Historians are rediscovering one of the most important LGBTQ activists of the early 20th century—an Asian Canadian named Li Shiu Tong. You probably don’t know the name, but he was at the center of the first wave of gay politics.
Li Shiu Tong and Magnus Hirschfeld in 1932
Much has been written about Li’s older boyfriend, Magnus Hirschfeld. He was a German doctor and sexologist who became famous in the 1930s as a defender of gay people. In books on Hirschfeld, Li is usually just a footnote. But as I found in my research, Li was a sexologist and activist in his own right. And in my view, his ideas about sexuality speak to our moment better than his much more well-known boyfriend’s do.
When Li died in Vancouver in 1993, his unpublished manuscript about sexuality was thrown in the trash. Luckily, it was rescued by a curious neighbor and eventually ended up in an archive. Since then, only a handful of people, myself included, have read it. In its pages is a theory of LGBTQ people as the majority that would resonate with a lot of young people today.
Nazis select books for burning at the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute
Born in 1907 in Hong Kong, Li was a 24-year-old studying medicine at a university in Shanghai when he met Hirschfeld. Then 63 years old, Hirschfeld had come to China to give public lectures about the science of sex. The year was 1931. The Shanghai newspapers billed Hirschfeld as the world’s foremost expert on sexuality. Li must have seen the papers, because he made sure to catch Hirschfeld’s very first lecture.
In medical school, Li had read all he could about homosexuality, then a very controversial topic. He had often encountered Hirschfeld’s name, and he knew his reputation as a defender of homosexuals. Whether he suspected that the famous sexologist was gay is a mystery. Almost no one in the 1930s could afford to be out—the revelation would have destroyed either man’s career.