Historians are rediscovering one of the most important LGBTQ activists of the early 20th Century ' an Asian Canadian named Li Shiu Tong. You probably don't know the name, but he was at the center of the first wave of gay politics. Much has been written about Li's older boyfriend, Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld was a closeted German doctor and sexologist who became famous in the 1930s as a defender of gay people. In books on Hirschfeld, Li is usually just a footnote. When Li died in Vancouver in 1993, his unpublished manuscript about sexuality was thrown in the trash. Luckily, it was rescued by a curious neighbor and eventually ended up in an archive. Since then, only a handful of people, myself included, have read it. Born in 1907 in Hong Kong, Li was a 24-year-old studying medicine at a university in Shanghai when he met Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld, then 63 years old, had come to China to give public lectures about the science of sex. The year was 1931. The Shanghai newspapers billed...
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