When Chinese medical student Li Shiu Tong met Magnus Hirschfeld in Shanghai during Hirschfeld’s 1931 world tour, their relationship — in which Li accompanied and cared for the famed sexologist across continents and the final years of his life — fell quickly into place.
Li attended St. Johns University, which ran classes in English and prepared students for life in the international sphere. Growing up in a wealthy family with a banker father who supported his academic pursuits, he had ambitions to study abroad and a sharp interest in Hirschfeld’s work on sexuality. The 63-year-old Hirschfeld, who was one of the first public advocates for LGBTQ+ people and who campaigned against laws restricting homosexuality, had a reputation for fancying younger men socially. It would have been career suicide, and likely worse, to admit to any intimate desires beyond that.
In 1931, being openly gay meant being cut off from society. Finding and keeping employment would have been nearly impossible. Social circles, though expanding, were found only behind closed doors. And many countries — including America, which Hirschfeld traversed before he met Li — had strict laws regarding homosexuals, including denying them entry at borders, imprisonment or even death.
So the men’s introduction, after Hirschfeld spoke to a group of Chinese feminists at an apartment complex, began with a professional communion rather than personal: Li offered to help Hirschfeld, who was German, Jewish, and 40 years his senior, navigate China.
Author Laurie Marhoefer, in their book “Racism and the Making of Gay Rights,” which chronicles Hirschfeld and Li’s journeys together and apart, wrote: “At that first meeting, Li made Hirschfeld a very generous offer that defined their relationship for its duration and transformed both of their lives. Hirschfeld wrote later: “He offered himself to me, after my first lecture in Shanghai, as a ‘companion’ and ‘protector,’ to take care of me and help me wherever I might want to travel in China, in particular to stand by my side as a Chinese interpreter.”
Li’s services to Hirschfeld quickly expanded beyond telling audiences about the doctor’s studies on topics such as hormones, birth control and homosexuality. The 24-year-old, whose father hoped would one day become as famous as the man he assisted, did everything including booking hotels, operating lecture slides, fetching medicine, and nursing Hirschfeld through illnesses, including malaria. His service also expanded beyond one country. When Hirschfeld’s time in China came to an end, Li left with him aboard a Dutch ship heading for Manila.
“After I assisted him through China,” Li wrote in an unpublished manuscript read by Marhoefer, “he offered a scholarship to study medicine in Germany and to continue to assist him around the world to investigate human sexual behavior. My qualification was that he needed a hard-working medical student who would live a long life to continue his work. He thoroughly searched my work habits and was told that my grandparents lived up to around ninety years of age. I jumped at the offer.”
Li spent the next two years with Hirschfeld, going from the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Palestine, and eventually to a European continent on the brink of a Nazi takeover. In those countries, with his young assistant in tow, Hirschfeld did interviews, gave lectures, and appeared on radio programs to share his expertise. They visited remote towns and red-light districts, meeting people of all backgrounds, not just the educated and well-off. In India, the two men stayed with Jawaharlal Nehru, the leader of India’s independence movement, who later became the country’s first Prime Minister.
By the time they got to Greece in March 1932, Hirschfeld’s friends had warned him not to return to Berlin. Antisemitism was rising, and enemies of Hirschfeld had begun attacking him, both via the press, with one paper calling his work “Jewish propaganda,” as well as via mailed death threats. So he and Li flitted between hotels in Vienna and later Zurich for the remainder of the year. Also that year, the two men co-authored a paper and presented it at a World League for Sexual Reform conference in Czechoslovakia. The paper featured ideas including “research on intersexuality” and “liberation for those affected from severe and antiquated laws,” and it is one of the rare accounts of Li’s academic achievements, though it’s unknown if any copies still exist.
In 1933, Li and another of Hirschfeld’s mentees, Karl Giese, snuck Hirschfeld, whose passport had expired and who wanted to distance himself further from Nazi Germany, into France. The three first settled in Paris, where Hirschfeld had secured a book contract and hoped to rebuild his Institute for Sexual Science (which had been destroyed by the Nazis), but Giese’s subsequent arrest for public indecency in a bathhouse, coupled with a former colleague’s denunciations, harmed Hirschfeld’s reputation further. He fled Paris with Li in December 1934, moving south to Nice, where he remained until his death.
From the time Li departed China with Hirschfeld in 1931 until arriving in Nice, the 27-year-old had paused his formal education. He thought of studying in the United States, and even offered to pay for Hirschfeld’s passage with him, but Hirschfeld thought himself too old for such a transition. So after helping Hirschfeld settle in, Li decided to enroll at the University of Zurich, which would allow him to continue his studies while being near enough to his mentor. Sadly, six weeks after he left, the man to whom Li dedicated four years of his life physically, professionally and socially, passed away. Hirschfeld, whose later years had been rife with health problems, died on May 14, 1935 — his 67th birthday. Li returned to Nice soon after.
Physical records of Hirschfeld and Li’s relationship contain no indication that the two were ever lovers. But subtextual evidence in various photographs and writings hints that the two were intimately connected. In Hirschfeld’s journal, which Li saved until his own death in 1993 and which Marhoefer transcribed in their book, the doctor wrote: “I am highly reluctant to do without his true devotion and his for the most part very charming company (which however is not seldom disrupted by quite temperamental, nearly hysterical petulance). On the whole, I could not have a more beloved, sunnier, more helpful person around me.” Shades of two bickering, loving companions abound.
In his will, Hirschfeld designated Li as the person who would carry on his work in sexology, and it was made clear that any inheritance was not to be spent on personal expenses. Li accepted the charge, though not without concern, and took back to Zurich many of Hirschfeld’s books, papers, journals, photographs and death mask.
After his mentor’s death, Li tried to resume his studies. But like anyone who loses a spouse or someone equally close, the shape of his life had dissolved, and building it back up proved difficult. The privileges Hirschfeld enjoyed due to race, education and notoriety did not transfer to Li. With the Nazi ascent nearly complete in Europe, he left Zurich in 1940 and attended graduate school at Harvard for several years before going to Washington D.C. until the war’s end. In 1958, while he was back in Switzerland, a German court made contact with him regarding claims against Hirschfeld’s estate, but he wanted nothing to do with it. He lived in Hong Kong from 1960 until 1974, and then made one final move to Vancouver, where members of his family lived. Few records exist of his activities, profession or research during those decades.
Li never completed any degrees in higher education. When he passed away in 1993, nearly 60 years after Hirschfeld, much of what he’d preserved of the sexologist’s work had been thrown in the garbage, saved only by a neighbor who’d stopped to look through the bin. Another item rescued by the neighbor was an unfinished manuscript of Li’s which contained bits of an autofictional narrative coupled with sexology research showing, among other things, that Li favored ideas including gender being mutable, homosexuality being shaped by environment rather than genetics (a stark difference from Hirschfeld’s views), that same-sex couples be allowed to adopt children, that transgender people were more prevalent than widely believed, and that bisexuals outnumbered heterosexuals (another break from Hirschfeld).
The manuscript also revealed that Hirschfeld warned Li not to translate any of his work, due in part to the controversy and potential persecution it would bring. Over the decades that Li outlived Hirschfeld, risks of such persecution diminished as LGBTQ+ visibility increased and civil rights were won, though many countries, including the United States, still criminalize aspects of LGBTQ+ life that Hirschfeld advocated for more than a century ago.
The personal effects recovered from the Vancouver trash bin wound up in the care of the Magnus Hirschfeld Society, whose director in 2003, Ralph Dose, flew to Canada to collect them from Li’s neighbor. Dose also met with members of Li’s family to secure Hirschfeld’s books, which they hadn’t thrown out, as well as to learn more about the doctor’s protege.
“When Ralf Dose met members of Li’s family almost a decade after Li’s death,” Marhoefer wrote, “they recalled that Li was a solitary person, without many friends, who spent much of his time with his books and manuscripts, aside from the sports things he liked to do, such as play tennis. Yet perhaps he had a social life his family did not know about; many queer people set up their lives in that way.”
Magnus Hirschfeld shaped Li Shiu Tong’s life more than Li shaped Hirschfeld’s. Such would have been expected from a young student in the company of an established and world-renowned doctor. But Li’s work with Hirschfeld as confidant and preservationist, along with his own research on sexuality, are worth remembering. And beyond the research, Li and Hirschfeld’s relationship served as an example of gay male life in 1930: controlled, calculated and largely hidden, but ever present and meaningful, just as it is today.
Photo credit: E. Elkan. Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 4.0)
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