Content warning for Nazis, Holocaust, eugenics
It only makes sense to follow the story of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft with the story of one of its founders: Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld was a gay Jewish man born in Germany in 1868. He lived, worked, and fought through the rise of Adolf Hitler, and his life brings a unique perspective to our World War II series.
Content warning for concentration camps, Holocaust, Nazis
As we dive back into World War II, we'll be looking at an equally compelling site of queer progress: Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (The Institute of Sexology). Founded in Berlin by Magnus Hirschfeld and Arthur Kronfeld in 1919, the Institute was revolutionary. It laid the groundwork for a legacy of acceptance and understanding of the human body and sexuality, only to be ripped apart by those that saw its work as too progressive or crude.
Content warning for concentration camps, Holocaust
This week we're beginning both our first series and our first discussion of an event rather than a single person. We'll take a look at World War II and the role the queer community played in the events leading up to, during, and after the war. We hope to keep things in chronological order, but history rarely makes things that easy.
We've so far looked at simple stories, in that their identities are clear. This is not the case with Kristina of Sweden. There is far more interpretation at play, as there are many labels Kristina may have fallen under. Without her to clarify, we do our best with the information at hand. What we know for certain is that she was not heterosexual, cisgender, and dyadic.
This week we're heading back into ancient history, to the middle of the 5th dynasty of Egypt and one of the first known same-sex couples in history. The tomb of Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum was uncovered in 1964 and has been a fierce topic of debate since. As with all translation work, bias is prevalent and it's possible to interpret things in many ways; people often see only what they want to see. What we can do is look at the evidence we have and extrapolate from there.
Content warning for suicide and murder
We move now from the first noted queer woman in ancient Greece to perhaps the most notable queer woman in modern United States history. To discuss her life, we must briefly address the history of queerness in the United States and how that history has translated into the modern day. Queer erasure continues to be an issue, but in this case, the erasure comes not from outside sources but from the queer community itself.
We thought it best to begin as close to the start as possible, though we're certain the project will jump throughout history. While there is no way to know who was the first human to experience same-gender romantic attraction, we will go back as far as recorded history allows. We begin with the origin of the word Sapphic and one of the most recognizable figures in history: Sappho.
