Four months after it was founded in January 1871, the nation-state of Germany enacted Paragraph 175, which criminalized consensual sex between men; tens of thousands were prosecuted under the notorious law, which stayed on the books until 1994. Magnus Hirschfeld was 3 years old when Paragraph 175 took effect. Not long afterward, the boy knew he was different from many of his peers: He was attracted to other boys. Confronted by homophobia—and antisemitism—Hirschfeld nevertheless grew to become an activist: He fought for gay rights, demanding that gay, lesbian, and transgender people be allowed to serve openly in Germany’s armed forces. As a sex therapist, he created the pioneering Institute for Sexual Science.
Hirschfeld’s life ended tragically—Nazis shut down his institute and burned his archive—but his heroism is celebrated in Daniel Brook’s revelatory and inspiring The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin (Norton, May 13). The book is one of many new titles that make for ideal reading during Pride Month.
Alice Austen, who was born two years before Hirschfeld, in 1866, grew up on the other side of the Atlantic. Austen is remembered as a photographer who documented the lives of New Yorkers, from immigrants to tradespeople, but she also trained her camera on herself and her female friends, sometimes posing in men’s clothes. Austen had a lifelong companion, Gertrude Tate, and happily, the photographer’s sexuality is now acknowledged: Her house museum on Staten Island is an LGBTQ+ landmark. Bonnie Yochelson tells Austen’s story in Too Good To Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen (Empire State Editions/Fordham Univ., June 3). Our review calls the book “generously illustrated…a sensitive portrait of a prolific photographer.”
Another book that pays tribute to past queer lives in photographs is Alice T. Friedman’s Queer Moderns: Max Ewing’s Jazz Age New York (Princeton Univ., May 27). Ewing rubbed elbows with cultural luminaries in 1920s New York, and he photographed many of them in his walk-in closet, which he playfully called his Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits. This handsome volume showcases dozens of the portraits, among a trove of other images.
Most of the subjects of Ria Brodell’s More Butch Heroes (MIT Press, April 29) lived before the invention of photography, but the artist has brought them to life in paintings conceived in the style of saints on holy cards. Brodell’s works, in the words of our review, honor “figures who went against society’s gender conventions—and often paid a price for doing so.” Their actions sometimes amounted to no more than wearing men’s clothing.
In So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color (Algonquin, May 13), Caro De Robertis shines a light on people who are fighting for their rights today. “A gender revolution is happening in our culture,” De Robertis writes. And to those who back a myth that “transness is an invention of the young, a ‘fad’ that can be easily dismissed,” the author adds, “Today’s trans and gender-expansive movements are part of a deep, rich story. Gender variance beyond the binary has existed throughout history, in every society, as natural as any other part of human existence.” Just like those butch heroes from centuries ago.
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
