Burchard, who was gay,[1] testified as an expert witness in several court cases involving prosecutions on grounds of Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexual practices.
He studied medicine in Tübingen, Würzburg and Kiel, taking his doctoral degree in 1900 with a dissertation on Einige Fälle von vorübergehender Glycosurie.
Benedict Friedländer and some others left the Scientific Humanitarian Committee and formed another group, the "Bund für männliche Kultur" or "Union for Male Culture", which however did not exist long.
The bill was brought before the Reichstag in 1898, but was only supported by a minority from the Social Democratic Party of Germany, prompting a frustrated Hirschfeld to consider the controversial strategy of "outing" — that is, forcing some of the prominent lawmakers who had remained silent out of the closet.
The German director Rosa von Praunheim made the film Der Einstein des Sex in 1999, based on the life of Magnus Hirschfeld.