The Hirschfeld Equation and the Queer Afro-Modern

Abstract

In 1904, seven years after he founded the world’s first homosexual rights movement, the German sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld published a slim volume called Berlin’s Third Sex, which detailed the city’s extensive queer life. If Hirschfeld was a pioneer in establishing the founding truth of what we now call the “LGBTQ Rights Movement”—that visibility brings equality—he understood something quite contradictory about the power of the city in this process: it allows you to hide in plain sight. He formulated an equation for queer urban life that has proven to be startlingly durable: “That which is hidden from the uninitiated in the metropolis can be all the more easily discovered by the initiate because it is far less constrained.” In the last few decades, African cities have boomed. The forces of globalization—the digital revolution, industrialization, and rapid urbanization—mean that queer communities have seeded in these cities in ways that are quite similar to the dynamics in Berlin in the twentieth century. But the differences, over time and space, and given the politics of the twenty-first century, are very marked too. This essay thinks with Hirschfeld about the dynamics of visibility and urbanism in African cities today, using research I conducted in Egypt, Uganda, Nigeria, and Senegal for my 2020 book, The Pink Line: Journeys across the world’s queer frontiers, as well as other contemporary African texts.