In March 1919, Magnus Hirschfeld, a pioneering sexologist and homosexual rights activist, opened the Institute of Sexual Science in central Berlin. Recognized as the first of its kind, the Institute became an international magnet, attracting both medical professionals and curious visitors from all over Europe, the Americas, and East Asia. Until Nazis destroyed the Institute in the spring of 1933, Hirschfeld and his colleagues conducted research and counseled patients. This included personalized advice on birth control, on sexual intimacy, and on strategies for coping with homosexual desire. For male and female cross-dressers, who adopted what today might be described as trans identities, the Institute pioneered hormonal treatments and gender confirmation surgery. Members of the Institute not only published their research in scientific journals but also popularized their work in print and film media. Despite its relatively brief twelve-year existence, the Berlin Institute became a global inspiration for future such programs, including the American Kinsey Institute, founded in 1947.

Date: Thursday, 18th April, 2019
Time: 6-7:30 PM
Venue: 4.36, 4/f Sir Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Speaker’s bio:

Dr. Robert Beachy received his PhD in European history at the University of Chicago in 1998. He has taught at Wake Forest University, Goucher College, and since 2014 as Associate Professor of History at Underwood International College of Yonsei University.  He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and prizes, including a John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center (Duke, NC), and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Dr. Beachy’s first book, The Soul of Commerce: Credit, Property, and Politics in Leipzig, 1750- 1840 (Brill, 2005) examined the role of early modern social ties and commercial culture in shaping political reform in Germany. Most recently, he published Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (Knopf, 2014; Vintage PB, 2015), which won the Randy Shilts Award and has since appeared in German and Italian translations. He is now working on a monograph about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals.

Published by csgchku