His ideas reached hundreds of thousands of people.
Asian gay sex on train plus#
He gave 178 lectures, plus radio interviews. It was neither an illness nor a sin, and the persecution of homosexuality was unjust. In his lectures, Hirschfeld explained his influential model of homosexuality: It was a character trait that people were born with, a part of their nature. Li then accompanied Hirschfeld on a lecture tour around the world, traveling first class on ships to Indonesia, the Philippines, South Asia, Egypt and beyond. With Li by his side, Hirschfeld spoke all over China. It was the beginning of a relationship that would profoundly shape gay history, as well as the rest of both of their lives. When Hirschfeld finished speaking, Li came up and introduced himself. The lecture that afternoon was hosted by a Chinese feminist club at a fancy, modern apartment building. Magnus Hirschfeld and Li Shiu Tong on the cover of a 1933 issue of a French magazine Almost no one in the 1930s could afford to be out-the revelation would have destroyed either man’s career. Whether he suspected that the famous sexologist was gay is a mystery. He had often encountered Hirschfeld’s name, and he knew his reputation as a defender of homosexuals. In medical school, Li had read all he could about homosexuality, then a very controversial topic. Li must have seen the papers, because he made sure to catch Hirschfeld’s very first lecture. 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 When Li died in Vancouver in 1993, his unpublished manuscript about sexuality was thrown in the trash.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.