German archivist and activist Karl Giese was BOTD in 1898. Born in Wedding to a working-class family, he moved to Munich in his teens. In 1918, he attended a lecture by the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. The two formed a relationship, moving together to Berlin in 1919, where Hirschfeld established the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sex Research). He appeared in the 1919 film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), co-scripted by Hirschfeld and thought to be the first feature-length film expressly addressing male homosexuality. He became Hirschfeld’s lead assistant, giving lectures, organising exhibitions and writing articles about sexual difference, and forming close friendships with the Institute’s celebrity visitors including archaeologist Francis Turville-Petre and writers André Gide and Christopher Isherwood. In 1930, Hirschfeld undertook a two-year world lecture tour, with Giese remaining in Berlin to run the Institute. After the destruction of the Institute by Nazi thugs in 1932, Giese spent several months in Brno, Czechoslovakia, attempting to acquire copies of Hirschfeld’s archives. He moved to Paris in 1934, living uneasily in a ménage-à-trois with Hirschfeld and the latter’s young Chinese lover Li Shiu Tong. Arrested for cottaging in a public toilet, he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment and deported from France, moving to Vienna. After Hirschfeld’s death in 1935, he returned to Nice for his funeral, assuming responsibility for Hirschfeld’s archive. He returned to Brno in 1936, where he lived with the lawyer Karel Fein. He committed suicide in 1938, aged 39, shortly before Hitler’s annexation of the Czech Sudetenland. His archive of materials rescued from the Institute are thought to have been lost during World War Two. Largely forgotten by history, interest in his life, work and contribution to Hirschfeld’s studies was re-ignited in the 1990s. He was portrayed by Olaf Drauschke in Rosa von Praunheim‘s 1999 Hirschfeld biopic Der Einstein des Sex (The Einstein of Sex). In 2016, a memorial to Giese was placed at the site of the Institute in Berlin.