Once upon a time in Berlin, there lived a fat, gay, Jewish nerd named Magnus Hirschfeld. He was a medical doctor who had a revelation early in his career: gay men were killing themselves, and he could stop it. First, he devoted himself to getting a draconian anti-gay law repealed. Then he started providing affirming mental health therapy to LGBTQ+ people. But he didn’t stop there. Magnus Hirschfeld could not see an injustice and leave it to fester. He started giving talks to other doctors worldwide about how OK it was to be queer. Then he started treating transgender people. He opened his own research institute in Berlin, where he brought in surgeons to conduct some of the world’s first gender-affirming surgeries, and suddenly, Berlin began to bloom as one of the queerest cities in the world. One man, now almost forgotten by history, empowered an entire LGBTQ community, and not just in Germany. Hirschfeld’s mission was to show the world that queerness was normal, beautiful, important, good. He hated racism and gave hormones to trans people. He told parents that their queer kids were OK and gave classes on how to navigate the world as an LGBTQ+ person. He gave talks about birth control and kinks as the LGBTQ sexual research center that he founded became a community center, and a queer cultural and medical museum too. Nazis tried to kill him twice, and they burned his life’s work to the ground in 1933. Hitler once called him “the most dangerous Jew in Germany.” In other words, he was the hardest rock star you’ve never heard of.

The name Magnus Hirschfeld may ring no bells with many modern queer folks. In fact, his legacy of research and advocacy—the core of who he was—is essentially gone. It was a nascent moment cultured by one person and bulldozed by a state which knew well that sexual freedom went hand in hand with freedom of thought and even antiracism. Now that the Nazis are back—and make no mistake, the people currently in power in the U.S. government have the same worldview as the literal Nazis of the 1930s, when it comes to human sexuality—we need to buckle down and study this man’s life. Because when Magnus Hirschfeld fought Nazis, he almost won. He almost had the scientific, social, and legal world convinced that LGBTQ people were normal and deserving of acceptance. He couldn’t fight using force, so his weapons of choice were research, compassion, love, education, advocacy, coalition-building, community, and kindness. This may sound—gasp, recoil—liberal. It was. But it was enough to scare the people who controlled an entire military structure and the government. See what I mean when I say he almost made it? When something scares Nazis, we need to dig into that and make it bigger, broader, badder. What Hirschfeld was doing was working, but he was only one person, and one person can fall. When that happens, the game is over. This time, we can’t afford to lose.

Now there are two books about Hirschfeld, both published by W.W. Norton. The Intermediaries by Brandy Schillace details a broad view of a world slowly going mad. Daniel Brook’s The Einstein of Sex is more personal, but no less devastating. They’re both worth reading—in fact, the discerning Current Affairs reader will drop the rest of their to-read list and begin them immediately upon completing this article, and my advice is to read them together. They are two intersecting views of a time, a place, and a person that have an extremely important message for those of us not yet living in a masculinist dictatorship. 

Going into both books, it’s helpful to know what “masculinism” is. Don’t worry: you already know. It’s a philosophy that holds that men are superior to women, that qualities like physical strength and aggression are manly, and that manliness is the ultimate good. We call it toxic masculinity these days. Nazis were masculinists. They were big on female fertility and submission, male physical fitness, male domination—the whole sweaty bro vibe. But there were gay masculinists in Weimar Germany too. They felt that they were, in fact, the manliest, since nothing could be more manly than love for the ultimate form, which was man. They were initially excited about the ascendency of masculinism when Hitler took over, only to experience an extremely abrupt turn soon thereafter when they realized that the Nazis were not, in fact, their friends. Hirschfeld actually tried to coalition with a few of the gay masculinists during the Weimar years, but the worldview of these chauvinists was completely incompatible with Hirschfeld’s philosophy of tolerance and the partnership rapidly fell apart. More on the gay masculinists later.

It’s helpful to read Brandy Schillace’s The Intermediaries first. There were a lot of unpleasant names for LGBTQ+ people in Hirschfeld’s day. Generally, they implied that variations in sexual orientation and identity were some kind of aberration, a health problem or psychiatric disease. Hirschfeld did not vibe with this. He created his own word, “intermediaries,” to describe people who existed between the stark masculine and feminine categories that were then available in Germany. That Schillace chose this word as the title of her book is appropriate, since this work focuses as much on the people around Hirschfeld than on the good doctor himself. The Intermediaries provides a wide view, a sweeping historic snapshot of a world about to go wrong even as it tips inexorably over a cliff. Magnus and his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which both books translate as “Institute for Sexual Science,” was the research and social hub he founded and ran. It seems small next to the looming doom of the Nazi takeover. But Magnus, too, was larger than life, a Prometheus whose fall capsized Berlin’s world-shifting queer culture. For a more focused and detailed view of him, read Daniel Brook’s intimate profile of Magnus’s life and loves, The Einstein of Sex.

Schillace does impressive justice to the historical events running up to the part we all know—the Nazis. Her comprehensive analysis and examination of the hyper-masculine military culture in Germany prior to 1933 is illuminating in many ways. For one thing, it’s easy to see how Kaiser Wilhelm’s rule, essentially itself a dictatorship where soldiers wore helmets with erect penis-like spikes, led to the Nazi dictatorship, where men like Hitler and Göring repressed everyone else’s sexual freedom so their cartoonishly masculine power fantasy could reign supreme. Both broad and profound, Brook shows that even as sexism and racism accumulated influence worldwide, Hirschfeld came to what was then a stunning conclusion: it’s impossible to understand human sexuality without realizing that the whole idea of racial purity is a joke. 

As he delved into international sex education, traveling the globe to speak and advocate on behalf of LGBTQ people, Hirschfeld had the unusual (for the time) opportunity to meet and talk with people from dozens of “races.” He observed interracial love and attraction, and saw that there were no unusual health problems in people of mixed racial heritage. If that sounds obvious, it’s not. Brook notes that many people during the mid-20th century still believed that interracial relationships produced unhealthy babies. But Hirschfeld, aside from being an educated and worldly person, was also a sex expert, and people—especially, as it turned out, the Nazis—were very much interested in how people of different races beget at the time. Hirschfeld’s answer to that question was not, generally speaking, what the German majority wanted to hear. Once, in a crowd of German Jews and non-Jews, he observed that there were more blonde Jews than there were blonde Gentiles. If people from different races were sex-compatible without hereditary consequences, then their love, like queer love, must be healthy, normal, and natural. Hirschfeld, by the way, is the man who appears to have coined the termanti-racism. No wonder the Nazis feared him.

Hirschfeld and history meet in the movie he helped make to champion the legalization of gay sex, Anders Als Die Andern, aka Different From The Others. Hirschfeld felt that the wildly popular and modern motion picture format could bring his message to a wide array of people in an efficient manner—and he was right. Viewers went for the drama and titillation and left with new sympathy for gay men whose love was then explicitly illegal. Hirschfeld’s ultimate aim was to change the law, and in fact, the film’s final shot is of a hand crossing out Paragraph 175, the law that illegalized homosexual acts between men. That said, the film accomplished much more. Both books reference it extensively as a watershed moment for the world’s rising premiere sexologist. 

It’s also worth watching even now, 106 years after its debut. It was about a violinist (played by silent film star Conrad Veidt) falling in love with his student and being brought up on charges for it, and is available on the Internet Archive today. Film restorationists at UCLA did an amazing job with the roughly 50 percent of the film that survived the Nazis’ attempt to crush it, but be patient with it. You’ll have to do a lot more title card reading than we’re used to these days. In addition to the academic community, we have to thank the people of Europe for the survival of this movie: they were so excited about watching Hirschfeld explain that gay sex is normal that it played in some theaters for nearly a year. Without that enthusiasm, Anders would have been lost, like so much else that Hirschfeld did. But note that early flicker of tolerance. Note that the tide that had started to turn. Because of the Institute for Sexual Science, Hirschfeld’s research and community hub, and its leader’s unstoppable personality, people in Germany were starting to relax about queer folks. Because they saw them in a movie. Because their doctors started listening to Hirschfeld the Queer Folks Expert, also a doctor. Because as queer folks came out, everyone started to realize that These People Really Are Harmless. 

What does that sound like to you? Does that sound familiar? It should. In the U.S., marriage equality is now ten years old and having a gay kid is hardly remarkable. Most cities hold Pride events. It’s easy to write off the Southern Baptists who are keen to end same-sex marriage, the deranged Heritage Institute plan to end LGBTQ+ legal existence in this country, the fact that being queer has only been even a bit OK for a little while—not to mention the firestorm still raging about transgender athletes. Here’s one lesson from Hirschfeld’s life: do not be seduced by the fact that they let you have a parade.

Reading Schillace’s book often feels like a slog, but in the sense that the reader feels the struggle of its heroes to push through the headwind of a repressed and repressive society. We share the effort and exhaustion of every inch gained, the internal doubts, the conflict. She highlights the fractures within the gay rights wing of the movement with skill and intensity befitting an uncomfortable truth: there were gay men who were completely on board with Nazi ideologies, most notably Hitler’s early ally Ernst Röhm, who co-founded the Nazis’ original goon squad, the Sturmabteilung. But he wasn’t the only one. Schillace discusses how Adolf Brand, publisher of the world’s first gay journal, Der Eigene, complained that people had stopped reading his magazines and started following Nazis. Der Eigene, which boasted about 1,500 subscribers at its peak, openly espoused eugenics and other far-right ideologies. They had so much contempt for women that it’s hard not to characterize their feelings as hate. And then there was Röhm! Was it any wonder that some gay men were seduced by the idea of sunrise on a new Sparta?

In hindsight, it seems inconceivable that gay masculinists didn’t understand that the Nazis were always going to betray them—they were Nazis. But the historical context that Schillace provides illuminates what gay men thought they were before Hirschfeld, and to a certain extent still thought they were even as Hirschfeld desperately tried to redefine queer to be even a little more egalitarian. Some male homosexuals in both the Kaiser’s Germany and the Weimar era, led by Brand, felt not only that love between men was a choice, but that it was the choice. No sex could be manlier than sex with a man.

Brook focuses more on Hirschfeld himself than on the troubling cracks in the queer rights movement. While this makes The Einstein of Sex a faster, buzzier, more entertaining read, The Intermediaries presents patterns that might surprise even the left-est left-wing readers. After all, who could have guessed that gay men would be seduced by privilege even when the purveyors of that privilege were literal Nazis? But another gay German from our own era, Peter Thiel, might well see himself in the mirror of history. This proudly gay man almost single-handedly elevated JD Vance to the vice presidency. As a result, we might very, very well have a 48th president who has stated that people identify as transgender to get a better crack at admission to top universities, characterizing trans existence itself as a kind of fraud. Thiel supports the Republican party whose leader began his legal war on transgender identity on his very first day in office, signing an executive order specifying that exactly two immutable genders will be recognized by the U.S. Federal Government. Within its first year, the Trump administration has even shut down funding for an LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention hotline that was actively saving queer lives. It is hard to interpret this as anything other than complicity with death, or at very best a complete lack of interest in the continued survival of a minority. Does it mean that this administration actively wants queer people to die? Possibly not—they may simply not care. But either way, they are enabling queer suffering and death. For all his wealth and acumen, Thiel is a fool to place his faith in these ghouls, and so is any LGBTQ+ person who trusts the Republican party. Magnus Hirschfeld could tell them so.

And we need Hirschfeld to do exactly that. Brook paints a beautiful picture of the social, educational and—yes—sexual community that flourished under the power of Hirschfeld’s personality and expertise. Not only did his Institute for Sexual Science treat LGBTQ people, but it functioned as a tourist attraction and a social hub. It was not uncommon for Hirschfeld to prescribe a trip to a gay bar for new patients, and people who Hirschfeld treated often became staff and friends. Travelers who stopped into the Institute to view the sex toys and photos of genitalia on permanent display there often continued their tour by frequenting a lesbian or trans-friendly nightclub whose proprietors and customers were familiar with Hirschfeld. By promoting Berlin as a sexually tolerant place, Brook shows, Hirschfeld’s institute empowered LGBTQ+ people financially and socially. Queer life was a must-see in Berlin, and once seen, it was impossible to escape the fact that queer life was not just normal, but fun. Hirschfeld himself was highly recognizable in the community, sometimes attending drag events as the dowdy but charming Tante Magnesia. The ISS—and Hirschfeld—were validating, promoting, and encouraging a whole new Berlin. 

Art by Patti Pogodzinski from Current Affairs magazine, Issue 54, July-August 2025

Reading Brook’s account provokes a longing for those Weimar years, if only to see the sudden blossoming of a queer city—to witness a parent marching their gay child to the known sexologist for affirming therapy, or a transgender man finally marrying his longtime girlfriend. What a dizzying time this must have been! Even as Hirschfeld struggled against the laws that technically made gay sex a punishable crime, the whirlwind of social progress alone makes Brook’s account riveting. Although you know how it is going to end, you hope against hope that this time, upon this very reading of this singular story, you’ll break into the universe where, against all odds, Hirschfeld won. What would that look like? Would it look like where we live now?

Both books make one thing clear: we are definitely not living in Hirschfeld’s paradise. We are living in a parallel to Weimar Germany that is already far too similar for comfort. The rising tide of acceptance for LGBTQ people is not unprecedented and not linear. It can, and did once, collapse back into ignorance and hatred. LGBTQ people are a remarkably useful scapegoat in a hypermasculine, racist society because they defy the idea that anybody is purely one thing. We happen to live in just such a society now, and The Intermediaries in particular underlines this. Weimar Germany was a theoretically progressive government that struggled with a persistent far-right movement. 

That movement gained power by degrees until it wolfed down the whole state in a moment of economic and social weakness. Its culture glorified manliness, manhood, male superiority and heroism, male intellect, male power. It reacted violently to the idea that anybody else could possibly stand equal. The shrieking vitriol of the masculinists is a template for today’s anti-DEI screeds. There’s alleged human trafficker and proud misogynist Andrew Tate, of course, and while his rhetoric is undeniably extreme, it’s easy to underestimate how much reach he’s had. The Guardianreported in 2023 that Tate videos had been viewed 11.6 billion times on TikTok. This is the same person who has made such classic masculinist declarations as “I'm not saying [women are] property. I am saying they are given to the man and belong to the man.” Unbelievably, Alina Habba, an acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey and counselor to Donald Trump himself, is “a huge fan.” Other political figures like Ron DeSantis—he who reportedly adds lifts to his shoes because he can’t handle the unmasculine state of being short—declare that “the Left tells us DEI stands for ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.’ But as practiced, it more closely represents ‘Discrimination, Exclusion, and Indoctrination.’” And more mainstream cultural figures like Joe Rogan have also been emboldened by an increasingly toxic atmosphere. “Over time these fucking cunts, these corrupt shitheads have done an amazing job of trying to chip away at [the Founding Fathers’ checks and balances for preventing the rise of tyranny],” Rogan said on his podcast in March 2023, “And convince people that ‘freedom is not important, what’s important is equity and inclusiveness and diversity.'” The Joe Rogan Experience had 14.5 million followers on Spotify in March of 2024. According to Newsweek, its listenership is 71 percent male. For Rogan, DeSantis, and people like them, noxious gender politics and contempt for equality as a concept go hand-in-hand.

The biggest apparent difference between toxic masculinity in Weimar Germany and the U.S. right now is that the U.S. doesn’t yet endure the level of financial duress that Germany experienced after World War 1; never underestimate the moral compromises that ordinary people will make when the money goes away. It’s arguable that American culture also has more sophisticated pseudo-intellectual language for defense of racism and homophobia, apparent in the fact that the acronym that is short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is rapidly becoming a slur. But frankly, we already live in a fragile kind of democracy when Florida state representative Webster Barnaby can refer to his transgender constituents as “demons and imps” and promptly get re-elected. Nationwide same-sex marriage legality is ten years old this year, but there has never been more anti-transgender legislation in progress.

In other words, queer progressives of the United States may also be building a city on a tightwire. So what do we do about it?

When Magnus fell, everyone fell. In 1933, soon after the rise of the Nazi Party to national control of Germany, Brownshirts ransacked his Berlin Institute for Sexual Science and burned most of its contents. Hirschfeld himself was out of the country at the time, having been urged to take a world tour by friends who knew that the highly visible Jewish doctor would be a target for the incoming administration. Indeed, the Nazis who built a bonfire out of his life’s work sought Hirschfeld during the raid, and when they couldn’t find him, they tried to burn a bronze bust of the prominent sexologist. Ironically, the metal sculpture did not burn. After the ghoulishly joyous burning of the vast majority of LGBTQ+ medical, social, and psychological research that existed at the time, the Nazi rank and file came through the ISS and looted what was left.

This catastrophe cut out the heart of the nascent LGBTQ+ acceptance movement and set it back at least 50 years. Hirschfeld had been an internationally known researcher, and his work was informing doctors worldwide. He had literally been changing the world. Without the ISS and without him—he died soon after in France, likely due to complications from diabetes, which his absent partner Karl Geise had previously helped control—that sea change didn’t have the force it needed to sustain itself. Needless to say, the destruction of Hirschfeld’s legacy completely routed Berlin’s queer community. Many of the medical and therapeutic professionals who had worked with Hirschfeld at the Institute ended up committing suicide, Schillace reports in the devastating and sudden conclusion of The Intermediaries. This, too, was a tragedy. These were Hirschfeld’s intellectual heirs, and without them, his experience and wisdom was also lost. The abrupt end of the ISS is all the more shocking after the intricate house of cards and meticulous historical detail Schillace spends the whole book building up. In one flash of fire and hate, it all comes down in ash. 

Brook focuses more on Hirschfeld’s death as an exile in France, bereft of his life’s work and separated from a place in time to which he could never return. Brook, more so than Schillace, emphasizes that Hirschfeld’s research, therapeutic support, and encouragement made Weimar Berlin the open queer Mecca that it was, made the entire medical world sit up and pay attention to the legitimacy of the queer experience. Hirschfeld had been a globally-renowned expert. Without him, the queer rights movement withered on the vine.

So let’s learn something from the tragic end of this man and the way he and his work were so immediately and completely forgotten. Let’s learn something from these two remarkable, necessary books.

First: you are not safe. Just because you can get married, change your name, change your gender identifier, and be queer on the job does not mean that it can’t all go away with a match and a can of gasoline.

Second: do not rely on the brilliant among us to be our salvation, our champions, our heralds and our heroes. Heroes fall. When a hero falls, the war is over. If it’s your hero, you didn’t win.

It is time for every single one of us to be a Hirschfeld. Every one of us needs to be a hero, distributed instead of singular, impossible to pin down because there are so damn many and we’re so damn loud. We need to rail against anti-trans laws, even when they’re not going to affect our little slice of queerdom. Hirschfeld would assure you that one day they will. We need to open our eyes to sexual repression, anti-feminism, and racism as conjoined evils—and rise against them all simultaneously, understanding that there is no rescue from one without rescue from all. 

Because once upon a time in Germany, one fat, gay, Jewish nerd led the charge against an enemy he couldn’t defeat. He did it with love and compassion even as his opponent defined itself by the very opposite. He probably knew he couldn’t win, but he did it anyway. Read these books. Remember him. Study what he did. When we make it past our Weimar era, let’s go to Hirschfeld’s paradise instead of Hitler’s hell.