GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
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Why do 'queer studies' omit the socialist record?
ANGUS REID fills the blanks left by a biased academic perspective
Magnus Hirschfeld
[Wellcome Images/Public domain]
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
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.
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