Join us on Saturday December 3rd for a reading with Laurie Marhoefer from their new book 'Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love' published by University of Toronto Press. The event is free. Doors at at 7:00 and we will start at 7:30. Masks are required.
The front space of the store where the event will take place is wheelchair accessible but the rest of the store includes several flights of stairs.
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In 1931, a sexologist arrived in colonial Shanghai to give a public lecture about homosexuality. In the audience was a medical student. 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.
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.
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.
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Laurie Marhoefer is a Jon Bridgman Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington. They are also the author of 'Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis.'
Event Venue
Left Bank Books, ,Seattle,WA,United States