ABSTRACT
In November 1930, when Magnus Hirschfeld arrived in New York to begin a four-month lecture tour that would take him to Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, he was hailed in the headlines of the far-flung Hearst newspaper chain as “the Einstein of sex” (Viereck 1931, 1). By invoking the most renowned German Jewish scientist of the times, this bit of journalistic shorthand both suggested Hirschfeld's preeminence within the emerging discipline of sexology and punned on his particular contribution:
[Hirschfeld] espouses the theory of sex relativity. He is not the first to enunciate this doctrine, but he carries it to its logical conclusion. Hirschfeld looks upon homosexuality and other divergences from standardization not as pathological phenomena but as variations of the sex instinct. A student of eugenics, Hirschfeld attempts to find a scientific basis for love. His experiments are as revolutionary as his conclusions. (Viereck 1930, 285)
