Adventures in Jewish Sexology: Norman Haire, the Australian Prophet

Wigmore Hall is not a place that one would typically expect to find out is intimately connected with the subversion of the sexual morals of the West. If you aren’t a fan of classical music, then its name probably means little to you, but since 1901 this concert hall located in central London has been one of the world’s premier chamber music and recital venues, a space specially designed for the exhibition of Europe’s unmatched musical achievements. Sadly, even places such as this have not been spared from the modern forms of “enrichment” that are becoming all too common within our cultural institutions. In-between performances of Schubert or Beethoven, the venue now hosts things like an “African Concert Series” and refugee art installations, and the hall is regularly used for music lessons for London’s depressingly multiracial youth. The sight of an ensemble of British primary school students—where almost not a single child is white—singing about diversity on a stage that should be reserved for the celebration of White people and not their denigration and replacement, is a particularly egregious example of our predicament.

As this writer recently discovered, such hostile acts are not a new occurrence at Wigmore Hall, as nearly 100 years ago it was being defiled in an altogether different sort of way. The year was 1929, and between the 8^th and 14^th of September the chamber hall was rented out for a congress that attracted almost 350 delegates. Present were luminaries from around the world, academics and experts in their field, seated alongside famous activists and British cultural figures. On the opening day they sat to listen not to a musical performance but to an opening speech about sexology. For this was no ordinary gathering of people, they were delegates of the Third International Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR) and the opening speaker was none other than Magnus Hirschfeld, the president of the league.        Readers of The Occidental Observer will need no introduction to Magnus Hirschfeld, a man once described by Hitler as “the most dangerous Jew in Germany,” but the name of Australian-born sexologist Norman Haire—the subject of this essay and the man who organized the London congress—has been largely forgotten to history. His exploits are now only known to a handful of writers and historians, but during the 1920s and 1930s, Haire was one of Hirschfeld’s more prominent disciples in the world of sexology and at one point the co-president of the WLSR, an organization that played more than a passing role in seeding the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the modern toleration for every form of sexual depravity imaginable. Haire’s works widely circulated in the elite and socialist circles of pre-war anglosphere, with Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm claiming in 1939 that he was one of the few people of his generation that did not read Haire.[1]

When it comes to “sexology” or the study of human sexuality and behaviour, Andrew Joyce has previously identified[2] the two distinct strains within the modern discipline as it emerged in the early years of the twentieth century, noting that it was never proclaimed as an explicitly Jewish discipline. One was the gentile strain, a forensic study of the “sex question” that medicalized sinful behavior, gaining prominence with the writings of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and was pioneered in the anglosphere by Havelock Ellis. The other was the now-dominant Jewish strain, the one to which “the modern toleration and promotion of sexual delinquency owes its most significant debt.”[3] This came out of the German-speaking world, originating with Albert Moll, Iwan Bloch, Magnus Hirschfeld and Albert Eulenberg, and was strongly supplemented by Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis.

Both strains sought to extract inquiries on sexual behavior from the constraints of religious discourse, but where gentile sexology largely contextualized sexual deviance within theories of degeneration and came to dovetail closely with the birth control and eugenics movements (which directed inquires on sex through the lens of demographic issues as they related to the health of the race), Joyce notes that:

these Jewish sexologists and social commentators were united in advancing theories of sexual inversion [homosexuality] that moved away from interpretations involving themes like degeneration, demographic decline and biological reality, and instead towards Talmudic abstractions involving the nature of romantic love and the allegedly fluid nature of gender and sex. As one might predict, running through all of their works is a clear preoccupation with the need for “tolerance” and social pluralism, the denial of human difference, and a fanatical opposition towards non-Jewish attempts to develop racial science.[4]

Bloch in particular can be credited with originating the critique of the “degenerative theory” that defined the gentile strain, arguing instead that sexual deviance was an isolated anthropological phenomenon that had no capacity to undermine civilization and result in cultural decline.[5]

Haire’s origins in the anglosphere saw him begin his career in the former strain, which imbued his writings with a degree of rhetoric on race improvement. But driven by his own Jewish background and homosexuality, as well as an underlying desire for sexual tolerance, it is obvious to which side he spiritually belonged to from the start. In a statement on the aims of the WLSR, Haire himself clearly articulated the ultimate point of Jewish sexology as a weapon of cultural warfare, namely to

establish sexual ethics and sociology on a scientific, biological and psychological basis instead of the present theological basis. … The Stronger our organisation [the WLSR] and the greater our resources, the sooner we shall attain our object, which is freedom of humanity from the sexual persecution and sexual starvation which ignorance and intolerance have imposed upon it.[6]

Though he was only of secondary importance in the history of sexology and twentieth-century sexual reform, Haire—as apologist and enabler—bridged the gap between the trailblazers of Jewish sexology and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Following in Hirschfeld’s wake were people such as Haire, who worked diligently to mould public opinion and popularize the sexual ideals that achieved dominance by the end of the twentieth century. According to Diana Wyndham, the author of his biography, Haire exemplified the Jewish virtue of Tikkun Olam (“healing the world”),[7] by which she means he dedicated his life’s work to the dissolution of Western, Christian norms on sexual morality and the aggressive promotion of the use of contraception. The following critical review of the contours of his life illustrates the poisonous influence that even a secondary player like Haire had, as a prophet of sexual reform and a prominent contributor to the sexually radical climate of pre-war intelligentsia, in bringing about the current sexual perversion of the West.

Australian Origins

Norman Haire was born Norman Zions in Sydney in 1892, the youngest of 11 children in a non-observant Jewish family. The Zions family (originally Zajac) originated from Poland and were one of the many thousands of Jews that migrated to London during the nineteenth century to escape the Tsar’s failed attempts at turning them into Russian citizens. Sexual deviance to some degree or another was common to the major proponents of sexology, leading to the obvious hypothesis that sexology became, at least in-part, the vehicle for legitimizing their own sexual deviance, and Haire was no exception to this rule. There was Alfred Kinsey the sado-masochist who physically abused his genitals, Hirschfeld the nudist homosexual, and Havelock Ellis’ private life was far from conventional, being in an “open marriage” with a lesbian. Haire’s own homosexuality was a matter of conjecture to even his colleagues within the sex reform movement, known only to or suspected by close confidants—one can theorize that Haire, who regularly interacted with the general public, felt the level of secrecy was necessary to avoid him and his clinic being ostracised. It was at the Sydney Library that an 18-year-old Haire encountered the first two volumes of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Within he discovered a discussion on sexual inversion (homosexuality) that, whilst still describing it as a disorder, was absent from guilt-inducing religious rhetoric that located the origins of the behaviour solely in sin. This apparently relieved his youthful sexual anxieties and sparked a lifelong desire to study sex and reform the views of Christian society that he felt caused unnecessary suffering.[8]

In 1915, Haire graduated from the University of Sydney with a medical degree and he relocated to work at a hospital in London in 1919, whereupon he made contact with Havelock Ellis. Ellis had spent a number of his formative years in Australia—of which he had fond memories—and even taught at the same Sydney high school Haire attended, and accordingly accepted his Australian admirer with open arms. With introductions from Ellis, Haire ingratiated himself and soon became a leading member of Britain’s birth control movement, moving in the circles of all the prominent figures—Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, Stella Browne and C.V. Drysdale. Within three years he was on the executive committee of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (BSSSP) and a medical officer of the Malthusian League, and his pioneering articles on birth control methods were being published in The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, both prominent medical journals. However, he was an ethnic outsider within the country’s birth control scene; Jews had entered into prominent roles in birth control endeavors elsewhere, such as Gregory Pincus and Abraham and Hannah Stone in America or Hans Lehfeldt in Germany, but in Britain, Haire took a backseat to what was primarily a gentile venture. Haire quickly moved on from hospital duties and set up a gynaecology practice on Harley Street and provided birth control advice to the poor at a free clinic he set up with the Malthusian League called the Walworth Women’s Welfare Centre—among the earliest such clinics in the world. A number of foreign contraceptives made their way to England through promotion by Haire, such as the Dutch-designed rubber pessary and the Gräfenberg Ring (designed by Jewish researcher Ernst Gräfenberg) a precursor to the IUD.

Haire’s most well-known and accessible book was Hymen, or the Future of Marriage (1927) wherein he outlined his predictions (or more accurately his desires) about the nature of marriage and sexual relations in the future. Alongside his defenses for no-fault divorce, euthanasia, pre-marital sex and sterilization, Haire predicted that every city in the world would have an Institute for Sexual Research like Hirschfeld’s, and he promoted the benefits of polygamy.

Lifelong monogamous marriage is, I believe, the ideal to aim at; but it is an ideal that is at present suitable to, and attainable by, only a very small minority of people. Most men are polygamous, in their desires at least: a large number are polygamous in practice; and, of those who remain physically faithful to one woman, the majority do so only because of the fear of consequences in this life, or punishment in that after-life which has been invented and exploited by theologians.[9]

At the heart of his book is the now-ubiquitous rhetoric of “live and let live” and the toleration of sexual difference, namely that unless a deviant sexual behaviour directly harms another individual, it should be left undisturbed:

But so long as the sexual rights of others are not interfered with…the sexual relations of two mutually consenting adults will probably be considered the private concern of the two individuals involved. We shall cease to persecute the unfortunate abnormals; and instead, we shall endeavour to cure them. Where cure is impossible, we shall not interfere with their rights as long as they do not interfere with the rights of others.[10]

The integration of homosexual toleration within the wider discourse of sexual reform, particularly through association with popular endeavors such as sex equality, was a longstanding Hirschfeld tactic of legitimization that Haire was more than happy to also utilize.

Rejuvenation and Conflict with the BSSSP

Other than his support for a form of compulsory sterilization, one of the more embarrassing aspects of Haire’s career for his modern-day defenders is his involvement with the Jewish-instigated medical quackery known as “rejuvenation therapy,” invented by Eugen Steinach and Serge Voronoff. Steinach, an endocrinologist born to an Austrian Jewish family, and Voronoff, a surgeon born to a Russian Jewish family, both purported to have discovered, through experimentation on the endocrine systems of animals, the medical answer to the “fountain of youth.” Through surgical alterations to the endocrine and reproductive systems, they claimed that mankind could be “rejuvenated” from old age, with the operations allegedly increasing the vigor and sexual potency of the subject. The Vonoroff method involved surgically grafting slices of monkey testicles to the scrotum of the patient, a procedure which earned him the moniker of the “monkey gland man.” Steinach’s method was more mundane, being essentially a partial vasectomy.                                                                                                                                         Haire learnt of the procedures from a lecture given by his colleague Eden Paul[11] to the BSSSP and opted for the Steinach method, earning a small fortune “rejuvenating” famous elderly clients like W.B Yeats and H.G Wells by charging exorbitant surgical fees. In 1924, he published Rejuvenation:Tthe Work of Steinach, Voronoff, and Others which popularised the fad. Needless to say, none of these operations resulted in anything more than a placebo effect, but what they did do is provide the perfect guinea pigs for experimentation on Steinach’s more enduring achievement—sex-reassignment surgery. Steinach’s experiments on the function of sex hormones guided Hirschfeld and two Jewish doctors (Ludwig Levy-Lenz and Felix Abraham) at the Institute for Sexual Research in 1931 in performing the world’s first full sex-transition surgery on a German man called Rudolph Richter.

Though originally founded under the chairmanship of Hirschfeld, the BSSSP was little more than a lacklustre discussion forum for upper-class sexual radicals,[12] and the majority of its members were not interested in the goal Haire aspired to, namely bold, public sexual reform. Haire, now a prominent figure in the society and the British birth control scene, was not impressed by the BSSSP and its low membership numbers, and described other prominent members as “unbalanced,” “timid,” and “carries discretion to the extreme.”[13] By mid-1923, a minor power struggle over the direction of the society had resulted, but Haire backed down after Ellis reprimanded him in January 1924 after giving a speech at a BSSSP meeting that took the case for homosexual liberation a little too far, telling him that “the usefulness of the society will be largely destroyed if it comes to be regarded as simply a homo club.”[14] Alongside his flair for self-promotion, Haire’s abrasive personality and chutzpah had previously caused friction and interpersonal disputes with prominent members of the British birth control movement,[15] but the conflict over the direction of the BSSSP saw Haire begin to gravitate away from his childhood idol[16] and into the orbit of Magnus Hirschfeld and the Jewish strain of sexology in the German-speaking world—a place Haire would later call his spiritual home.

Hirschfeld and the Third Sexual Congress

First contact with Hirschfeld was made on a trip to Berlin in 1923 with a letter of introduction from Ellis. Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research (ISR) made a strong impression on Haire, as did the “openness of homosexuality” that he encountered in the Berlin bars Hirschfeld invited him along to.[17] In Hirschfeld and the ISR, Haire found an outwardly confident movement that since 1897 already had a trailblazing track record of strong public support for the cause of sexual reform and homosexual liberation. Haire was present at the 1928 Copenhagen conference which founded the World League for Sexual Reform and also attended Albert Moll’s rival Berlin sexology congress in 1926, the International Congress for Sex Research.

Norman Haire (on the left) standing outside a WLSR meeting with Hirschfeld and his lover Karl Giese.   

Haire took up leadership roles in the WLSR, including as co-president with Hirschfeld from 1930 onwards, and he proved particularly influential in the transmission of the currents of Jewish sexology into the anglosphere. Proficient in both French and German, he put his language skills to use not only in attending conferences that were out of reach to most English speakers, but also in personally translating and editing German-language sexology books. From 1929, Haire edited The International Library of Sexology and Psychology series, which provided cheap translations and reprints of all the major sexology works, and edited and contributed to the English editions of Arthur Koestler’s bestseller The Encyclopaedia of Sexual Knowledge (1934). Translations of Wilhelm Aldor’s[18] Encyclopedia of Sex Practice (1934) and Wilhelm Stekel’s Sadism and Masochism (1929) brought Haire into legal trouble as they were being sold as titillating works alongside pornographic books and were considered “unlikely to be read in a scientific manner.”[19]

Haire’s role at the junction between Jewish sexology and the English-speaking world became most evident when he organized the aforementioned Third Congress of the WLSR in London, the first outside continental Europe and a high point for sexual reform in Britain. In total, the congress drew 350 delegates, a mixture of prominent sexologists and birth control activists from around the world and liberal reformers in Britain. Papers from prominent names such as Julian and Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell (Russell’s 2^nd wife Dora assisted Haire in organising the congress) and George Bernard Shaw were presented. Havelock Ellis, now dealing with Haire at arm’s length, did not support the London congress and refused to attend, and Margaret Sanger abruptly defected, apparently for fear of her birth control endeavours being tainted with the accusation of involvement with communism and homosexual activism.[20]

The Planks of the WLSR

The topic of homosexuality did not in-fact receive much discussion at the London WLSR, struck from the agenda by Haire in order to align the congress with the more conservative English sensibility, and despite him bemoaning the “conspiracy of silence” against homosexuals.[21] Sex censorship on the other hand received particular attention (as did psychoanalysis), an issue on the minds of British participants given that many of them had recently come to the defense of Raclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), charged with obscenity due to its presentation of lesbianism. Haire gave evidence in support of the book during the trial, invited by the publisher’s solicitor Harold Rubinstein,[22] and Rubinstein returned the favor by presenting a paper on censorship at the congress. The “planks”
of the WLSR platform, as re-drawn (and somewhat watered down[23]) by Haire for the London congress, read as follows:

1. Political, economic and sexual equality of men and women.
2. The liberation of marriage (and especially divorce) from the present Church and State tyranny.
3. Control of conception, so that procreation may be undertaken only deliberately and with a due sense of responsibility.
4. Race betterment by the application of the knowledge of Eugenics.
5. Protection of the unmarried mother and illegitimate child.
6. A rational attitude towards sexually abnormal persons, and especially towards homosexuals, both male and female.
7. Prevention of prostitution and venereal disease
8. Disturbances of the sexual impulse to be regarded as more or less pathological phenomena, and not, as in the past, merely as crimes, vices, or sins.
9. Only those sexual acts to be considered criminal which infringe the sexual rights of another person. Sexual acts between responsible adults, undertaken by mutual consent, to be regarded as the private concern of those adults.
10. Systematic sexual education.[24]

Minus some changes to the language, and with the notable exception of the eugenics plank, it stands as almost a complete ideological framing of the sexual revolution that was still nearly 40 years away, with all the suggested reforms having now been implemented throughout the Western world.

Following the 1929 London congress came the Vienna congress in 1930, which attracted 1,000 delegates. However, a subsequent congress held in Brno prior to Hirschfeld’s death failed to attract as much publicity, and sexual reform was overshadowed by the worsening political and economic situation. Haire was in London when he heard of the burning of the archives of the ISR by the National Socialists in May 1933 (which included Haire’s works) and sent a frantic letter to Hirschfeld’s lover Karl Giese to inquire if any of the more precious books and papers had been spared from consignment to the flames.[25]

Haire and Race

A more difficult aspect of Haire’s career to parse out is how he approached the question of race. Haire did not (to this writer’s knowledge, based on his publicly available works) make any outwardly hostile statements on racialism or race science and his writings express a broad support for sterilization for reasons of “race improvement.” For example, in Hymen Haire critiques a funding appeal in a newspaper for a family suffering a case of hereditary blindness:

Such an appeal is possible only because Society has a false standard of values—a standard which is hurrying us to national and racial disaster.[26]

His rhetoric on race is nevertheless highly generalized and medicalized and can be seen far more as the desires of a utopian (Haire considered himself a socialist) seeking to eradicate physical and mental deformities in all peoples of the world, utilizing the linguistic rhetoric popular in Britain at the time, rather than as a manifestation of a commitment to the health of the race derived from a wider worldview of racial nationalism.

Degenerative theory is absent from his writings on sexuality and it is difficult to see Haire, the “world citizen” equally at home in London as he was in Berlin and Paris, offering support to racial nationalism or engaging in rhetoric against miscegenation. Furthermore, Haire was concerned about rising anti-Semitism and “jew baiting” in Germany, and he helped a number of his fellow Jewish sexologists who came to England as refugees after 1933. The most generous interpretation is that the issue was largely not of interest to him, a distraction from his pet topic of birth control, but his idol Magnus Hirschfeld’s position on race offers us a clue as to what Haire’s view most likely was (see Andrew Joyce’s Magnus Hirschfeld’s Racism” (1934)).

Wykeham Terriss and the Population Debate

Haire continued his medical practice and involvement with the WLSR and Sanger’s birth control conferences throughout the 1930s, but war and poor health saw him decide to return to Australia in 1940, setting up a clinic in Macquarie Street, Sydney. When it came to movements for sexual reform, not much had changed in the country of his birth since he had left it nearly 20 years prior. There were only two operating birth control clinics, set up by Australia’s small but dedicated birth control movement (one by the Racial Hygiene Association in New South Wales (NSW) and another by the Eugenics Society of Victoria), local condom manufactures like Ansell Rubber (founded by London-born Jew Eric Ansell) still operated discreetly, and little of the currents of Jewish sexology had reached Australia’s shores other than isolated eccentrics who ran afoul of obscenity laws.[27]

After experiencing the liberated scenes of Weimar Germany, Australia was still stuck in what Haire considered to be a sexual dark age, wracked with sexual ignorance and religious dogma,[28] and before long he was at war with Australia’s even more conservative standards on sex, though public discussion of homosexuality was still out of the question. Churches and Christian societies targeted his sex education seminars held at universities and Haire penned a series of articles for The World News on “Sex and Censorship” where he decried Australia’s international reputation on the censorship of sexual publications, arguing that “the present method of censorship is very imperfect, harmful to the public interest and an unwarranted interference with the liberty of the individual.”[29]

In March 1941, Haire scored a major coup in the promotion of sexual reform in Australia when he was appointed to write a series of sex advice articles for a popular weekly magazine (Woman) using the pseudonym “Wykeham Terriss.” Australian women’s magazines of the day were still respectable affairs that catered to the middle-aged woman as the enforcer of morality in society—it would be another 50 years before Jewish editor Nene King turned Australia’s most popular women’s magazines into trashy gossip rags, filled with sex and scandal. Until it ceased publication in 1951, Haire contributed more than 400 articles, which were taboo-breaking endeavours guaranteed to provoke and enrage. Haire refused to use “code words” or religious rhetoric for describing behaviours and body parts, and provided he avoided the obscene, the only topics forbidden in his “freethinking” articles were masturbation and homosexuality. Highlights include Haire blaming the spread of venereal disease on the closing of shops and entertainment on Sundays. Haire’s claim that his articles were the first mass presentations of sex advice in Australia is difficult to quantify,[30] but there is no doubt that they had a wide readership that moulded public opinion in the direction of openness in talking about sex and sexual reform.

Alongside the Wykeham Terriss articles, Haire’s most notorious contribution to Australia was a radio debate in August 1944 which brought him wide censure from Australian politicians. Held as part of the Nations Forum of the Air series, which presented topics that looked towards post-war reconstruction, the debate asked the question “Population Unlimited?” and invited four participants for an unscripted hour-long debate. For the affirmative were two Catholics, Dame Enid Lions, member for parliament and wife of the former prime minister, and the economist Colin Clark, who later advised on the 1967 papal encyclical Populorum Progressio. The feminist Jessie Street took the negative alongside Haire. Whilst he conceded the need for Australia to “cautiously” grow (unlike in Europe, where he felt it best to decrease growth due to “over-population”), Haire presented a staunch defense of birth control methods of the sort that was almost never articulated on national radio, let alone in public discourse. During the debate, Haire referred to his mother as little more than a “prize cow” stuck in a cycle of fertility and child-rearing. The comment was taken as a broadside against Australian motherhood, and the outcry resulted in a government ban being imposed on both the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and commercial radio from broadcasting talks on sexual matters and venereal disease.[31]

The Legacy of Haire

“Norman Haire became a sort of hero. … Since then his followers have spread out, infiltrating not only the medical profession, but universities, schools, churches.”[32]

Haire returned to London in August 1946 to find that sexual reform had run out of steam due to the war, and that the fervor over birth control had subsided. As Haire no doubt understood from the radio debate in Australia and its vituperative aftermath, promotion of birth control strongly conflicted with the goal of using population growth as a form of economic stimulation to counter wartime death and destruction, and the field of eugenics had been rendered morally reprehensible by association with the National Socialist regime and its sterilization policies.

Haire kept pre-war sexual reform alive by establishing the Sex Education Society and its accompanying journal, and he became more public in support of abortion and reform of homosexual law, but he continued to be plagued by ill health. His last venture was a speaking tour in the US in 1952, where he met all the Jewish leading lights of American sexology and gay rights activism—Edward Sagarin, Albert Ellis, Hugo Gernsback and Edwin W. Hirsch—and received a visit from Harry Benjamin and Alfred Kinsey whilst resting in a New York hospital.[33] The trip was interrupted by intermittent hospital visits due to heart failure and he died in the UK a few months later. Haire’s papers, which contained many intimate details about well-known English and Australian political and cultural figures, were burned, but his sexology library was donated to the University of Sydney, which in 2020 established the Norman Haire Fund for Sexology Studies.

The legacy of Norman Haire was not immediately apparent in Australia after his departure, as the local sexology scene continued along the gentile strain for a number of years, i.e., it was concerned primarily with family and racial health to the exclusion of radical sexual reform.[34] By the mid-1950s however, the world that he had prophesized back in 1927 was beginning to emerge, a radical world of sexual license and the “toleration of difference”(as a proxy for the toleration of Jews) driven by Jewish ethno-political activism that was intrinsically hostile to any notion of race or racial improvement. The spirit of Hirschfeld, Haire, and the WLSR lived on in the form of Freudianism, Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School, championing the subversive cause of sexual liberation and cultural pluralism throughout the West, and the trickle of pornography and sexual publications turned into a flood. As a sign of the times, the NSW Racial Hygiene Association renamed itself the Family Planning Association in 1960 to align with the new goal of sexual liberation and remove any pretext that it was interested in the biological strengthening of White Australia. The strongly Jewish nature of this endeavour in the Australian context, particularly in the war on obscenity laws and Australia’s conservative sexual morality, has previously been discussed in detail by this writer; see his four-part series The Plot Against Australia (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4).

Once all the legal and cultural prohibitions on open discissions of sex had been dismantled, the field of sexology itself emerged in Australia in full bloom during the 1970s, and as one would expect with Jews playing leading roles. The first professional organization for sexology, the Australian Association of Sex Educators, Counsellors and Therapists (ASSERT), was founded under the leadership of Greta Goldberg as its convener and first president. Jewish doctors Jules Black (also a founding director of ASSERT) and Elsie Koadlow later jockeyed amongst themselves for the accolade of who set up Australia’s first sex-therapy clinic,[35] and Viennese-born doctor Herbert Bower pioneered a gender-dysphoria clinic at a Melbourne hospital, later graduating to an in-house psychiatrist at the first sex-reassignment surgery clinic in Australia at Monash University—in 1999 he was called the man who “approves every sex change operation in Australia.”[36] Sexologists like Bettina Arndt[37] began appearing on mainstream radio and television networks and Dennis Altman’s Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971) was a worthy successor to Haire and Hirschfeld’s quest for sexual reform.

Once the love that dare not speak its name, now the love one dare not oppose – Current prime minister Anthony Albanese and leading members of the Australian Labor Party celebrating the passing of the gay marriage bill at the Labor caucus.

Around the world, Jews abound in the history of the sexual revolution and its precursors, but like Norman Haire, most of them are now hidden away in the margins of books and journal articles (or uncritical Wikipedia entries), their lives which brim with subversion and intrigue unknown to all but the most esoteric readers. Perhaps someday writers on the Jewish Question will uncover them all, but for now this writer leaves you with the Australian piece in this puzzle, an individual that Australian patriots would prefer to forget was produced on our shores.

Select Bibliography

• Bongiorno, F 2012, The Sex Lives of Australians: A History, Black Inc, Australia.
• Grosskurth, P 1985, Havelock Ellis: A Biography, New York University Press, USA.
• Haire, N 1927, Hymen: Or the Future of Marriage, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, London, UK.
• Haire, N 1943, Sex Problems of To-day, Angus & Robertson Ltd, Sydney, Australia.
• Leck, R.M 2016, Vita Sexualis: Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science, University of Illinois Press, USA.
• Mancini, E 2010, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement, Palgrave Macmillan, USA.
• Wyndham, D 2012, Norman Haire and the study of sex, Sydney University Press, Australia.

[1]Munster, G 1983 ‘Only shadowy clues left by a reviled prophet of sexual liberation’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 24 September, p.38.

[2] Joyce, A 2015 ‘The Assault on Gender and the Family Jewish Sexology and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School, Part 1, The Occidental Observer, retrieved from: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/12/26/the-assault-on-gender-and-the-family-jewish-sexology-and-the-legacy-of-the-frankfurt-school-part-one/

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Leck, R.M 2016, Vita Sexualis: Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science, University of Illinois Press, USA, p.185.

[6] Wyndham, D 2012, Norman Haire and the study of sex, Sydney University Press, Australia, p.184

[7] Ibid., p.425.

[8] Wyndham, Op. Cit., p.35.

[9] Haire, N 1927, Hymen or The Future of Marriage, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Lt. London, p.95. Retrieved from: 04.us.archive.org/26/items/dli.ministry.14394/E09677_Hymen_Or_The_Future_Of_Marriage_text.pdf

[10] Ibid., p.59.

[11] A member of the Communist Party, Paul was another prominent translator of Jewish sexology books from Germany.

[12] “The Society’s contemporary impact in terms of reform of laws, or even moderating more than a small corner of public opinion, was apparently minimal.”- See Hall, L.A 1995, ‘’Disinterested Enthusiasm for Sexual Misconduct’: The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, 1913-47’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.8(4), pp.665-686.

[13] Crozier, I 2003, ‘“All the World’s a Stage”: Dora Russell, Norman Haire and the 1929 London World League for Sexual Reform Congress’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol.12(1), pp16-37, p.21-22

[14] Wyndham, Op. Cit., p.116.

[15] See Crozier, I 2001 ‘Becoming a Sexologist: Norman Haire, the 1929 London World League for Sexual Reform Congress, and Organizing Medical Knowledge about Sex in Interwar England’, History of Science, Vol.39, pp.299-329.

[16] Wyndham’s account of the correspondence between Ellis and Haire from this point up until Ellis’ death in 1939 give the impression of a tense but still professional relationship, with Ellis less than pleased by Haire’s manoeuvrings with the WLSR.

[17] Wyndham, Op. Cit., p.112.

[18] The cousin of Arthur Koestler.

[19] Cocks, H.G 2004, ‘Saucy stories: Pornography, sexology and the marketing of sexual knowledge in Britain, c. 1918-70’, Social History, Vol.29(4), pp.465-484, p.481.

[20] Wyndham, Op. Cit., p.183

[21] Ibid., p.184.

[22] Rubinstein’s son Michael was the defence solicitor for Penguin Books in the landmark 1960 obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

[23] Haire for example removed the plank, originally written by Hirschfeld, on the “tolerance of free sexual relations” and re-wrote the eugenics plank with more racialist language. See Dose, R 2003, ‘The World League for Sexual Reform: Some Possible Approaches’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol.12(1), pp.1-15.

[24] Crozier 2003, Op. Cit., p.28-29

[25]Wyndham, Op. Cit., p.228

[26] Haire, Op. Cit., p.32.

[27] Notably George Southern, the only Australian-based member of the WLSR.

[28] Wyndham Op. Cit. p.320-321.

[29] Haire, N 1941, ‘Sex and Censorship’, The World’s News Sydney, Saturday 25 October, p.2, retrieved from: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/139906663/16086749.

[30] Wyndham, Op. Cit., p.412 – The NSW Racial Hygiene Association had in fact produced sex education pamphlets during the 1930s. The guarded religious language used within these pamphlets about the spiritual uplift of marriage and sexual relations and the opposition to masturbation are a world apart from Haire’s writings on the topic.

[31] Inglis, K.S 1983, This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission 1932-1983, 2^nd Edition, Black Inc., Australia, p.188.

[32] Buckley, B 1966, ‘Morals: The Sexual Revolution’, The Bulletin, p.19, retrieved from: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-674029485/view?partId=nla.obj-674142795

[33] Wyndham, Op.Cit., p.391-392

[34] This came in the form of contemporary practitioners such as Victor Hugo Wallace, the Australian editor of the journal Marriage Hygiene (later the International Journal of Sexology) from 1947 to 1955 and a leading member of the Eugenics Society of Victoria.

[35] See https://john.curtin.edu.au/julesblack/launch.html

[36] Bock, A 1999, ‘Gender Bender’, The Age, Saturday 9 October, p.113.

[37] Not Jewish, but with a Jewish background; her family were Lutheran converts.