Li Shiu Tong was a trailblazing sex researcher and early LGBT rights activist. Only most of the world just found out about him, decades after his death. In fact, his work was almost lost entirely but for a stroke of pure chance. Found discarded in a dumpster by a neighbor after his death in 1993 and archived in obscurity for decades before ever being read, Li’s research reported the incredible results of his interviews which were far ahead of their time. In line with other work in the field, both older and recent, Li’s findings tell a story where bisexuality is far more common than people ordinarily assume.

In 1931, a Chinese student named Li Shiu Tong (the grandson of Li Hongzhang, a major player in the Taiping Rebellion) dropped out of medical school to begin working with the German doctor and early sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. To understand this seemingly rash decision, one must understand who Magnus Hirschfeld was. To say that Hirschfeld was a giant in LGBT history is an understatement. Aside from pioneering gender confirmation procedures and basically inventing trans advocacy, in 1897 Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first LGBT organization in history. His work was so high profile and studied by experts from around the world, it is no wonder that his center was plundered and its archives were torched by the Nazis as one of their first acts upon assuming power. Dubbed the “Einstein of Sex”, Hirschfeld, upon meeting the actual Einstein, humorously called his fellow expatriate the “Hirschfeld of physics.” Hirschfeld was a fearless proponent of LGBT rights in an era when homosexuality was not just reviled, but unspeakable. Whereas others saw homosexuality as a “lifestyle”, Hirschfeld saw something that ran much deeper; that sexuality is not simply chosen consciously but is instead part of a person’s core being.

Likely influenced by his own life experience, Hirschfeld, traveling with the younger Li as his research assistant, gave hundreds of lectures stressing that same-sex attraction was indeed something natural, and in no way sinful or pathological. It was during this speaking tour that Hirschfeld and Li fell in love. Thanks to this love (and Hirschfeld being Jewish), the two fled to France after Hitler's rise to power, where they essentially co-wrote Hirschfeld's book, Women East and West: Impressions of a Sex Expert (1933), which covered their travels throughout the world and what they learned through interviews about human sexuality along the way. They also jointly published a paper that was the first to cover, in detail, the topic of intersex conditions (differences of sexual development) and the normalization of homosexuality.

What no one knew was that after Hirschfeld died in 1935, Li continued his pioneering work, traveling around and conducting research in Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Zurich, never settling down permanently in one place. And from his itinerant work came a manuscript — which, tragically, went unseen until after Li died in 1993. When Li’s Vancouver apartment was cleaned out after his death, a neighbor happened upon an intriguing pile of personal effects that had been thrown away, including diaries, notes, photographs, Hirschfeld’s plaster death mask, and a manuscript. The documents were filed away in an online archive of works associated with Magnus Hirschfeld, where they went almost entirely unread for over 25 years, until historian Laurie Marhoefer came across them.

Most notable were the self-reports of sexual activity by Li’s interviewees. Not only were 20% of his subjects exclusively homosexual in their behavior, only 30% were exclusively heterosexual, and 40% were bisexual in their behavior. Li went so far as to argue that people who exclusively engaged in heterosexual behavior “Should be classified as an endangered species.” In addition, 10% of the people he studied didn't identify as strictly belonging to any single category label. This provides evidence for some fundamental truths about human sexuality — evidence which has been confirmed by many scholars since.

Li’s findings about the prevalence of bisexuality were independently discovered in his own era by Alfred Kinsey and his famous Kinsey Reports, which showed that 37% of males reported having sexual experiences with another male, and established the Kinsey scale to measure the gradations of sexuality. Building off of this work, later researchers such as Fritz Klein and Lisa Diamond, among others, further explored the spectrum and fluidity of sexuality — how one’s sexuality can shift over their lifetime, and how there are many gradations of attraction between strict hetero- and homosexuality. Anthropological studies of 20th century tribal societies showed that nearly two-thirds of the communities examined considered same-sex behavior socially acceptable. Moreover, research from nature has documented same-sex behavior in over 1,500 known species, and yet only domesticated rams have displayed exclusive homosexuality, demonstrating just how natural bisexual behavior is. Recent polling finds that nearly half of young British adults are not 100% straight, and 12.5% of Harvard’s class of 2025 identifies as bisexual — both figures showing marked increases. And yet, even though a preponderance of data suggests that same-sex behavior is much more common than conventional wisdom assumes, it never became mainstream to casually state it as fact.

The future may, as Peter Tatchell argued in a recent Queer Majority cover story, “Look a lot more bisexual”, and the rigid identity labels we invest so much importance in may wane in relevance. As Tatchell writes, he has “Long predicted that we would begin to see a decrease in the number of people who feel they can be defined as strictly hetero- or strictly homosexual.” This is not to say that everyone will be gay by 2054, as Bill Maher recently joked, nor that sexuality is a conscious choice. The argument is rather that one’s perception of sexuality may change throughout their lives, and that the public shift to viewing sexuality as a spectrum may lead to steady increases in people coming to view themselves as sexually fluid, which by definition constitutes a form of bisexuality. Now of course, this is by the standards of today. The concept of “bisexuality” may come to be seen the way “heterosexuality” was for much of history — so common and assumed that people didn’t even need a word for it, it was just “how things are.”

The data collected so many years ago by Li Shiu Tong would have been considered groundbreaking had it been published. But even after all these years, the picture of human sexuality it paints still seems cutting edge. After nearly a century, though, attitudes are beginning to change. As long as no regressive legal roadblocks are placed in the way of LGBT people, we could very well reach a place where attitudes surrounding sexuality regard it as no more central than culinary preferences. It’s a reality that Li Shiu Tong would never live to see, though based on his research, his time spent with his lover and mentor, and his overall life experience, it was a reality that he knew was possible. Not because of hopeful platitudes, or neo-Marxist narratives of oppression, but by simply following where the data leads. Indeed, already in the 1890s, Hirschfeld and his associates operated under the motto “Justice Through Science,” believing from the get-go that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality and that therefore better scientific understanding of same-sex attraction would in itself eliminate stigmas and discrimination against LGBT people. The facts Li uncovered on that quest remain counterintuitive to much of the public, but fortunately we can already see that younger generations accept these realities about human sexuality at much higher levels. The rest of us would do well to catch up. If we care about the truth, we must follow where the evidence leads and embrace new discoveries. Even those that show up in your late neighbor’s garbage can.

Published Aug 26, 2022