The Shanghai newspapers billed Hirschfeld as the world’s foremost expert on sexuality. Then 63 years old, Hirschfeld had come to China to give public lectures about the science of sex. Student and mentorīorn in 1907 in Hong Kong, Li was a 24-year-old studying medicine at a university in Shanghai when he met Hirschfeld.
In its pages is a theory of LGBTQ people as the majority that would resonate with a lot of young people today. Since then, only a handful of people, myself included, have read it. Luckily, it was rescued by a curious neighbor and eventually ended up in an archive. When Li died in Vancouver in 1993, his unpublished manuscript about sexuality was thrown in the trash. And in my view, his ideas about sexuality speak to our moment better than his much more well-known boyfriend’s do. In books on Hirschfeld, Li is usually just a footnote.īut as I found in my research, Li was a sexologist and activist in his own right.
He was a closeted German doctor and sexologist who became famous in the 1930s as a defender of gay people. Much has been written about Li’s older boyfriend, Magnus Hirschfeld.
You probably don’t know the name, but he was at the center of the first wave of gay politics. Historians are rediscovering one of the most important LGBTQ activists of the early 20th century-an Asian Canadian named Li Shiu Tong.
