For my last post for class, I want to focus on the German Jewish physician and sexologist named Magnus Hirschfeld. He is known as the “Einstein of Sex,” because of the amount of work he did to prove, scientifically, that homosexuality was rooted in biology to help liberate gay men and lesbians from oppressive German laws. He founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee) to campaign for LGBT individuals to be recognized in society and against their legal persecution and is known as the first ever LGBT organization in history. He also created and ran the Institute of Sex Research (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft), which as a non-profit foundation that served as a research library and had medical, psychological, and ethnological divisions, and a marriage and sex counseling office. The institute advocated for sex education, contraception, the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, and women’s emancipation, and was a pioneer worldwide in the call for civil rights and social acceptance for the LGBT Community. Magnus Hirschfeld started advocating for gay rights, because many of his LGBT patients started to commit suicide, because of the way that society viewed them. Sadly, most of his work was either destroyed or ended up in the wrong hands during the Hitler reign on Germany. He was a true pioneer that paved the way for others to continue advocating for the acceptance of LGBT individuals within society.
#LGBTQExperiencesUSA #LGBTQFiguresinHistory #LGBTQOrganizingwithinHistory