Tag Archives: LGBTQA

The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture

The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture by Heike Bauer was recently been published by Temple University Press. As described on the publisher’s website,

Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin’s Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture? The Hirschfeld Archives answers this critical question by examining the violence that shaped queer existence in the first part of the twentieth century.

Hirschfeld himself escaped the Nazis, and many of his papers and publications survived. Bauer examines his accounts of same-sex life from published and unpublished writings, as well as books, articles, diaries, films, photographs and other visual materials, to scrutinize how violence—including persecution, death and suicide—shaped the development of homosexual rights and political activism.

The Hirschfeld Archives brings these fragments of queer experience together to reveal many unknown and interesting accounts of LGBTQ life in the early twentieth century, but also to illuminate the fact that homosexual rights politics were haunted from the beginning by racism, colonial brutality, and gender violence.

The full volume is available as an open access pdf here.

Conversion Therapy for LGBTQ Children Banned in Groundbreaking Ontario Legislation

LGBT_Flag_Map_of_OntarioOntario has become the first Canadian province to legislate a bill that renders such so-called therapies for children illegal, and prevents medical practitioners of adult treatments from billing the provincial health care system. The Toronto Star reports:

The legislation proposed by New Democrat MPP Cheri DiNovo won unanimous support from all three parties at Queen’s Park on Thursday, in time for Pride week, which begins June 19.

It’s the first law of its kind in Canada and goes further than conversion therapy bans in several U.S. states by including protection for the transgender community.

“We’re sending an incredibly strong message . . . there’s absolutely no room in an inclusive society for trying to change somebody’s sexual identity or their gender expression or their gender identity,” DiNovo told the Star.

Read the full article by Rob Ferguson here.

Find the National Post coverage here.

DiNovo’s website also reports that Manitoba is following suit.