Hirschfeld, Magnus (1868-1935)

Born in 1868 to Jewish parents in Kolberg, a Prussian town on the Baltic coast, Magnus Hirschfeld became an important theorist of sexuality and the most prominent advocate of homosexual emancipation at the beginning of the 20th century. He first studied modern languages [Page 425]and then medicine, obtaning his degree in 1892. His sexology research was empirically and activist directed, permeated by the belief that the sexuality ideology of Judeo-Christian civilization was a serious obstacle to the understanding of sexuality and to the reform of laws and practices that regulated it. In 1897, Hirschfeld established, together with Max Spohr, Franz Josef von Biilow, and Eduard Oberg, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the world's first gay rights organization. Its goal was to fight for the abolishment of the anti-homosexual paragraph 175 in the German law that punished sexual contact between men. Hirschfeld believed that scientific understanding of sexuality would promote tolerance of sexual minorities. In 1899, he started the Yearbook of Intermediate Sexual Types, the first journal in the world to deal with sexual variants, which was regularly published until 1923. He developed the theory that all human beings are intersexual variants, each individual possessing different proportions of masculinity and femininity, and these proportions changed during one's lifetime. The main idea was that there were no discrete sexual categories, but that human sexuality was in a constant flux, with potentially an infinite number of sexual constitutions.

Hirschfeld did huge statistical surveys on homosexuality, and in 1914, he published his study Homosexuality in Men and Women. One year earlier, with Iwan Bloch and Heinrich Körber, he founded the Medical Society for Sexual Science and Eugenics. In addition to publishing on sexology and sexual reforms, Hirschfeld also wrote about racism, politics, and the history of morals. In 1919 he opened the first sexology institute in the world in Berlin, the Institute for Sexual Science, which was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933, together with its huge library and archive. In the same year he established the institute, Hirschfeld also participated in the production of the first homosexual liberation film Different from the Others. Within a year, the film was banned by the German government. In 1928, Hirschfeld founded the World League for Sexual Reform, which called for reform of sex legislations, the right to contraception and sex education, and legal and social equality of the sexes. Being both a Jew and a sexual liberation activist, Hirschfeld early on became the target of right-wing supporters, being seriously physically attacked in 1920 and 1921. Later, with the Nazis coming in power, he was regularly assaulted and his lectures were disrupted. Returning to Europe in 1932 after his world journey, Hirschfeld decided not to return to Germany, but went first to Switzerland and then in 1934 to France. He died in Nice, on his 67th birthday, May 14, 1935.