Happy Saturday. In our recent episode on the Autobiographies of Jenny June, we talked about how people understood and talked about gender and sexuality very differently in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries compared to today. A lot of psychologists were framing these ideas in a pretty binary way, with anyone who diverged from that binary considered to be part of a third sex. One person whose work started to really move away from that idea was Magnus Hirschfeld, who we covered on the show on September nineteenth, twenty eighteen. Since we couldn't really get into Hirschfeld and his work in the episode on Jenny June, but it was connected to a lot of that discussion, we're bringing it out as today's Saturday Classic Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we are going to talk about Magnus Hirschfeld, who was a groundbreaking researcher into gender and sexuality in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His name and his work have come up in a lot of past episodes, including Alan L. Hart and the Compton's Cafeteria Riots and Henry Gerber and Chicago Society for Human Rights. I also know a lot of listeners have requested this one, but when I went into the email to try to figure out people's names, I couldn't figure out who's So thanks to people who did request this one. We are not going to be talking about Hirshfield's work in an explicit way, but the subject matter does mean that there's going to be more sex talk in today's episode than there typically is on our show. We are also talking primarily about gay Jewish men living out a time when homosexuality was outlawed in Germany and when the Nazis were coming to power. So there are no number of things that we were going to get into that fall into the general umbrella of disturbing and upsetting. Magnus Hirschfeld was born on May fourteenth, eighteen sixty eight, in Kolburg, Prussia, to Herman and Frederi Hirschfeld. Today Kolberg is Kolobjig, Poland, and that's on the coast of the Baltic Sea. The family was Jewish. Herman was a doctor and Magnus was one of ten or possibly eleven children. Magnus's father was really prominent and respected in their community. Kohlberg had been home to a Prussian garrison. It was basically a military town, and until about eighteen twelve, Jews hadn't been allowed to live there at all. After that changed, a small Jewish community formed, which was mostly made up of merchants and their families. Magnus's father was the most well educated man among this group, and consequently he was elected the president of the Deputy Assembly, which was sort of the Jewish community's organization of self government. Agnus's father died when Magnus was seventeen, and he had been so beloved by the community that a monument was erected in his honor. This monument was unfortunately destroyed by the Nazis. In nineteen thirty three, when Magnus was a teen, he became involved with the Social Democratic Party, although he doesn't seem to have taken an active part in party politics beyond that point. After the Nazis came to power in Germany, the Social Democratic Party was outlawed, but Hirshfeld's name doesn't appear on lists of doctors who were part of the party. Hirshfeld studied at a number of universities before earning his MD in eighteen ninety two. He'd originally wanted to study language in writing, and he described this as his first real love, but for practical reasons, he ultimately decided to become a doctor. Although he was a prolific writer for his entire career. During his university years, Hirshfeld became increasingly secular. He stopped describing himself as Jewish and started describing himself as a dissident. He joined the Monist League during these years as well. If you're not familiar with that term, Monism is the idea that there's one single element or principle that's the fundamental basis of all reality. It underpins a number of religions and philosophies, and this was a huge influence on both Hirschfeld's secular philosophy and his later research into sex and gender. After completing his medical degree, Hirschfeld traveled for a while, including going to Chicago to visit the World's Colombian Exposition and to spend time with family members who had immigrated to the United States. He paid for his trip by writing newspaper reports. After he returned to Europe in eighteen ninety four, he settled in Magdeburg, roughly between Hanover and Berlin. Hirschfeld incorporated naturopathy into his medical practice. In Magdeburg, he emphasized avoiding alcohol and drinking lots of water, taking lots of walks in fresh air, and practicing good nutrition. This put him a bit at odds with the rest of the German medical community. There were plenty of other nature paths, but they tended to be laypeople. This wasn't common at all for an MD in Germany to focus so much on naturopathy rather than on conventional medicine. This led to some of the other doctors nearby being really critical of him and his work. After a year or so in Magdeburg, Hirschfeld moved to Charlottenburg, not far from Berlin, where he continued to work as a doctor, continuing to have a focus in naturopathy. It was about this time that Hirschfeld started focusing his work on gender and sexuality. One influence was probably the trial of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency in eighteen ninety five. People in Germany knew about this trial and it led to a lot of discussions of homosexuality from both a medical and legal perspective. In eighteen ninety six, Hirschfeld gave up his practice as a doctor and a naturepath and devoted himself to the study of sexuality and gender. He told a different story about how he came to this decision, and though although it's one that might be apocryphal, he wrote that he had a patient who was supposed to be getting married, and the patient in question was a young homosexual man. The night before the wedding, he took his own life rather than having to marry a woman. But first this patient wrote a suicide note to Hirschfeld, his doctor, asking him to tell his story and to use it to help change society's understanding of homosexuality so that homosexual men wouldn't be forced to hide their identities and marry women. Hirschfeld's first written work on this subject came out that same year. It was titled Sappho and Socrates, or how is the Love of Men and Women for persons of their own sex? To be Explained? Under the advice of his publisher, he used the pseudonym Theodore Raymond. This was the only time that he didn't publish his work under his own name, but Hirschfeld also told the publisher that if anyone asked who had really written it, they could absolutely say it was him. A lot of the people who I had to track down the author of Sappho and Socrates are people that today would fall under the umbrella of gender and sexual minorities. People we would describe in terms like gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender today. These terms weren't in use at all, or weren't in use in quite the same way in eighteen ninety six, but that's how we would describe folks in more modern times. As a result of all these inquiries, in eighteen ninety seven, Hirschfeld and other advocates established the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee was one of the first, if not the first, established gay rights organizations in the world, and we're going to talk more about it and its work after we first pause for a little sponsor break. The motto of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee is translated as justice through science or through science justice. It was dedicated to scientific study of gender and sexuality with the hope of dispelling stigma around homosexuality. The organization was an advocate for other reforms as well, including contraception and an overhaul of divorce law to make it easier to get a divorce. But the biggest focus was homosexuality, and on that front, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee had a very concrete goal the repeal of paragraph one seventy five of the German Imperial Penal Code, which dated back to eighteen seventy one. Paragraph one seventy five outlawed homosexual conduct among men. In addition to criminalizing homosexual behavior, this law also led to a huge culture of blackmail in Germany. Blackmailers would threaten to expose someone's real or alleged violation of paragraph one seventy five and then extort huge amounts of money from their victims. This added to the climate of fear and persecution of gay men in Germany at the time. Added to the repeal of paragraph one seventy five, Hirschfeld also wanted to raise the age of consent in Germany from fourteen to sixteen. He thought that it was only with some additional maturity that a person could really know they were ready to be sexually active and know with whom they were ready to be sexually active. On top of that raising the age of consent would mean that pederasts wouldn't have a loophole to get away with their crimes if paragraph one seventy five was abolished. Hirschfeld was not the first person to advocate for the reform of these laws in Germany. That credit usually goes to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who gave an address on the subject at the sixth Congress of German Jurists in Munich in eighteen sixty seven, thirty years before the establishment of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, and the word homosexual had not been coined when Ulris made his speech, and he was using completely different terminology that really isn't in use today, but this is generally regarded as the first time a gay person gave a speech on the subject of gay rights. Ulrix continued to campaign against paragraph one seventy five until he finally had to leave Germany in eighteen eighty. Yeah, his advocacy against laws that criminalized homosexuality goes back even before paragraph one seventy five was written into the code, So in a lot of ways, Hirschfeld and the Scientific Humanitarian Committee were picking up where Orrix had left off. The organization drafted a petition arguing for the removal of paragraph one seventy five from the Penal Code, and they circulated it for the next thirty three years, from eighteen ninety seven to nineteen thirty They got thousands of signatures from well known prominent people, and at its peak, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee had seven hundred members. The committee also published pamphlets and other informational material, including sex education and education about homosexuality. One very popular pamphlet was what must Our Nation Know About the Third Sex, which people would ask to have mailed to their family members or would casually leave on public transportation to try to educate others. So at this point in his work, Hirschfeld and others were framing homosexuality as being part of a third sex. This was also how Urix had framed his theories, and Hirschfeld was basically building off of that previous work. So the basic idea was that homosexuals and bisexuals all belonged to a third sex, which was different from male or female. Hirschfeld did not stick with this third sex idea for long, though he conducted at least thirty thousand interviews and extensive physical examinations of gay men and lesbians, and toured places like gay communities and bars all over Africa, North America, and Europe, and all of this work led him to a totally different conclusion what he described as sexual intermediaries. Essentially, according to hirsch Felt, everyone was some mix of masculine, feminine, and in some cases androgynous traits. So in this model, there were not just two types of human being, male and female, who were sexually dimorphic and sorted into matching binary genders. There were more than forty three million possible combinations of a whole range of indicators. This made gender and sexual orientation a colossally large spectrum and not a matter of a binary. Even though he was conceiving of all of this as a seemingly infinite range of sexual orientations and genders, Hirshfeld still tried to develop taxonomies that incorporated homosexuals, bisexuals, and the like. In eighteen ninety nine, he published his first Yearbook of Intermediate Sexual Types, something he continued to publish annually until nineteen twenty three. One of the things that Hirshfeld was trying to do, and all of this study and all of this taxonomizing was to establish the idea that homosexuality was inborn and unchangeable. He thought that if he made it clear that people were born this way, that it would dispel stigma and it would provide a strong argument for their appeal of paragraph one seventy five. Over the next few years, Hirshfeld established himself as such a renowned expert engender and sexuality that he was called on as an expert witness in court cases related to homosexuality. Some of his colleagues at the Scientific Humanitarian Committee advocated releasing the names of prominent gay people to try to undermine the legitimacy of paragraph one seventy five, what we would describe as outing today, and Hirshfeld never agreed with this strategy, but when he was called on to be an expert witness, he tried to frame his testimony in a way that he hoped would have the same general outcome of dismantling paragraph one seventy five. These intentions had the opposite effect in nineteen oh seven, when Hirshfeld was called on as an expert witness during the Uhlenberg affair. This was part of a huge scandal and press campaign that was led by journalist Maximilian Harden. Harden alleged that German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm the Second was surrounded by a quote degenerated homosexual Camarilla, and that that degenerated group was led by Prince Philip Eulenberg. The Uhlenberg affair went on from nineteen o six to nineteen o nine, and in nineteen oh seven, high ranking Prussian general Kuno Multke accused Harden of libel, saying that Harden was spreading lies about Moltke being a homosexual. A civil trial followed and Hirschfeld was a witness. One of the things that had to be established at this trial was whether what Harden was saying about Moltke was true, because if it was true, it wasn't libel. Hirshfield's testimony, which was founded on his idea that homosexuality wasn't deviant and wasn't a pathology, was that Moltke was an unconscious homosexual, whether he knew it or not. The conservative press was outraged over these statements. Even though Hirschfeld himself did not believe homosexuality was pathological, deviant, or criminal, much of the rest of Germany believed the exact opposite. So while Hirschfeld hoped that his testimony would help normalize the idea of homosexuality in the minds of many, he was just committing slander, and in the second trial Hirschfeld had to recant his original testimony. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee started losing support and members, and Hirschfeld himself became the target of both anti semitism and homophobia. In defiance of all of that criticism, Hirschfeld continued working. In nineteen ten, he published a work called The Transvestites, coining that term as well as the term transsexuals. Neither of those terms is really the preferred term today, but at the time he was creating language for something that nobody had really named yet. In The Transvestites, he tried to make it clear that there was a distinction between cross dressing and homosexuality, as well as between cross dressers and other people who were at the time considered to be deviant, and once again his goal was ending stigma. Cross dressing was not outlawed under paragraph one seventy five, and when people were arrested for cross dressing, the charges were usually vague offenses like creating a disturbance, so he was hoping that by drawing this very clear line dividing cross dressing from homosexuality, that he would protect cross dressers from stigma and arrest. At the same time, the transvestites. While groundbreaking, is also kind of muddled by today's standards. His descriptions assumed that all the people in his case studies in the work are people that we would describe as sis gender today, that they were the same gender as the sex that they were assigned at birth. So the idea of being transgender, which also wasn't a term that existed yet, does not play a part in this at all, even though when you read the case studies it's clear that some of the people in them probably would have described themselves as transgender if they lived today. In nineteen thirteen, Hirschfeld helped establish the Medical Society for Sexual Science and Eugenics. Hirschfeld was vehemently against racial eugenics, but like a lot of people at the time, he was in favor of the idea of using eugenics to stop hereditary disease and improve humanity in general. As we have discussed on the show before, eugenics was an extremely mainstream concept at this point and the field of sexual science, which was brand new at the time, was all tangled up with it. Yeah, when you look at this sort of newly developing field of sexual science, that's a whole huge spectrum of how people thought that eugenics connected to all of it. And it's on the spectrum from oh, we could make humanity a little better too, Oh, we need to stop the bad people from breeding. It's really all over the place and its tangled together. In nineteen fourteen, Hirshfeld published The Homosexuality of Men and Women, which was a huge compendium of research at the time. This was the largest collection of available research on gender and sexuality, and really, in terms of just the sheer amount of information it collected into one work, it might still be. In this work, Hirschfeld continued his argument that homosexuality was not a pathology. He argued that the psychiatric and interpersonal issues that gay people faced were not a product of their sexuality, but of the immense stress of trying to keep it a secret and of living under so much stigma and discrimination. He described it as quote the eternal battle between willing spirit and weak flesh, that the perpetual fear of being discovered of blackmail, arrest, court sentences, loss of social status and respect from family and friends greatly affects one's disposition. Must surely be nerve racking and could bring on a nervous breakdown, depression, and thoughts of suicide. He also concluded that the reason that homosexuality was so connected with deviance and medical literature was that healthy and generally well adjusted homosexuals were able to keep their sexual orientation a secret from their doctors. So doctors only encountered homosexuals that they knew about when there was some kind of physical or psychological problem going on, or when they had been contacted by police to examine someone who had been arrested for a crime. World War One also began in nineteen fourteen, and much of the work of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee turned to focus on the war, like delivering care packages to troops. Hirschfeld was called on to be an expert witness when servicemen were suspected of homosexuality or cross dressing. But otherwise, the World War One years were something of a pause, and so while they pause, we are going to pause and have a little bit of a sponsor break. The period between the end of World War One and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany is known as the Weimar Republic, and the field of sexual science flourished in both Germany and Austria during these years. It was a turbulent time, but also one of some social progress and a whole sexual revolution. Lots of other groups formed to advocate for the legalization of homosexuality and for rights and protections for gay people. In nineteen nineteen, using his own money, Magnus Hirschfeld established the Institute for Sexual Science, also called the Institute for Sexology. Initially, the Institute was dedicated to mainly scientific research and training related to sexuality and gender, but it soon expanded to include marriage counseling, counseling related to sexual identity and orientation, a medical facility, and a massive library on gender and sexuality. When we say that it is massive, it was incredibly huge. It encompassed basically everything that was known about gender and sexuality in the early twentieth century, including tens of thousands of books, original photographs, and letters, and all of Hirschfeld's extensive collection of primary data from all of the studies that he had been doing. The Institute saw four thousand patients in its first year alone, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee was folded into the Institute as its sex education division. The institute's research continued on the same tack that Hirschfeld had been pursuing earlier, including looking for some kind of evidence that homosexuality was inborn and had a biological basis. A lot of the ways that we might do this today, like brain scans and hormone studies, didn't exist yet, so he was looking at people's observable traits, such as in four hundred and sixty three homosexual men, one hundred twenty eight had undeveloped Adams apples, two hundred nineteen had poorly developed ones, and only one hundred sixteen had quote unquote normal ones. Or in five hundred homosexual men, most had less to no body hair or very fine body hair, or in gay men, the width of the hips tended to be about the same as the width of the shoulders, whereas non gay men generally had broader shoulders than their hips. And basically he was trying to figure out what the norm was and figure out if homosexuals deviated from that norm, and looking at just about every physical trait you could think of to make these comparisons. He also supported the work of Austrian researcher Eugen Steinock, who, along with other research was building off the discovery of sex hormones with the idea of transplanting gonadle tissue from one person to another. This unfortunately did not work, and in some cases it caused serious problems when the transplanted tissue became necrotic, but Steinach is viewed as one of the early pioneers of interchnology. Also in nineteen nineteen, Hirscheld participated in the creation of a film called Different from the Others, which was the first film to call for decriminalization of homosexuality. The film was almost immediately banned and it was later burned by Nazis. It was probably while working on this film that Hirschfeld met Karl Geza, which is one of only a couple of long term relationships in his life that we really know about. Hirschfeld was very private about his personal life, and for a lot of it he seems to have lived alone. That set him apart from Karl, Heinrich Orris, who publicly talked about his own homosexuality, while Hirschfeld never publicly discussed himself as a gay man, Giza moved in with Hirschfeld in nineteen nineteen. In nineteen twenty eight, Hirschfeld co founded the World League for Sexual Reform, which had existed in some form since nineteen twenty six but wasn't formally chartered until two years later. The World League hosted large conferences on the subject of sexual reform, everything from women's rights to contraception to homosexual rights. Throughout all of this, Hirshfield was still doing all this research, and he was still advocating for the repeal of paragraph one seventy five, and in late nineteen twenty nine it looked like that was probably going to happen. A Penal Code Reform Committee voted to remove the paragraph with three exceptions. One was if one party was under twenty one and the other wasn't. Another, if one party quote used a position of influence to pressure the other, and the third was if it was a commercial relationship, in other words, if it was sex work. Within the movement to abolish paragraph one seventy five, this was really controversial to some, it was a win, but the proposed change effectively raised the age of consent for gay me end to twenty one, which was higher than it was for anyone else. It also made the punishments for homosexual acts that were still illegal much harsher than they had been before, so in the minds of others, it actually did more harm than good. In spite of this vote, though a new penal code did not go into effect, the revised code didn't make it through the legislature before the rise of the Nazi Party. In late nineteen thirty Magnus Hirschfeld left Germany on a speaking and fundraising tour. He traveled all over the world. Press in the US called him the Einstein of Sex. In Shanghai in nineteen thirty one, he met and began a relationship with a man named Lee Shu Tong. Hirshfeld and Karl Geza were still a couple as well. At this point. While in India, Hirshfeld started hearing rumors that he was being targeted by the Nazis. He'd also started to experience a range of health issues. He contracted malaria while he was on this tour. He also had diabetes and a nerve disorder in a series of heart attacks. The stress of not knowing for sure what was going on back home in Germany made all of this a lot worse. He never went back to Germany after starting that tour in nineteen thirty. On May sixth, nineteen thirty three, Nazis destroyed the Institute of Sexual Science. Copies of a lot of Hirschfeld's published papers and books still exist, but most of his primary data was destroyed in this attack. On May tenth, material taken from the institute was burned in Opera Square, along with other books that were declared to be anti German. Hirschfeld also became a part of Nazi propaganda as an example of from the Nazi perspective, an evil, degenerate Jew. The distraction of the Institute of Sexual Science and this ongoing persecution by the Nazis led Hirschfeld to start considering how he should think about his own identity. He had been the target of anti Semitism for his entire career, including being beaten so badly in an anti Semitic attack in nineteen twenty that he was reported to have been killed. This was particularly disturbing to him because it was happening in spite of the fact that he hadn't been an observant Jew since he was a child In nineteen thirty three, he wrote, quote, the question where do you belong? What are you? Really? Tortures me. If I frame the question as are you a German, a Jew, or a world citizen, then my answer is always a world citizen or all three. On November fourteenth, nineteen thirty three, everything from the institute that hadn't been destroyed was sold at auction. Hirschfeld wrote, quote today November fourteenth, that has been three years since I left Berlin and never returned. Today in my former home begins the auction of my remaining books, materials, furniture. The last act for now of a fateful tragedy that comprises a terrible psychological martyrdom. Everyone turned out of the house, even my sisters. The Bar Association took possession of the house. I was completely stripped of all my rights, persecuted, a bounty put on my head, and insulted. Hirschfeld was able to buy back a few things from the institute, and with that he hoped to start a new French Institute of sexual science. In nineteen thirty three. Karl Giso was supposed to be part of this new institute, but he was arrested in a bath house and deported from France. The French Institute soon closed. Toward the very end of his life, Hirschfeld wrote a study of racism, which he had started on after leaving Germany. It was first published as an English translation in nineteen thirty eight, and it was a response to Nazi ideology. Hirschfeld also sent a copy to a friend of his who had become a strong supporter of the Nazis, in the hope that his work would change this person's mind. Mangus Hirschfeld died on his sixty seventh birthday, May fourteenth, nineteen thirty five, in Niece, France. At the time, Karl Giso was in Vienna and Lisiu Tongue was studying in Zurich. Hirschfeld left his remaining work to these two men, but Giso wasn't able to collect his inheritance because doing so would have required him to go to the German embassy, which for obvious reasons, he could not do. He took his own life in nineteen thirty eight. Lie Shutong lived until nineteen ninety three, and he kept up with the materials that Hirshfeld had left him for the rest of his life, although some of these belongings were found in a trash heap. After his death, a number of materials he had kept were handed over to the Magnus Hirschfeld Society in two thousand and three. Although some of Hirschfeld's family members and colleagues at the Institute of Sexual Science were able to get out of Germany, others did not survive the Holocaust. Even after his death, the Nazi Party continued using Magnus Hirschfeld and anti Semitic and anti homosexual propaganda. There was a bust of him placed in the Museum of the Revolution in Nuremberg with a really disparaging sign, and his head was carried through the streets in effigy during rallies. When Hirshfeld was making his arguments that homosexuality was inborn and unchangeable, it was controversial. He hoped that proving that people were born gay or lesbian would end stigma in persecution, but to some the idea of being born this way was just too restrictive, and others feared that proving that homosexuality was inborn and finding physical markers that correlated to it would just lead to more persecution. This fear was and frankly continues to be absolutely justified. Not long after Magnus Hirschfeld's death on June twenty eighth, nineteen thirty five, the Nazi Party expanded Paragraph one seventy five. It broadened the definition of criminally and decent activities between men to include anything that could be interpreted as homosexual in any way. Later on, German courts upheld the idea that this applied to even thinking about it. S s Chief Heinrich Himler established the Reich Central Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality on October twenty sixth, nineteen thirty six, and its officers had almost unlimited power to arrest anyone considered to be in violation of the law and held without trial indefinitely. Roughly one hundred thousand gaymen were arrested for their sexual orientation in Germany and German occupied territories between nineteen thirty three and nineteen forty five. About fifty thousand men were imprisoned, and somewhere between five thousand and fifteen thousand were sent to concentration camps. Lesbians were not targeted nearly as much because they were not considered to be as much of a threat to the idea of Aryan purity. The Nazi Party also put an end to the field of sex research that had been flourishing in Germany and Austria during the Weimar era. Paragraph one seventy five was removed from the Penal Code in East Germany in nineteen fifty, but it remained part of the code in West Germany until after German reunification. It was formally removed in nineteen ninety four and the two thousands, the German Parliament annulled the convictions of gay men who had been convicted under Nazi rule, and then just very recently, in twenty seventeen, Germany announced that roughly fifty thousand other men would be pardoned, including men who were convicted after the end of World War Two. After World War Two, Magnus Hirschfeld really fell into almost total obscurity. He was remembered only by people who had personally known and worked with him, but his work was rediscovered during the nineteen eighties. The Magnus Hirschfeld Federal Foundation was founded in twenty eleven, devoted to research and advocacy on behalf of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Today, a lot of Hirschfeld's surviving research and notes are in the Kinsey Institute for Research and Sex, Gender and Reproduction. I feel like the idea that he based so much of his work on, that sexual orientation is inborn, has come and gone out of favor in the years since then. Like it was a controversial idea when he was advocating for it. I know when I was growing up in the nineteen eighties and nineties, it was almost universally accepted as common knowledge within the community. And now I feel like it's evolved a little bit to be that, Like it's a person can't really consciously change their sexual orientation, but it is possible for people to understand their identity differently in different parts of their life. Yeah, it's a little more nuanced, it is, and it can I mean, the whole idea of identity and gender continues to evolve. So, yeah, where we're at now is probably not the place we will be even in a year or two, and certainly not in another five to ten. So it is pretty fascinating that this was going on way before. We often think of these concepts as having been developed. Yeah, well, like I know a lot of folks think of and we've talked about this on the show before, like a lot of people sort of imagine the gay rights movement starting with the Stonewall Riots, and really there was a lot going on way before that, and in the case of in Germany, way way way before that. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old health stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. In our recent episode on the Autobiographies of Jenny June, we talked about how people understood and talked about gender and sexuality very differently in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries compared to today. A lot of psychologists were framing these ideas in a pretty binary way, with anyone who diverged from that binary considered to be part of a third sex. One person whose work started to really move away from that idea was Magnus Hirschfeld, who we covered on the show on September nineteenth, twenty eighteen. Since we couldn't really get into Hirschfeld and his work in the episode on Jenny June, but it was connected to a lot of that discussion, we're bringing it out as today's Saturday Classic Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we are going to talk about Magnus Hirschfeld, who was a groundbreaking researcher into gender and sexuality in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His name and his work have come up in a lot of past episodes, including Alan L. Hart and the Compton's Cafeteria Riots and Henry Gerber and Chicago Society for Human Rights. I also know a lot of listeners have requested this one, but when I went into the email to try to figure out people's names, I couldn't figure out who's So thanks to people who did request this one. We are not going to be talking about Hirshfield's work in an explicit way, but the subject matter does mean that there's going to be more sex talk in today's episode than there typically is on our show. We are also talking primarily about gay Jewish men living out a time when homosexuality was outlawed in Germany and when the Nazis were coming to power. So there are no number of things that we were going to get into that fall into the general umbrella of disturbing and upsetting. Magnus Hirschfeld was born on May fourteenth, eighteen sixty eight, in Kolburg, Prussia, to Herman and Frederi Hirschfeld. Today Kolberg is Kolobjig, Poland, and that's on the coast of the Baltic Sea. The family was Jewish. Herman was a doctor and Magnus was one of ten or possibly eleven children. Magnus's father was really prominent and respected in their community. Kohlberg had been home to a Prussian garrison. It was basically a military town, and until about eighteen twelve, Jews hadn't been allowed to live there at all. After that changed, a small Jewish community formed, which was mostly made up of merchants and their families. Magnus's father was the most well educated man among this group, and consequently he was elected the president of the Deputy Assembly, which was sort of the Jewish community's organization of self government. Agnus's father died when Magnus was seventeen, and he had been so beloved by the community that a monument was erected in his honor. This monument was unfortunately destroyed by the Nazis. In nineteen thirty three, when Magnus was a teen, he became involved with the Social Democratic Party, although he doesn't seem to have taken an active part in party politics beyond that point. After the Nazis came to power in Germany, the Social Democratic Party was outlawed, but Hirshfeld's name doesn't appear on lists of doctors who were part of the party. Hirshfeld studied at a number of universities before earning his MD in eighteen ninety two. He'd originally wanted to study language in writing, and he described this as his first real love, but for practical reasons, he ultimately decided to become a doctor. Although he was a prolific writer for his entire career. During his university years, Hirshfeld became increasingly secular. He stopped describing himself as Jewish and started describing himself as a dissident. He joined the Monist League during these years as well. If you're not familiar with that term, Monism is the idea that there's one single element or principle that's the fundamental basis of all reality. It underpins a number of religions and philosophies, and this was a huge influence on both Hirschfeld's secular philosophy and his later research into sex and gender. After completing his medical degree, Hirschfeld traveled for a while, including going to Chicago to visit the World's Colombian Exposition and to spend time with family members who had immigrated to the United States. He paid for his trip by writing newspaper reports. After he returned to Europe in eighteen ninety four, he settled in Magdeburg, roughly between Hanover and Berlin. Hirschfeld incorporated naturopathy into his medical practice. In Magdeburg, he emphasized avoiding alcohol and drinking lots of water, taking lots of walks in fresh air, and practicing good nutrition. This put him a bit at odds with the rest of the German medical community. There were plenty of other nature paths, but they tended to be laypeople. This wasn't common at all for an MD in Germany to focus so much on naturopathy rather than on conventional medicine. This led to some of the other doctors nearby being really critical of him and his work. After a year or so in Magdeburg, Hirschfeld moved to Charlottenburg, not far from Berlin, where he continued to work as a doctor, continuing to have a focus in naturopathy. It was about this time that Hirschfeld started focusing his work on gender and sexuality. One influence was probably the trial of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency in eighteen ninety five. People in Germany knew about this trial and it led to a lot of discussions of homosexuality from both a medical and legal perspective. In eighteen ninety six, Hirschfeld gave up his practice as a doctor and a naturepath and devoted himself to the study of sexuality and gender. He told a different story about how he came to this decision, and though although it's one that might be apocryphal, he wrote that he had a patient who was supposed to be getting married, and the patient in question was a young homosexual man. The night before the wedding, he took his own life rather than having to marry a woman. But first this patient wrote a suicide note to Hirschfeld, his doctor, asking him to tell his story and to use it to help change society's understanding of homosexuality so that homosexual men wouldn't be forced to hide their identities and marry women. Hirschfeld's first written work on this subject came out that same year. It was titled Sappho and Socrates, or how is the Love of Men and Women for persons of their own sex? To be Explained? Under the advice of his publisher, he used the pseudonym Theodore Raymond. This was the only time that he didn't publish his work under his own name, but Hirschfeld also told the publisher that if anyone asked who had really written it, they could absolutely say it was him. A lot of the people who I had to track down the author of Sappho and Socrates are people that today would fall under the umbrella of gender and sexual minorities. People we would describe in terms like gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender today. These terms weren't in use at all, or weren't in use in quite the same way in eighteen ninety six, but that's how we would describe folks in more modern times. As a result of all these inquiries, in eighteen ninety seven, Hirschfeld and other advocates established the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee was one of the first, if not the first, established gay rights organizations in the world, and we're going to talk more about it and its work after we first pause for a little sponsor break. The motto of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee is translated as justice through science or through science justice. It was dedicated to scientific study of gender and sexuality with the hope of dispelling stigma around homosexuality. The organization was an advocate for other reforms as well, including contraception and an overhaul of divorce law to make it easier to get a divorce. But the biggest focus was homosexuality, and on that front, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee had a very concrete goal the repeal of paragraph one seventy five of the German Imperial Penal Code, which dated back to eighteen seventy one. Paragraph one seventy five outlawed homosexual conduct among men. In addition to criminalizing homosexual behavior, this law also led to a huge culture of blackmail in Germany. Blackmailers would threaten to expose someone's real or alleged violation of paragraph one seventy five and then extort huge amounts of money from their victims. This added to the climate of fear and persecution of gay men in Germany at the time. Added to the repeal of paragraph one seventy five, Hirschfeld also wanted to raise the age of consent in Germany from fourteen to sixteen. He thought that it was only with some additional maturity that a person could really know they were ready to be sexually active and know with whom they were ready to be sexually active. On top of that raising the age of consent would mean that pederasts wouldn't have a loophole to get away with their crimes if paragraph one seventy five was abolished. Hirschfeld was not the first person to advocate for the reform of these laws in Germany. That credit usually goes to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who gave an address on the subject at the sixth Congress of German Jurists in Munich in eighteen sixty seven, thirty years before the establishment of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, and the word homosexual had not been coined when Ulris made his speech, and he was using completely different terminology that really isn't in use today, but this is generally regarded as the first time a gay person gave a speech on the subject of gay rights. Ulrix continued to campaign against paragraph one seventy five until he finally had to leave Germany in eighteen eighty. Yeah, his advocacy against laws that criminalized homosexuality goes back even before paragraph one seventy five was written into the code, So in a lot of ways, Hirschfeld and the Scientific Humanitarian Committee were picking up where Orrix had left off. The organization drafted a petition arguing for the removal of paragraph one seventy five from the Penal Code, and they circulated it for the next thirty three years, from eighteen ninety seven to nineteen thirty They got thousands of signatures from well known prominent people, and at its peak, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee had seven hundred members. The committee also published pamphlets and other informational material, including sex education and education about homosexuality. One very popular pamphlet was what must Our Nation Know About the Third Sex, which people would ask to have mailed to their family members or would casually leave on public transportation to try to educate others. So at this point in his work, Hirschfeld and others were framing homosexuality as being part of a third sex. This was also how Urix had framed his theories, and Hirschfeld was basically building off of that previous work. So the basic idea was that homosexuals and bisexuals all belonged to a third sex, which was different from male or female. Hirschfeld did not stick with this third sex idea for long, though he conducted at least thirty thousand interviews and extensive physical examinations of gay men and lesbians, and toured places like gay communities and bars all over Africa, North America, and Europe, and all of this work led him to a totally different conclusion what he described as sexual intermediaries. Essentially, according to hirsch Felt, everyone was some mix of masculine, feminine, and in some cases androgynous traits. So in this model, there were not just two types of human being, male and female, who were sexually dimorphic and sorted into matching binary genders. There were more than forty three million possible combinations of a whole range of indicators. This made gender and sexual orientation a colossally large spectrum and not a matter of a binary. Even though he was conceiving of all of this as a seemingly infinite range of sexual orientations and genders, Hirshfeld still tried to develop taxonomies that incorporated homosexuals, bisexuals, and the like. In eighteen ninety nine, he published his first Yearbook of Intermediate Sexual Types, something he continued to publish annually until nineteen twenty three. One of the things that Hirshfeld was trying to do, and all of this study and all of this taxonomizing was to establish the idea that homosexuality was inborn and unchangeable. He thought that if he made it clear that people were born this way, that it would dispel stigma and it would provide a strong argument for their appeal of paragraph one seventy five. Over the next few years, Hirshfeld established himself as such a renowned expert engender and sexuality that he was called on as an expert witness in court cases related to homosexuality. Some of his colleagues at the Scientific Humanitarian Committee advocated releasing the names of prominent gay people to try to undermine the legitimacy of paragraph one seventy five, what we would describe as outing today, and Hirshfeld never agreed with this strategy, but when he was called on to be an expert witness, he tried to frame his testimony in a way that he hoped would have the same general outcome of dismantling paragraph one seventy five. These intentions had the opposite effect in nineteen oh seven, when Hirshfeld was called on as an expert witness during the Uhlenberg affair. This was part of a huge scandal and press campaign that was led by journalist Maximilian Harden. Harden alleged that German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm the Second was surrounded by a quote degenerated homosexual Camarilla, and that that degenerated group was led by Prince Philip Eulenberg. The Uhlenberg affair went on from nineteen o six to nineteen o nine, and in nineteen oh seven, high ranking Prussian general Kuno Multke accused Harden of libel, saying that Harden was spreading lies about Moltke being a homosexual. A civil trial followed and Hirschfeld was a witness. One of the things that had to be established at this trial was whether what Harden was saying about Moltke was true, because if it was true, it wasn't libel. Hirshfield's testimony, which was founded on his idea that homosexuality wasn't deviant and wasn't a pathology, was that Moltke was an unconscious homosexual, whether he knew it or not. The conservative press was outraged over these statements. Even though Hirschfeld himself did not believe homosexuality was pathological, deviant, or criminal, much of the rest of Germany believed the exact opposite. So while Hirschfeld hoped that his testimony would help normalize the idea of homosexuality in the minds of many, he was just committing slander, and in the second trial Hirschfeld had to recant his original testimony. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee started losing support and members, and Hirschfeld himself became the target of both anti semitism and homophobia. In defiance of all of that criticism, Hirschfeld continued working. In nineteen ten, he published a work called The Transvestites, coining that term as well as the term transsexuals. Neither of those terms is really the preferred term today, but at the time he was creating language for something that nobody had really named yet. In The Transvestites, he tried to make it clear that there was a distinction between cross dressing and homosexuality, as well as between cross dressers and other people who were at the time considered to be deviant, and once again his goal was ending stigma. Cross dressing was not outlawed under paragraph one seventy five, and when people were arrested for cross dressing, the charges were usually vague offenses like creating a disturbance, so he was hoping that by drawing this very clear line dividing cross dressing from homosexuality, that he would protect cross dressers from stigma and arrest. At the same time, the transvestites. While groundbreaking, is also kind of muddled by today's standards. His descriptions assumed that all the people in his case studies in the work are people that we would describe as sis gender today, that they were the same gender as the sex that they were assigned at birth. So the idea of being transgender, which also wasn't a term that existed yet, does not play a part in this at all, even though when you read the case studies it's clear that some of the people in them probably would have described themselves as transgender if they lived today. In nineteen thirteen, Hirschfeld helped establish the Medical Society for Sexual Science and Eugenics. Hirschfeld was vehemently against racial eugenics, but like a lot of people at the time, he was in favor of the idea of using eugenics to stop hereditary disease and improve humanity in general. As we have discussed on the show before, eugenics was an extremely mainstream concept at this point and the field of sexual science, which was brand new at the time, was all tangled up with it. Yeah, when you look at this sort of newly developing field of sexual science, that's a whole huge spectrum of how people thought that eugenics connected to all of it. And it's on the spectrum from oh, we could make humanity a little better too, Oh, we need to stop the bad people from breeding. It's really all over the place and its tangled together. In nineteen fourteen, Hirshfeld published The Homosexuality of Men and Women, which was a huge compendium of research at the time. This was the largest collection of available research on gender and sexuality, and really, in terms of just the sheer amount of information it collected into one work, it might still be. In this work, Hirschfeld continued his argument that homosexuality was not a pathology. He argued that the psychiatric and interpersonal issues that gay people faced were not a product of their sexuality, but of the immense stress of trying to keep it a secret and of living under so much stigma and discrimination. He described it as quote the eternal battle between willing spirit and weak flesh, that the perpetual fear of being discovered of blackmail, arrest, court sentences, loss of social status and respect from family and friends greatly affects one's disposition. Must surely be nerve racking and could bring on a nervous breakdown, depression, and thoughts of suicide. He also concluded that the reason that homosexuality was so connected with deviance and medical literature was that healthy and generally well adjusted homosexuals were able to keep their sexual orientation a secret from their doctors. So doctors only encountered homosexuals that they knew about when there was some kind of physical or psychological problem going on, or when they had been contacted by police to examine someone who had been arrested for a crime. World War One also began in nineteen fourteen, and much of the work of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee turned to focus on the war, like delivering care packages to troops. Hirschfeld was called on to be an expert witness when servicemen were suspected of homosexuality or cross dressing. But otherwise, the World War One years were something of a pause, and so while they pause, we are going to pause and have a little bit of a sponsor break. The period between the end of World War One and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany is known as the Weimar Republic, and the field of sexual science flourished in both Germany and Austria during these years. It was a turbulent time, but also one of some social progress and a whole sexual revolution. Lots of other groups formed to advocate for the legalization of homosexuality and for rights and protections for gay people. In nineteen nineteen, using his own money, Magnus Hirschfeld established the Institute for Sexual Science, also called the Institute for Sexology. Initially, the Institute was dedicated to mainly scientific research and training related to sexuality and gender, but it soon expanded to include marriage counseling, counseling related to sexual identity and orientation, a medical facility, and a massive library on gender and sexuality. When we say that it is massive, it was incredibly huge. It encompassed basically everything that was known about gender and sexuality in the early twentieth century, including tens of thousands of books, original photographs, and letters, and all of Hirschfeld's extensive collection of primary data from all of the studies that he had been doing. The Institute saw four thousand patients in its first year alone, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee was folded into the Institute as its sex education division. The institute's research continued on the same tack that Hirschfeld had been pursuing earlier, including looking for some kind of evidence that homosexuality was inborn and had a biological basis. A lot of the ways that we might do this today, like brain scans and hormone studies, didn't exist yet, so he was looking at people's observable traits, such as in four hundred and sixty three homosexual men, one hundred twenty eight had undeveloped Adams apples, two hundred nineteen had poorly developed ones, and only one hundred sixteen had quote unquote normal ones. Or in five hundred homosexual men, most had less to no body hair or very fine body hair, or in gay men, the width of the hips tended to be about the same as the width of the shoulders, whereas non gay men generally had broader shoulders than their hips. And basically he was trying to figure out what the norm was and figure out if homosexuals deviated from that norm, and looking at just about every physical trait you could think of to make these comparisons. He also supported the work of Austrian researcher Eugen Steinock, who, along with other research was building off the discovery of sex hormones with the idea of transplanting gonadle tissue from one person to another. This unfortunately did not work, and in some cases it caused serious problems when the transplanted tissue became necrotic, but Steinach is viewed as one of the early pioneers of interchnology. Also in nineteen nineteen, Hirscheld participated in the creation of a film called Different from the Others, which was the first film to call for decriminalization of homosexuality. The film was almost immediately banned and it was later burned by Nazis. It was probably while working on this film that Hirschfeld met Karl Geza, which is one of only a couple of long term relationships in his life that we really know about. Hirschfeld was very private about his personal life, and for a lot of it he seems to have lived alone. That set him apart from Karl, Heinrich Orris, who publicly talked about his own homosexuality, while Hirschfeld never publicly discussed himself as a gay man, Giza moved in with Hirschfeld in nineteen nineteen. In nineteen twenty eight, Hirschfeld co founded the World League for Sexual Reform, which had existed in some form since nineteen twenty six but wasn't formally chartered until two years later. The World League hosted large conferences on the subject of sexual reform, everything from women's rights to contraception to homosexual rights. Throughout all of this, Hirshfield was still doing all this research, and he was still advocating for the repeal of paragraph one seventy five, and in late nineteen twenty nine it looked like that was probably going to happen. A Penal Code Reform Committee voted to remove the paragraph with three exceptions. One was if one party was under twenty one and the other wasn't. Another, if one party quote used a position of influence to pressure the other, and the third was if it was a commercial relationship, in other words, if it was sex work. Within the movement to abolish paragraph one seventy five, this was really controversial to some, it was a win, but the proposed change effectively raised the age of consent for gay me end to twenty one, which was higher than it was for anyone else. It also made the punishments for homosexual acts that were still illegal much harsher than they had been before, so in the minds of others, it actually did more harm than good. In spite of this vote, though a new penal code did not go into effect, the revised code didn't make it through the legislature before the rise of the Nazi Party. In late nineteen thirty Magnus Hirschfeld left Germany on a speaking and fundraising tour. He traveled all over the world. Press in the US called him the Einstein of Sex. In Shanghai in nineteen thirty one, he met and began a relationship with a man named Lee Shu Tong. Hirshfeld and Karl Geza were still a couple as well. At this point. While in India, Hirshfeld started hearing rumors that he was being targeted by the Nazis. He'd also started to experience a range of health issues. He contracted malaria while he was on this tour. He also had diabetes and a nerve disorder in a series of heart attacks. The stress of not knowing for sure what was going on back home in Germany made all of this a lot worse. He never went back to Germany after starting that tour in nineteen thirty. On May sixth, nineteen thirty three, Nazis destroyed the Institute of Sexual Science. Copies of a lot of Hirschfeld's published papers and books still exist, but most of his primary data was destroyed in this attack. On May tenth, material taken from the institute was burned in Opera Square, along with other books that were declared to be anti German. Hirschfeld also became a part of Nazi propaganda as an example of from the Nazi perspective, an evil, degenerate Jew. The distraction of the Institute of Sexual Science and this ongoing persecution by the Nazis led Hirschfeld to start considering how he should think about his own identity. He had been the target of anti Semitism for his entire career, including being beaten so badly in an anti Semitic attack in nineteen twenty that he was reported to have been killed. This was particularly disturbing to him because it was happening in spite of the fact that he hadn't been an observant Jew since he was a child In nineteen thirty three, he wrote, quote, the question where do you belong? What are you? Really? Tortures me. If I frame the question as are you a German, a Jew, or a world citizen, then my answer is always a world citizen or all three. On November fourteenth, nineteen thirty three, everything from the institute that hadn't been destroyed was sold at auction. Hirschfeld wrote, quote today November fourteenth, that has been three years since I left Berlin and never returned. Today in my former home begins the auction of my remaining books, materials, furniture. The last act for now of a fateful tragedy that comprises a terrible psychological martyrdom. Everyone turned out of the house, even my sisters. The Bar Association took possession of the house. I was completely stripped of all my rights, persecuted, a bounty put on my head, and insulted. Hirschfeld was able to buy back a few things from the institute, and with that he hoped to start a new French Institute of sexual science. In nineteen thirty three. Karl Giso was supposed to be part of this new institute, but he was arrested in a bath house and deported from France. The French Institute soon closed. Toward the very end of his life, Hirschfeld wrote a study of racism, which he had started on after leaving Germany. It was first published as an English translation in nineteen thirty eight, and it was a response to Nazi ideology. Hirschfeld also sent a copy to a friend of his who had become a strong supporter of the Nazis, in the hope that his work would change this person's mind. Mangus Hirschfeld died on his sixty seventh birthday, May fourteenth, nineteen thirty five, in Niece, France. At the time, Karl Giso was in Vienna and Lisiu Tongue was studying in Zurich. Hirschfeld left his remaining work to these two men, but Giso wasn't able to collect his inheritance because doing so would have required him to go to the German embassy, which for obvious reasons, he could not do. He took his own life in nineteen thirty eight. Lie Shutong lived until nineteen ninety three, and he kept up with the materials that Hirshfeld had left him for the rest of his life, although some of these belongings were found in a trash heap. After his death, a number of materials he had kept were handed over to the Magnus Hirschfeld Society in two thousand and three. Although some of Hirschfeld's family members and colleagues at the Institute of Sexual Science were able to get out of Germany, others did not survive the Holocaust. Even after his death, the Nazi Party continued using Magnus Hirschfeld and anti Semitic and anti homosexual propaganda. There was a bust of him placed in the Museum of the Revolution in Nuremberg with a really disparaging sign, and his head was carried through the streets in effigy during rallies. When Hirshfeld was making his arguments that homosexuality was inborn and unchangeable, it was controversial. He hoped that proving that people were born gay or lesbian would end stigma in persecution, but to some the idea of being born this way was just too restrictive, and others feared that proving that homosexuality was inborn and finding physical markers that correlated to it would just lead to more persecution. This fear was and frankly continues to be absolutely justified. Not long after Magnus Hirschfeld's death on June twenty eighth, nineteen thirty five, the Nazi Party expanded Paragraph one seventy five. It broadened the definition of criminally and decent activities between men to include anything that could be interpreted as homosexual in any way. Later on, German courts upheld the idea that this applied to even thinking about it. S s Chief Heinrich Himler established the Reich Central Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality on October twenty sixth, nineteen thirty six, and its officers had almost unlimited power to arrest anyone considered to be in violation of the law and held without trial indefinitely. Roughly one hundred thousand gaymen were arrested for their sexual orientation in Germany and German occupied territories between nineteen thirty three and nineteen forty five. About fifty thousand men were imprisoned, and somewhere between five thousand and fifteen thousand were sent to concentration camps. Lesbians were not targeted nearly as much because they were not considered to be as much of a threat to the idea of Aryan purity. The Nazi Party also put an end to the field of sex research that had been flourishing in Germany and Austria during the Weimar era. Paragraph one seventy five was removed from the Penal Code in East Germany in nineteen fifty, but it remained part of the code in West Germany until after German reunification. It was formally removed in nineteen ninety four and the two thousands, the German Parliament annulled the convictions of gay men who had been convicted under Nazi rule, and then just very recently, in twenty seventeen, Germany announced that roughly fifty thousand other men would be pardoned, including men who were convicted after the end of World War Two. After World War Two, Magnus Hirschfeld really fell into almost total obscurity. He was remembered only by people who had personally known and worked with him, but his work was rediscovered during the nineteen eighties. The Magnus Hirschfeld Federal Foundation was founded in twenty eleven, devoted to research and advocacy on behalf of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Today, a lot of Hirschfeld's surviving research and notes are in the Kinsey Institute for Research and Sex, Gender and Reproduction. I feel like the idea that he based so much of his work on, that sexual orientation is inborn, has come and gone out of favor in the years since then. Like it was a controversial idea when he was advocating for it. I know when I was growing up in the nineteen eighties and nineties, it was almost universally accepted as common knowledge within the community. And now I feel like it's evolved a little bit to be that, Like it's a person can't really consciously change their sexual orientation, but it is possible for people to understand their identity differently in different parts of their life. Yeah, it's a little more nuanced, it is, and it can I mean, the whole idea of identity and gender continues to evolve. So, yeah, where we're at now is probably not the place we will be even in a year or two, and certainly not in another five to ten. So it is pretty fascinating that this was going on way before. We often think of these concepts as having been developed. Yeah, well, like I know a lot of folks think of and we've talked about this on the show before, like a lot of people sort of imagine the gay rights movement starting with the Stonewall Riots, and really there was a lot going on way before that, and in the case of in Germany, way way way before that. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old health stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.