But her core focus was always her study of queer women. In 1931,according to When Brooklyn Is Queer, she traveled to Berlin to meet the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. At Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, a prominent research clinic, Gay read Hirschfeld’s “books and notes and records concerning homosexuals, seeing something of the treatment accorded them,” she wrote later. She conducted in-depth interviews with many of her new acquaintances. By 1935, she had visited Oxford, Paris, New York, and Berlin, and interviewed roughly 300 queer women about their lives.
In one single group of characters from inside the 1939, Homosexual sent a released questionnaire in order to colleges such Barnard College. The woman concerns need seemed peculiar to help you a college administrator when you look at the the fresh 1930s: What was, Homosexual expected, the faculty’s emotions on crushes or “enchanting relationships” one of exact same-intercourse students?