has been extensively researched by Marhoeffer’s fellow Canadian, Dan Healey, whom she cites in her 30-page bibliography, but doesn’t seem to have read.

Is this the state of LGBTQI studies? You have a huge bookshelf but use it to conceal the absence of genuine research? You parade it, but it provides no historical context, and you use it to camouflage a deliberately anti-socialist agenda?

It’s readable stuff, but don’t be misled.