From: MPetrelis@aol.com
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 1996 01:17:46 -0500
Subject: Hirschfeld = homosexual


MICHAEL PETRELIS
2215-R Market Street, #413
San Francisco, CA 94114
Ph. # (415) 621-6267

TRANSMITTED VIA FAX; 011-49-30-313-3957

Stephen Kinzer
NY Times
Berlin, Germany, bureau

February 6, 1996

RE: Failure to mention Magnus Hirschfeld's homosexuality


Dear Mr. Kinzer:

Your January 30 Berlin Journal news article, A Curator Who Doesn't Blush
Easily, omitted an essential fact about Magnus Hirschfeld -- his
homosexuality.

In your story about "a vast museum of erotica," you assert that "[o]ne of the
most interesting displays is devoted to Magnus Hirschfeld, a Berliner who was
one of the world's first serious sex researchers. Hirschfeld founded The
Journal of Sexology in 1908, organized the first congress of sex researchers
in Berlin in 1921 and published the first major textbook on the subject in
1926, when parts of Berlin society were beginning to explore sex in a way
that Germans had not done before. The display includes copies of articles
from Nazi newspapers denouncing him and a photo of Nazi thugs carrying books
from his library to be burned in 1933, two years before he died in exile."  

I don't know if the exhibit fails to note Hirschfeld's homosexuality, or how
his advocacy on behalf of homosexuals directly contributed to the Nazis
destroying his institute. If that is the case, then I believe the NY Times
has a responsibility to report this omission on the museum's part.

If the museum duly records Hirschfeld's homosexuality, then my question to
you is, Why was such an integral fact ignored and not reported in your story?

As you can see from the following passage, excerpted from "The Nazi
Extermination of Homosexuals," by Frank Rector, page 25, published by Stein
and Day in 1981, homosexual history books always mention Hirschfeld's sexual
orientation.

"The persecution of homosexuals simply because they were homosexuals began
officially when Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, but did not become a 'Final
Solution' until the Rohm Purge. For simplicity's sake, gay genocide is dated
as beginning with the June 30, 1933, Blood Purge (or the Night of the Long
Knives, as it was also known), because in effect that was the starting point.
In reality, the persecution of gays bubbled and boiled for years before 1934.
It broke into dramatic conflagration with the Nazis' burning of the holdings
in Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin in 1933.
Hirschfeld's institute was primarily homosexually oriented. Along with
condemned holdings in other libraries, this was the first Nazi book-burning
party, and a symbolic auto-da-fe of homosexuals, although most Nazi gays
probably did not then know it or admit it.

"Hirschfeld--a Jew, transvestite, and effeminate homosexual--helped launch in
Berlin on May 15, 1897, the world's first homosexual emancipation
organization, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. Inasmuch as Hirschfeld
was a Jew, his institute's position anything but pro-Nazi, his reform efforts
on behalf of gays disparaged by many homosexuals themselves (they could not
stomach his transvestism, his effeminacy, his deplorable inability to keep
his mouth shut, and, for many, his Judaism itself), the attack against him
and his institute was seen as an anti-Semitic act rather than an expression
of anti-homosexual sentiment by gays in and out of the Nazi Movement. Much of
the public, however, correctly read it as an attack against both Judaism and
homosexuality. Straight Nazis' referred to the institute as a Jewish breeding
ground of homosexual dirt and filth."

One final political point -- Hirschfeld's influence on the German homosexual
liberation movement extends to the present. The leading gay news magazine in
Germany today is named Magnus, in honor of Hirschfeld's life and ideals.

In the future, please accurately report the fact of Hirschfeld's
homosexuality when writing about him.

Sincerely,

Michael Petrelis

cc: Letters editor, NY Times