I love learning about new rainbow areas in history and I had not heard of this person or their story. Thanks to the author for researching and sharing it with us. Great book to add to any library.

I always have a difficult time reviewing non-fiction, but I truly did enjoy how informative and well written this book was.

I like how in-depth the book was in discussing about gay rights, more specifically how race, eugenics, and women were intertwined throughout history in multiple countries, like the United States, Germany, the Philippines, and Malaysia. I was pleased with looking at how women were affected by the gay rights movement, especially how lesbians were perceived by the general public along with gay men. I wish there was more content in the book, but was pleasantly surprised at how much I learned with this book.

Loved this book, it broke down much of the history very simply. I learned so much from this book, there was something new every chapter. It was inspiring to read so much queer history that is largely not taught in schools.

I had a bit of trouble getting through this particular book. I thought it was interesting and I learned a lot about the gay rights movement and one of it's beginnings, but the writing leaned towards the academic and there were times I had to reread portions to make sure I was understanding things correctly. That's not necessarily the book's fault, it's just something to keep in mind when reading. This is an academic work and you need to make sure you're prepared to read it like one.

I started reading it many times but couldn't connect with the narrative. There's something in the author's style made it lack in appeal, although I'm sure the story is fascinating and important. While other readers could find a must-read, I failed to find it interesting.

The history told in this academic work is a hugely important part of LGBTQIA+ history and intersectionality research.

I appreciated that this book took an intersectional lens for looking at the history of Queer activism and Gay rights. It was dense and definitely felt like a monograph. It took me a while to finish but it was worth it.

In 1931, a sexologist arrived in colonial Shanghai to give a public lecture about homosexuality. In the audience was a medical student, and after the lecture concluded, he introduced himself. The sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, fell in love with the medical student, Li Shiu Tong. Li became Hirschfeld’s assistant on a lecture tour around the world – the first time in history that a renowned expert defended homosexuality to so many people in so many countries.

Racism and the Making of Gay Rights shows how Hirschfeld laid the groundwork for modern gay rights, and how he did so by borrowing from a disturbing set of racist, imperial, and eugenic ideas. Yet on his journey with Li, Hirschfeld also had inspiring moments – including when he formulated gay rights as a broad, anti-colonial struggle and as a movement that could be linked to Jewish emancipation.

Following Hirschfeld and Li in their travels through the American, Dutch, and British empires, from Manila to Tel Aviv to having tea with Langston Hughes in New York City, and then into exile in Hitler’s Europe, Laurie Marhoefer provides a vivid portrait of queer lives in the 1930s and of the turbulent, often-forgotten first chapter of gay rights.

Laurie Marhoefer is the Jon Bridgman Endowed Associate Professor in History at the University of Washington.

I thought this was a really interesting book. I had never heard of Magnus Hirschfeld or Tao Li, but rhey had realt interesting lives and conteibutions ro the queer community and queer history, especially at a time when it wasn’t easy or even possible to be out. While these men were not perfect by any means, they did dedicate their lives to sexology. At times, their views were written in a confusing way, but their views were often confusing and contradictory, so it makes sense that that happens. But otherwise I think it was well-written and interesting.

Review is rounded up from 3.5.

I think overall this was a good read. I am really enjoying this trend of bringing LGBT history and stories that have been suppressed back to the forefront and I hope it continues. For me this one was not as great in the first half, but much better in the second. The author really found a stride, but still lost it at times in the second half. The author tended to get a little chaotic especially in the middle of the chapters. I think it began to get a little convoluted because in addition to the story they were trying to tell, and in the point the author was trying to make about Magnus Hirschfield being a problematic gay historical figure they would offer personal opinion and almost debate themself in a way. Hirschfield (63) was in a long term professional, mentorship, and romantic relationship with Li Shiu Tong (24) who he hoped would inherit, and carry on his legacy. The author would base opinions about what the subjects of the book thought, or felt offering little to no evidence to back up why they felt the way they did which was sad because this book was clearly very well researched. This was a really interesting story that I feel was well written, but could have used more editing. I think less personal opinion and debate, and more facts and telling the story, and when personal opinion is stated more evidence would have been helpful to painting the picture of why they had formed those opinions. I really enjoyed learning about people I didn’t know anything about prior, but wished it were a little more polished.

Release date: May 17th 2022

*a copy of this book was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

An unexpectedly delightful read - I learned far more than I thought possible. There is so much for our community to be grateful to our ancestors for.

This was an interesting premise, but the depth was more than I was prepared for. A scholarly work for sure.

Thank you Net Galley and U o T Press for providing an ARC to provide an honest review.

This book really opens your eyes on how gay rights are not just about being gay. When one fights against injustice for one thing, there are infinite connections to other injustices that can't and shouldn't be ignored. In Laurie Marhoefer's book, she examines the life of a German man at the front of the gay rights movement from the late 1800s to the early 1900s calling out the fact that while he was fighting for the rights of gay people, he meant white gay men. She connects his works to the lack of advocacy for gay men of colour and lesbians of any race.

Honestly, this book was incredible and I highly recommend it if you're looking for a book on early gay rights and how it's always been and should always be connected to anti-racism and anti-colonialism.

(Also reviewed on my Instagram- @britt.reviews)

Whoa. The title of this book immediately grabbed by attention, and I was definitely not disappointed. As a scholar of race, gender, and sexuality, I was really blown away that I was not aware of this history. It really nuances one's understandings of the history of sexuality studies, racial imperialism, and queer rights. An excellent addition to classes on these subjects, and students will definitely be captivated.

This is an information dense book, it was slow going for me but I absolutely loved it. I think reading it over a long period of time gave me the ability to sit with and digest each individual chapter and all the heaviness of them.

Marhoefer does an amazing job of explaining Hirschfield's ideas while refuting aspects that we now know are incorrect. I think the chapter that hit hardest for me was the eugenics one. Specifically the reminder that while we associate eugenics as a far right racist, ableist, homophobic take it was not always so black and white. W.E.B. Dubois, a staunch anti-racist, was a eugenicist and Hirschfield believed that eugenics were necessary in the anti-racism movement. That kind of nuance to history is one that often gets lost, and it was interesting to see so many commonly held beliefs be refuted so well.

There is a good bit of information on the general attitude towards homosexuality during that time period and the sort of information available to the public which helped the explanations of Hirschfield's theories. His ideas on the queer community are very exclusionary of most women, non-white people, etc. but he was a pioneer of sexology and gay rights and that cannot be ignored just because of his problematic viewpoints. This is definitely a book with nuanced takes.

I will say, I was slightly disappointed by this book's title. It is not a deep dive into the gay rights movement and how racism has affected it, it was a deep dive into one specific sexologists racism and how it affected his findings. Once I got over that initial misunderstanding of the contents of the book, I found it all very interesting.

I would recommend this book to everyone, I think the author has a lot of really important takes and I found myself questioning things that I had previously considered fact.

Unfortunately, I was not able to finish this book in time. As a master's student I have a lot of mandatory academic reading and tend to read lighter things personally. However, the parts that I did read very very fascinating. I am always intrigued in learning the forgotten origins of things that seem commonplace these days. Especially when it comes to colonialist history of Germany and Germans, there is still so much to learn. This was a well researched and well written book that can be enjoyed by academics as well as people interested in LGBT and colonial history and social movements.
Thank you for the opportunity to read this ARC!

Thank you to NetGalley and U of T Press for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. This one is out in May.

This is an academic text and I'm evaluating it as such. My own doctoral research is heavily informed by queer theory, including queer of colour critique. I am, however, not a historian.

Magnus Hirschfeld was a prominent sexologist who argued for homosexuality as an innate, biological category and for the rights of people within that category. In the 1930s, he met Li Shiu Tong in Shanghai and took him on as a protegé and probably lover. Marhoefer exposes the flaws in Hirschfeld's theories - particularly the endemic racism and sexism and the missed opportunity to critique empire - and attempts to write Li back into a story he has been largely erased from.

The strength of this book is in Marhoefer's complex treatment of Hirschfeld's ideas. They centrally argue that the understanding of homosexuality as biologically innate and immutable informs gay rights rhetoric today. They expose the downfalls of this theory and explain that many of the exclusions of mainstream gay activism come from the shortcomings in Hirschfeld's own conception of sexuality. Hirschfeld was against biological racism but indulged many racist tropes in his own work and was particularly anti-Black. He also largely excluded women from his work. This leads to his concept of "the homosexual" being implicitly gendered and racialized as a white man. I like Marhoefer's conclusion that Hirschfeld's work shouldn't be ignored but that we should instead look at his ideas more fully, with a critical eye that does not dismiss the ways in which it fails.

A lot of Marhoefer's attempts to bring Li back into this narrative rely on statements like "I assume", "One can assume", statements which guess at his presence or thoughts. In turn, I would assume that a trained historian has good reasons for making these assumptions, and I would have liked more clarity and transparency about these thought processes. There has been a widespread erasure of Li's contributions to Hirschfeld's research as well as his literal physical presence, and I wanted more in the way of evidence or at least reasonable guesses that he was indeed present. The reading of the little of Li's own thought that survives is insightful and convincing.

I think the title somewhat oversells what this book offers: while there is some link drawn between Hirschfeld's ideas and modern gay rights movements in the introduction and conclusion, that connection is not maintained throughout the book. As a historical account and reading of Hirschfeld's work it is strong. But I'm not sure it is quite doing what the title implies, which is to provide a thorough and sustained account of how Hirschfeld's own racism has a direct link to mainstream gay rights movements that focus on assimilation and respectability and often have very exclusionary politics. The book is not a broad look at "Racism and the making of gay rights" - it is the account of one influential sexologist's racist theory of homosexuality. I think it generally succeeds at that task, but I would have liked a more comprehensive engagement with modern queer activism and its links to the past. As it is, the book largely glosses over everything that happened between Hirschfeld's 1935 death and the present day.

I can see myself referencing sections of this book in my own dissertation.

Ever since I worked on a research project exploring the development of queer communities on the U.S. home front during World War II, I've been interested in getting a more holistic view of queer history around the world. Marhoefer does an incredible job of writing a nuanced narrative. Hirschfeld was a pioneer in sexology and gay rights, but he held some racist and sexist views that did not account well for intersectionality. He reminded me a bit of Frank Kameny, a gay rights activist in the U.S. who fought passionately for his cause, but had a very homogenous idea of who "fit" in the queer community. I agree with the author's point that while we don't need to stop reading or assigning writings from these figures, we do need to do so without excuses or apologies, while recognizing which parts are helpful and which parts are harmful.

Like Marhoefer, I wish we had more of Li's history and work- but given the small amount of material that we had to work with, I think she did a wonderful job of introducing us to Li and giving us a full a picture as possible. In Li's surviving research, I found a lot of modern ideologies that we are still exploring today- like the idea that sexual attraction is fluid, changing, and much more flexible than most people think, for the majority of the world. I appreciate Marhoefer's commentary on the ideal many people expected when they joined the fight for gay rights- a fight against racism and imperialism- versus the reality, that white politics dominated the scene in a dangerous way (and still does). Overall, this book is definitely relevant today and worth a close read.

I requested this by accident and couldnt cancel. The title sounds like its an important book with good things to know. Unfortunately, I dont think its for me. I skimmed through it a bit, and it seems like a lot of text and blocks of paragraphs. Im just not really in the mood to read a big informative non fiction right now. So I have nothing bad to say about the book, its just not for me at the time. Maybe one day I'll get to reading it.
I cant not rate it, so I'll just give a neutral 3 stars