The History
About the Book
In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin’s thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond, but everything changes when Hitler rises to power. The institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend, Sofie, to a nearby farm. There they take on the identities of an elderly couple and live for more than a decade in isolation.
In the final days of the war, with their freedom in sight, Bertie and Sofie find a young trans man collapsed on their property, still dressed in Holocaust prison clothes. They vow to protect him—not from the Nazis, but from the Allied forces who are arresting queer prisoners while liberating the rest of the country. Ironically, as the Allies’ vise grip closes on Bertie and his family, their only salvation becomes fleeing to the United States.
Brimming with hope, resilience, and the enduring power of community, The Lilac People tells an extraordinary story inspired by real events and recovers an occluded moment of trans history.
Queer History, Uncovered
While The Lilac People is a work of fiction, author Milo Todd was inspired by true history and artifacts he found in his research. Its pages contain such events as the rise of the original trans and queer fascism movement, the first documented queer and trans book ban, and other atrocities. Here are some images to help you visualize that time.
Interested in more? Milo also has a presentation called “A Trans History of the Weimar Republic,” which discusses the era’s vibrant trans community and its endless series of firsts, including terminology, surgeries, rights, memoirs, and music.
The presentation has received high praise from audiences across the United States, and Milo has adapted it to lengths ranging from 15 minutes to 90 minutes, as well as adjusting it for festivals, universities, libraries, community centers, virtual events, and more.
Please contact him for rates and availability.
Milo on Writing Historical Fiction
“As someone who writes about and instructs on transgender history, I grapple with erasure, misrepresentation, and denial on a regular basis. Attempting to uncover forgotten people and destroyed histories is a headache in itself, but in our growing age of lies, the work sometimes feels more like an existential crisis…The mainstream’s concept of trans history, and trans people at large, plays a notable part in this approach. It creates a simple formula: A trans narrative is only true or untrue if a given reader deems it so. Trans existence becomes dependent on singular whims that swing drastically between extremes.”
—”Uncovering the Forgotten: The Struggle For Trans History, From Nazi Germany to Today” (LITHUB)
“The tricky nature of recovering marginalized history is it’s never done. It shifts, it surprises. There are inevitably parts that remain empty or obscured, and yet sometimes something new pops up despite the tireless efforts of previous historians…We know that trans history is far from over, that it has always been and continues to be a collaborative effort within and beyond the community, people contributing new pieces of information as they find them. We’ll continue to recover, discover, and awaken histories that either were erased…or have been slumbering this whole time, undisturbed, because none of us yet know they’re there.”