GLBT History Museum: Author Talk | The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin

$10 admission; Free for GLBT Historical Society Members

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More than a century ago, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld — the “Einstein of Sex” — became renowned for his groundbreaking theory of sexual relativity. Nearly 100 years after the Nazis burned his books and hounded him from the queer mecca he helped build, Hirschfeld’s vision of sexuality and gender as continual and fluid, rather than rigid binaries, has never been more important.

Join the GLBT Historical Society for an Author Talk and book signing with journalist Daniel Brook, in conversation with historian and Society founding member, Gerard Koskovich. Brook will highlight Hirschfeld’s 1931 visit to the Bay Area, including a tour of San Quentin State Prison, during which he advocated for Black transgender inmates ensnared by California’s capriciously enforced law against consensual oral sex.

About the book:

In this new biopraphy, journalist Daniel Brook retraces Hirschfeld’s rollicking life and reinvigorates his legacy, recovering one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century. In an era when gay sex was a crime and gender roles rigid, Hirschfeld taught that each of us is their own unique mixture of masculinity and femininity. Through his public advocacy for gay rights and his private counseling of patients toward self-acceptance, he became the intellectual impresario of Berlin’s cabaret scene and helped turn his hometown into the world’s queer capital. But he also enraged the Nazis, who ransacked his Institute for Sexual Science and burned his books.

Driven from his homeland, Hirschfeld traveled to California, Asia, and the Middle East to research sexuality on a global scale. Through his harrowing lived experience of antisemitic persecution and a pivotal late-in-life interracial romance, he began to see that race, like gender, was a human invention. Hirschfeld spent his final years in exile trying to warn the world of the genocidal dangers of racism.

The Einstein of Sex at last brings together this unsung icon’s work on sexuality, gender, and race and recovers the visionary who first saw beyond the binaries. A century after his groundbreaking work—as book bans, gender panics, and the fascist politics of “us” and “them” threaten anew—Hirschfeld’s gift for thinking beyond the confines of his world has much to offer.

Copies of The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

This event is co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut San Francisco.