Marlow Moss (1889-1958) artist

We have already discussed Madeleine Pelletier and Violet Morris, who while dressing, looking, behaving like (trans) men and being taken as men, retained their female names and she/her (elle) pronouns. This was at a time when the social construction of transsexuality was still decades away in the future. Without role models, without the social construction and without external hormones, Pelletier and Morris made decisions about how to live that differ from the options available to trans men today. Likewise Marlow Moss.

Moss, born and raised in Kilburn by prosperous Jewish parents, studied piano as a child, but this was interrupted for a few years by tuberculosis and the death of the father. A new guardian offered the best teachers for dance and movement, but on the condition of remaining non-professional. This condition Moss refused, and studied at the St John’s Wood School of Art, later cutting off ties with the family to study at the Slade School of Fine Art (which was at that time opposed to any type of modern art). By then the Great War had just finished, and Moss withdrew down to Cornwall for a while. 

On return to London Moss shaved the head, switched to male clothes and took the male name of Marlow. Moss read Rimbaud and Nietzsche at the British Museum Reading Room and studied the paintings of Van Gogh and Rembrandt. In 1927, age 37, Moss went to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Moderne, the free art school in Montmartre that had been founded in 1924. Moss studied under the cubist artist Fernand Léger. Moss was one of very few English artists at that time to engage with European Modernism.

Moss was impressed by the early work of the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and his non-representational art which he deemed Neoplasticism. They met in 1929 when Moss’ studio on Boulevard Raspail was only a few doors away from Mondrian’s, and there were lively discussions between them. Like Mondrian and others associated with Neoplasticism and Constructivism, Moss considered radical abstraction the ultimate art form for an increasingly fast-paced and technologically advanced society. 

Moss produced a variation on Neoplasticism by using a double line, to render ‘the composition dynamic instead of static’. Despite this criticism, Mondrian incorporated the innovation two years later. He nominated Moss for founding membership of the new Association Abstraction-Création which was to foster abstract art and counter the influence of Surrealism. Mondrian was a mystic, fascinated by the occult and the Theosophist Madame Blavatsky. Moss, on the other hand, was a theoretician, organising her compositions according to a set of mathematical and geometric rules.

Also in 1929 Moss met a Dutch writer, Netty Wind (1897-1971) also known by her married and professional name as Antoinette Hendrika Nijhoff. They became lovers and had a studio at Gauciel, Normandy, a commune to the north-west of Paris where they welcomed other artists. 

In 1933, the Swiss abstract artist, Max Bill, encountered Moss and Wind at an opening at a Paris gallery, pointed to a group of pictures on the wall and commented, "Thank goodness Mondrian has sent in such beautiful works!" There was a silence. Then Moss said quietly: "Those are my paintings".

Moss often wore jodhpurs (riding trousers) but sometimes a man’s suit. Many took her to be male, but others thought she was a Garçonne (many of whom wore male or near-male clothes). Despite this Netty and other close friends continued to refer to Moss as ‘elle’, and Moss accepted being addressed as ‘Mademoiselle Moss’.

In September 1938, given the changing political situation, Mondrian moved to London, and in September 1940 after Paris had fallen, he moved to New York City, where he was quite successful. He died in 1944. In recent years, his works have sold for tens of millions.

In 1939 Moss moved to the Netherlands, but when that country was invaded, Moss, being Jewish, quickly left for England, but without Netty who stayed to be with her son. Moss managed to talk her way onto a fishing trawler going to Cornwall.

During the war Moss failed to connect with the artists (some of them abstract) in St Ives. However Moss met a naval engineer, who helped train her to work in metal. Unfortunately in 1944, wartime shelling destroyed the commune in Gauciel, and much of Moss’ earlier work was lost.

After the war, Moss and Nijhoff-Wind reunited and lived alternatively in Den Haag (with Nijhoff-Wind’s husband Martinus Nijhoff) and in Cornwall where Moss had opened a studio in 1940 in the village of Lamorna, a short distance from Penzance. The marriage of Netty Wind and Martinus Nijhoff ended in 1950. He remarried to a Dutch actress, but died in 1953.

Moss’ second phase as sculpturist resulted in solo shows at the Hanover Gallery in London in 1953 and 1958, organised by the agent Erica Brausen, a lesbian: this work made no reference to Mondrian at all, although Moss did still do some Neoplasticist pieces.

Moss died in August 1958, in Penzance. Four years later Nijhoff-Wind published a book about Moss and her art. Moss's postwar work was left, at her death, to Nijhoff's son, Wouter Stefan Nijhoff, a Man Ray-trained photographer who worked under the name Stephen Storm and who died in 1986. He in turn left it to his partner, who has seldom lent or shown the work since.

Antoinette H. Nijhoff-Wind died in March 1971.

In 2014 there was tour of Moss’ work at Tate St Ives, the Leeds Art Gallery, the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings and Tate Britain in London. As a result the Dutch museum that lent two works to the first show was alerted to the fact that they owned Mosses at all. As a result, the paintings are now hanging on the museum's walls for the first time in half a century, and will not be shown at Tate Britain.

• A H Nijhoff. Marlow Moss. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1962.
• Germaine Greer. The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work. Farrar Straus Girouxm 1979: 103.
• Randy Rosen. “Marlow Moss: Did she influence Mondrian’s work of the thirties?”. Arts Magazine, 53, 1979.
• Sarah Wilson. “Marlow Moss” in  Delia Gaze. Dictionary of Women Artists. Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997.
• Alan Fowler. Constructivist Art in Britain 1913-2005. PhD Thesis University of Southampton, March 2006: 34-6, 37-9. Online.
• Lucy Harriet Amy Howarth, Marlow Moss (1889–1958). PhD Thesis University of Plymouth, 2008. Online.
• Élisabeth Lebovici translated by Lucy Pons. “Marlow Moss”. Aware Women Artists, 2013. Online.
• Charles Darwent. “Marlow Moss: forgotten art maverick”. The Guardian, 25 Aug 2014, Online.
• Lucy Howarth, ‘Marlow Moss: Space, Movement, Light’, in Marlow Moss, Tate Research Publication, 2014. Online.
• Alex Pilcher. “Marlow Moss” A Queer Little History of Art. Tate Publishing, 2017: 66-7. Also Online.
• Sabine Schaschl-Cooper. A forgotten Maverick: Marlow Moss. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2017.
• Lucy Howarth. Marlow Moss. Eiderdown Books, 2019.
• Lucy Howarth. “Queering Constructivism: the legacy of Marlow Moss”. ArtUK.org, 17 Feb 2021. Online.
• Gülce Özkara. “Space, Movement, and Body: Marlow Moss” Stedelijk Studies Journal. 11,2022. Online.
• “Marlow Moss and the quest for ‘space, movement and light’ “. Christie’s, 13 October 2022. Online.
• Nicole Lampert. “The transing of Marlow Moss: It is narcissistic to project our own ideas back through history” . co.uk, 19, May 2023. Online.
• Claudio Vogt. “Notes on an Overlooked Maverick”. Vonbartha, June 7, 2024. Online.
• Emily Snow. “Marlow Moss: The Queer Abstract Artist Who Influenced Mondrian”. Daily Art Magazine, 21 April 2025. Online.
• Florette Dijkstra. De sprong in het licht: Marlow Moss (1889-1958). Querido, 2025.
• Joanna Moorhead. “ ‘Her time has come’: did Mondrian owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove?”. The Guardian, 12 Jan 2026. Online.

EN.Wikipedia     The Tate      The Mayor Gallery       Kunstmuseum den Haag

----------------------------------------------------------------

As with Madeleine Pelletier and Violet Morris, Halberstam's Female Masculinity has nothing to say about Marlow Moss.

Darwent comments: 

“Moss's prewar paintings do look like Mondrians, in the way that some early Mondrians look like Derains. There is a difference between influence and imitation. Moss's take on neoplasticism is mathematically based, Mondrian's instinctual. When Moss – always ‘Miss Moss’ to Mondrian – writes to explain her theories to him, he answers, stiffly, ‘Numbers don't make any sense to me.’ Her works look like his, but they also don't.”

Germaine Greer, who does not discuss Moss’ life or gender construction, does write: 

“The modern version of this calumny is the easy assumption that is made about closely related male and female painters, that the man led and the woman followed, which accords her the status of an imitator, and assumes that differences in outlook are evidence of inferiority or incompetence. A superficial judgment would place Marlow Moss as an imitator of Piet Mondrian, with whom she spent a great deal of time in Paris between 1929 and 1938, but in fact the relationship between them was one of equals, and in the case of double-line compositions, Mondrian followed the lead set by Moss. Their careers diverged when Moss began to use relief in her paintings with superimposed white slats and collage. She was, as many women have been, interested in constructivism and the boundaries of painting and moved eventually to plastic constructions. It is arguable that she had a greater influence on subsequent developments in twentieth-century painting than Mondrian did.”

Of course the Constructivist Art and Social Construction are completely different things.

Elisa Menezes Duarte (1949 - 1980) performer, bombadeira, travesti boss, murdered

Original July 2023, revised and updated December 2025

During the 1970s travesti sex workers in Brazil became more accepted by some members of the public, if not by the police, and along with that there were two other developments:

1) the injection of silicone rather than the more dangerous oil or paraffin to feminise the body. Such pumping (bombadas) was first done in New York by competent doctors such as Dr David Wesser, but a few years later was being done by non-doctors (such as Jimmy Treetop in New York).

2) A few Brazilian travestis had managed to get to Paris, and returned rich enough to buy not one but two or more apartments. The first was almost always for their mother: a casa da minha mãe. Then greater numbers went. At the peak of the migration there were – for a short while – special charter flights for travestis (although in mufti). It was estimated that of 700 prostitutes in France, 500 were from Brazil – and they had taken over the main prostitution venues in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne. They were treated somewhat better than in Brazil – they were addressed as Madame or Mademoiselle, but they were still living on the margin, subject to violence and having to pay both the police and a travesti boss for a place to stand. The French prostitutes’ union protested their presence, accusing them of unfair competition in that as illegal immigrants they did not pay taxes.

Elisa was from a relatively well-off family in Rio de Janeiro.  She participated in some Carnival balls, and performed in the Săo Paulo stage show Les Girls when it came to Rio

Elisa (in Et il voulut)

.  She had been able to afford to be pumped in New York. She learned how to do it, and after buying silicone in New York, she set up in business in Paris in 1973 as a bombadeira. She did have a gig at Chez Madame Arthur, but mainly controlled the prostitution ‘stands’ and was known as la Reine de Pigalle. If a Brazilian sex worker did not accept her terms, she could get the worker deported, as happened to Jaqueline Welch. 

Elisa was featured in the film  Et il voulut être une femme, about travestis and other trans women in Paris in the 1970s.  The film includes Elisa's surgery.

Competition came from Claudia Tavares, who was also a bombadeira, who sourced her silicone in Paris and had cheaper prices. Elisa put a lot of pressure on Claudia, to get her to leave France. Threats and violence mounted until Claudia killed Elisa.

Claudia in later years,

Claudia was convicted for the killing, served seven years in a men's prison, afterwards obtained completion surgery in France, found a husband and became a celebrity chef providing Brazilian cuisine.  She has written some books, giving her version of things. 

After the murder, many rivalries, envy, scandals, and threats surfaced among the immigrant travesti sex workers themselves. At the same time, the pressure from the French authorities grew: between 1980 and 1984, expulsions were multiplied because of irregularities in their visas. Migration of Brazilian travestis to Italy and other European countries commenced.

• Michel Richaud (dir).  Et il voulut être une femme, with Elisa.  France 76 mins 1978.  IMDB. Part 1 online. 
• “Reavesti brasileiro é assassinado em Paris”. Cidade de Santos, 1.11.1980: 7.
• "Elisa morreu na Praça Pigalle. Mataeam o maior travesti do mundo”. Diário da Manhã, 2.11.1980: 1.  
• Joao S Trevisan translated by Martin Foreman. Perverts in Paradise. Gay Men’s Press, 1986: 165.
• Don Kulíck. Travesti : Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Univeristy of Chicago Press. 1998: 178, 217.
• Julieta Vartabedian. Brazilian Travesti Migrations: Gender, Sexualities and Embodiment Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 : 89, 197.
• Igor Danin, research 2025.

A tentative list of Claudia's books:

• Claudia Tavares. A volta da gata. Livaria Editoria, 1983.
• --  La femme inachevée.  Editions R Deforges, 1987. *
• -- Circonstances atténuantes : Récit.  Nicolas Philippe, 2002. *
• -- A Rejeitada. Cia, dos Livros, 2011. 
• -- Claudia.  Faralonn éditions, 2022.
• -- La volonté d'exister. Nombre 7, 2023.

*=discusses Elisa.

-----

No surname is given by either Vartabedian or Kulíck. Vartabedian has no entry in her index for any Elisa. Kulíck has an index entry for a different Elisa, but not this one.

Vartabedian writes: “During the beginning of the 1970s, the first ‘pumped up’ (bombadas) travestis did it in the United States, in New York, with the practitioner Wesser.” Apparently she did not know that Wesser was a doctor, even though I wrote of him two years before her book came out.

The practice of pumping silicone spread across Brazil and south America during the 1980s. In 1983 there was a sort of epidemic in São Paulo where many travestis were dying painfully after industrial silicone was sold as filtered silicone. (Trevisan p165).

Claudia's books are very hard to find.   As is the film, Et il voulut être une femme.

Health warning:   estrogen is far better than silicone for feminisation.

Louise Michel (1830-1905) teacher, anarchist, Communard

Louise was the illegitimate daughter of Marianne Michel, a domestic servant in Vroncourt-la-Côte, Haute-Marne. Marianne was seduced and then abandoned by Laurent Demahis, the scion of the estate, who quickly left after Louise was born. Unusually, the Demahis grandparents embraced Louise Demahis (as she was known), permitting her the run of the estate, giving her a good education and freedom to pursue scientific enquiries. When the grandparents died in 1850, Laurent’s widow claimed the estate forcing Louise and Marianne, who had received a small bequest, to leave, and forbade Louise from presenting herself any more as Mademoiselle Demahis. Louise studied in Chaumont, the prefecture of Haute-Marne, where she qualified as an assistant teacher. 

In 1851, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, and President of France, did a coup against himself and became Emperor as Napoleon III. It was now required that teachers and other civil servants swear an oath of allegiance. As a sincere Republican, Louise would not do this, and she was not able to teach in the regular schools, but she opened free schools where she taught. In 1856 she and fellow-teacher Julie Longchamps moved to Paris, where they shared accommodation, and where Michel did find work as a teacher. She wrote poems, became a member of the Union of Poets, corresponded with the writer Victor Hugo. 

She was frugal with female dress. It was said that if she had two dresses, she would give the better to one with a greater need. She also kept male clothing, which she would wear to attend evening lectures and meetings. 

In 1870, goaded by Otto von Bismark of Prussia, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia, quickly lost, abdicated and went into exile. The established politicians, not agreeing who should be the next king, established the Third Republic as a compromise. After a further defeat by the German army in March 1871, the government retreated to Tours. 

Soldiers of the National Guard, which had defended the now abandoned Paris, seized control of the city and established the Paris Commune. Its policies included the separation of church and state, self-policing, the remission of rent, the abolition of child labour, and the right of employees to take over an enterprise deserted by its owner. All Catholic churches and schools were closed. Michel became part of the National Guard. When the Paris Commune was declared she was elected head of the Montmartre Women's Vigilance Committee, and as such was responsible for the day-to-day welfare of two hundred children. She was part of a project to reform the city’s education system, ran a soup kitchen and attended to the wounded. She also scolded Karl Marx for his failure to join the Commune. In addition to this, Michel – in the male uniform of the National Guard - fought on the barricades with the 61st Battalion of Montmartre in the battles of Issy, Montmartre and Clamar. To the Franch press, she became La Vierge Rouge (The Red Virgin).

In late May, the “semaine sanglante”, the national French Army suppressed the Commune – it had lasted 73 days. The army killed an estimated 15,000, and arrested 43,000. Michel surrendered after her mother Marianne was arrested.

15,000 were tried in court, 13,500 of whom were found guilty, 95 were sentenced to death, 251 to forced labour, and 1,169 to deportation – mainly to Nouvelle-Calédonie (New Caledonia). Michel was tried in December, charged with offences including trying to overthrow the government, encouraging citizens to arm themselves, being a pétroleuse and herself using weapons and wearing a military uniform. The judges assumed that Michel, as they assumed for all the female Communards, was a “shameless slattern”, and that Michel was sexually involved with Theophile Ferré, of the Commune executive council. Her denials only led to later accusations that she had “tastes against nature”, that she was lesbian.

After twenty months in prison, during which Ferré was executed, Michel was loaded onto the ship Virginie on 8 August 1873, to be deported to New Caledonia where she arrived four months later. Also on the ship was the anarchist Nathalie Lemel who instructed Michel in the theory of anarchism. The two worked together in New Caledonia, and were calumnied as lesbian. 

Marie Ferré, Theophile’s sister cared for Michel’s mother while Michel was in prison, and then in exile.

Michel in New Caledonia befriended the indigenous Kanaks, and learned their culture and language. She supported the 1878 Kanak revolt, and acted as a teacher for the children of the deported. 

In 1880, amnesty was granted to all surviving Communards, and those deported returned to France. Michel became a public speaker, and writer. 

Marie Ferré died two years after Michel’s return, and Michel organised her funeral

In 1883 Michel was one of the leaders of a demonstration of unemployed workers. She was sentenced to six years of solitary confinement for inciting the looting, but released after three. 

In 1888, while speaking in Le Havre, Michel was shot at twice: one bullet was lost in her hat, the other wounded her behind the ear. After medical attention, she refused to press charges. 

In 1890, after an attempt to commit her to a mental asylum she moved to London, where she ran the International Anarchist School for the children of political refugees.

From 1890 onwards, Charlotte Vauvelle became Michel's almost constant companion, accompanying her on her international travels. In 1895 Michel met Emma Goldman at an anarchist conference in London.

Michel was on a speaking tour in Marseille in January 1905 when she died of pneumonia.

In 1937 the Collège Louise-Michel was opened in the 10th arrondissement. On 1 May 1946 the Paris Metro Vallier station in Levallois-Perret was renamed Louise Michel station. In 2004 the Square Louise-Michel in Montmartre was renamed after her. Michel was one of 10 French women honoured during the 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Paris, where a gold statue of her was raised along the Seine river.

--------------------

The first biography of Louise Michel was by Karl von Levetzow, an associate of Magnus Hirschfeld, and as such concerned to show that famous persons could be gay.  His article was published in Jahrbuch fiir sexuelle Zwischenstufen, in the same year that she died.  Levetzow emphasized her non-conformity with the 19^th-century ideas of gender and found lesbianism even in her  facial features. 

"A more virile character than hers cannot be found even among the most masculine of men” (p324). 

 He also quotes Theophil Zolling, who interviewed Michel in 1880 and called her “ugly” and 

“the wide-slit mouth, whose thick, pale, cracked lips by no means invite a kiss, and hide the small, icy eyes lurking behind bushy brows. A moustache, which would arouse the envy of a grammar school pupil, is shaded under the strong and not ignobly cut nose” (p327-8)  

This reading is not supported by the photographs that we have. 

This reinforced an idea that had already been proposed by her political enemies intended as a calumny., although this apparently was not Levetzow’s intention.

A year later a different biography appeared written by fellow anarchist Ernest Girault.  To protect her from insinuations of “tastes against nature” he emphasised her love for Theophile Ferré.  Her energy, courage, and "disgust with life" all stemmed, in his opinion, from Ferré's rejection of her affections.

A similar opinion was found the article on Michel in the 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Hirschfeld, in his Die Transvestiten, 1910 in his chapter on Women as Soldiers, discusses her only in the context of the Commune, where he states that women soldiers can be just as ‘inhuman’ as their male comrades, and quotes Levetzow.

In 1923 Emma Goldman visited Hirschfeld’s Institut fuer Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin and saw Michel’s photograph on a wall amidst other well-known lesbians. She objected to this arguing that Michel was a woman who had rejected the 19^th century roles for women, but that this did not make her a lesbian.  This reply was published in Jahrbuch fiir sexuelle Zwischenstufen.

Hirschfeld’s reply: 

“that even what appears to be the best circumstantial evidence can be based on error [...]. The various views of Levetzow and Mrs. Goldmann about Louise Michel, whose admirers and admirers are both to the same extent, is new evidence of this old experience. And yet there is also a bridge over the seemingly unbridgeable gap, namely where Ms. Goldmann speaks of Louise Michel in the following statements as a 'new type of femininity‘, a 'complicated nature‘. Individual psychology is not limited to a classification, no matter how sophisticated. Every scheme is shadowy.  The differentiation of human individualities is inexhaustible, unlimited.” (Hirschfeld 1923: 71 f).

Havelock Ellis in his Sexual Inversion, 1927 added a sentence on Michel to his third edition: “Great religious and moral leaders, like Madame Blavatsky and Louise Michel, have been either homosexual or bisexual or, at least, of pronounced masculine temperament” and a footnote referring his readers to Levetzow.

The major biography of Michel is by Edith Thomas, after she broke with the French Communist party.  She again continued the heterosexualisation by speculating a possible sexual relation with Victor Hugo also.  She portrayed Michel as an 

"unhappy woman who had lost the man she loved and admired” (p143-4)

Andrew Hussey has a paragraph on Louise Michel in his Paris: The Secret History, in which he makes a claim not found anywhere else, and without giving a source: 

“Michel was called the ‘Red Virgin’ because she refused to marry, but this did not stop her enjoying a long list of lovers, whom she took in the name of total freedom”.

------------------

Pétroleuse – a term of abuse aimed at female participants in the Commune, suggesting that they used petroleum to burn down buildings during the semaine sanglante (in later years lit bottles of petroleum were called Molotov cocktails). The EN.Wikipedia and FR.Wikipedia articles are strongly in disagreement. The latter says that recent research shows that actually there were no proven incidents of arson committed by women, and that no woman was afterwards convicted as an arsonist. The former lists some who were so convicted.

Caledonia is of course the Roman name for what we call Scotland. “New Caledonia” was named by British explorer James Cook during a quick visit in 1774. It became a French colony, but they kept the British name, merely revising it to Nouvelle-Calédonie. Not to be confused with Nova Scotia. To the indigenous Kanaks, it is Kanaky.

Republican parties across Europe are generally left-wing, anti-clerical, anti-monarchy, anti-aristocrats and anti-oligarchs. In the US of course it is the reverse. And the new French Party, Les Républicains, founded by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2015, is more like the US party as it was pre-Trump.

---

So, was Louise Michel in any way trans? Remember that several French trans men such as Violette Morris and Madeleine Pelletier lived and dressed as male but never took a male name. Remember also the common practice of claiming that politicians etc are gender or sexually deviant. This has recently happened to Brigitte Macron and Michelle Obama. 

I see Louise Michel as gender fluid. She was not determined enough to be transgender – her passions lay within anarchism. But she was not uptight about being a lady or a woman either. When convenient she dressed as male – and it was no big deal at all. It is unfortunate that the debate about her private life centres on whether she had “tastes against nature” for which there is no definite evidence either way. It would be better to ask whether anarchists should be gender conformists? Are not gender roles part of the oppression that anarchy is fighting against? Louise is a model of non-conforming.

• Theophil Zolling. Reise um die Pariser Welt. Verlag von W Spemann, 1882: 52.
• Karl von Levetzow, "Louise Michel," Jahrbuchfiir sexuelle Zwischenstufen 7, pt. 1 (1905): 307-70.
• Ernest Girault, La Bonne Louise. Bibliothèque des Auteurs modères, 1906.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. Die Transvestiten; ein Untersuchung uber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb: mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen Materia Berlin: Pulvermacher, 1910: 532-3. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. Transvestites: The Erotic urge to Crossdress. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991: 404-5.
• Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 3^rd vol. 2, Sexual Inversion. Random House, 1927): 197.
• Emma Goldman, "Offener Brief an den Herausgeber der Jahrbücher uber Louise Michel," Jahrbuchfur sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 23 (1923): 70-92.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. „Vorbemerkung des Herausgebers“. Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 1923; 23: 70–72.
• Alistair Horne. The Fall of Paris: The Seige and the Commune 1870-71. Macmillan, 1965, 1989: 28, 57, 237-8, 270-1, 278, 298-9, 319, 357, 379, 408, 413, 423, 425 ,
• Edith Thomas, translated by Penelope Williams. Louise Michel. Black Rose Books, 1980 – French original 1971.
• Marie Marmo Mullaney. “Sexual Politics in the Career and Legend of Louise Michel”. Signs, 15, 2, 1990:300-22.
• Bonnie Haaland. Emma Goldman: Sexuality and the Impurity of the State. Black Rose Books, 1993: 149, 155, 156, 166-170.
• Nic Maclellan (ed). Louise Michel. Ocean Press, 2004.
• Andrew Hussey. Paris: The Secret History. Bloomsbury, 2006: .
• Sidonie Verhaeghe. « Should we still call Louise Michel the Red Virgin? ». Cahiers d’histoire: Revue d’histoire critique, 148, 2021: 19-32.

EN.Wikipedia                FR.Wikipedia

Magnus Hirschfeld in Paris, July 1933

 An article on the front page of La Volanté, 20 Juillet 1933.

Translation

Anti-Semitism Against Science.

Professor Magnus Hirschfeld whose work on sexuality is famous, is in exile in Paris

---------------

and 180 of his works, 40 thousand volumes that he had collected, have been burned in Berlin by the Nazis.

He has been our guest for a month, staying at the Hotel d'Orsay, with his countless filing cards and a young Japanese secretary, Tao-Li, who follows him like his shadow.

A strange man, this exile from Hitler's regime, Magnus Hirschfeld: a Don Quixote of sexuality, who travelled the globe for 40 years, from Europe to China, studying the problem of sexual perversion, in Man and in animals-- even insects--to defend and treat a mystery of nature. A really great mystery, when a huge, bearded guy has an irresistible urge to put on a dress and make tapestries.

In his museum of sexuality in Berlin he saw 40,000 cases, strange cases mixing buffoonery and drama, a museum where garter belts and bras serve as men's outfitting.

I should say his former museum. For it's all gone. His 14,000 volume collection on the subject, his own 180 papers, a collection that would astonish Freud, Malthus and the Marquis de Sade-- all burned.

Tao-Li showed me in. The professor was wearing a white shirt. His dreamy blue eyes focussed on me rather severely. I was a little embarrassed. Would he take me for case no. 40,001? Thank God, his scowling expression, darkened by his gray moustache, like a Indian sculpture, lightened up. "Forty years ago," he said, "when I was a young doctor, one of my patients, an officer, killed himself on the night before his wedding. I learned the real reason for his despair only after he died. I was interested. I wrote a pamphlet under a pseudonym. The day after it was published, my bookstore was swamped with requests-- an unexpected bookseller's success. That's how I got started.

At the professor's invitation, I interviewed him. "It isn't true", he said, "that Germany has a monopoly on inverts. But there, they are legally controlled and they attract attention, while in France, the Napoleonic Code does not interfere with the private affairs of individuals. Here, cases like that of Oscar Wilde or Prince Eulenburg would go completely unnoticed."

But what about all those 'special' clubs in Berlin? "That's just it. The police watch them carefully; the problem is kept in one place where it's easy to control. According to the statistics, there are one million inverts in Germany. In Berlin alone there are 20,000 female domestic arrangements  and thousands of men in dresses and silk stockings."

His answer was vague: Several countries offered to take him, including America, China and Egypt, but he would rather stay in  Europe: "I feel more at home, especially in France, where I always find a warm welcome, and two scientists who initiated me are here, Brown-Sequard and Charcot."

It was time to leave. I was starting to feel a little insecure about my own sexuality, escpecially after Tao-Li, who was himself well versed in the subject, showed me some of the profesor's books with photos of strange patients. One of them was cutting women's hair, another only liked white gloves, a third killed himself because he couldn't get permission to dress as a woman!

On the way back, I could not get out of my mind everything that this good man had revealed to me. I began to freak out passers-by with an abnormal exprssion. At the Place de la Concorde a big car passed driven by a Japanese. Riding in back, with his hair flying in the wind, was Professor Magnus Hirschfeld.

Yvonne NOVIA 

-------------------

Of course Tao-Li was Chinse, not Japanese.

It was good to see this on the front page of La Volanté.   I have not found any English languages papers that paid the same attention to Hirschfeld in Paris.