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

Laurie Marhoefer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1487523971 ISBN 13: 9781487523978

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2022

Synopsis

In 1931, a sexologist arrived in colonial Shanghai to give a public lecture about homosexuality. In the audience was a medical student, and after the lecture concluded, he introduced himself. 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 – the first time in history that a renowned expert defended homosexuality to so many people in so many countries. 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. Yet on his journey with Li, Hirschfeld also had inspiring moments – including when he formulated gay rights as a broad, anti-colonial struggle and as a movement that could be linked to Jewish emancipation. 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.

About this title

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1487523971
• ISBN 13: 9781487523978
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 334