The Shanghai newspapers billed Hirschfeld as the world’s foremost expert on sexuality. Hirschfeld, then 63 years old, had come to China to give public lectures about the science of sex. In its pages is a theory of LGBTQ people as the majority that would resonate with a lot of young people today.īorn in 1907 in Hong Kong, Li was a 24-year-old studying medicine at a university in Shanghai when he met Hirschfeld.