Sexuality Summer School/ Laws of Love + Sanctus + discussion (18)

The Sexuality Summer School returns to HOME for its 2026 edition, and another evening of fascinating film and discussion. The theme for the 2026 edition is ‘On the Biological’ - an exploration of contemporary political and intellectual debates about how ‘the biological’ shapes current and historical understandings of sex, gender, race and sexuality.

Laws of Love is a completely unique piece of silent cinema history: a performance lecture by legendary gay campaigner Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld that puts the work of the Institute for Sexology on screen, combining early nature documentary (birds, bees and… hermaphroditic snails!) with campaigning information about LGBTIQ+ community, culminating in an edited version of the first ever gay drama, Different From the Others, written by Hirschfeld and banned under Weimar-era censorship. Moving from the biological to suggest what Donna Haraway would later call natureculture, Laws of Love is not just an argument for tolerance or inclusion, but a dazzling document of being here, queer and integral throughout the natural world and human history.

Once thought lost forever to censorship and Nazi destruction, the film has been sensitively restored and scored by the Munich Film Museum, from a recently-discovered rare print.

Laws of Love screens with Sanctus, Barbara Hammer’s playful and poignant investigation of another queer pioneer of both narrative cinema and biomedical imaging, Dr James Sibley Watson, co-director of Lot in Sodom, regarded as one of the first gay (or at least super-camp) Hollywood films – but here explored through his X-Ray experiments, reframed by Hammer as part of her career-long queer look at the body and how it’s made (in)visible.