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.