By the time the lawyer and writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs took the podium at a meeting of the Association of German Jurists in 1867, rumors about his same-sex love affairs — and the subsequent threat of arrest and prosecution — had already cost him his legal career and forced him to flee his homeland.
Standing in Munich before more than 500 lawyers, officials and academics — many of whom jeered as he spoke — Ulrichs argued for the repeal of sodomy laws that criminalized sex between men in several of the German-speaking kingdoms and duchies that existed in the years before the creation of a unified German state.
Ulrichs described a “class of persons” who faced persecution simply because “nature has planted in them a sexual nature that is opposite of that which is usual."
Same-sex attraction was a deeply taboo topic at the time; the word “homosexuality” would not even exist for another two years, when it was coined by the Austro-Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny. So the ideas in Ulrichs’s speech — that such attraction was innate, and that those who experienced it should be treated the same as anyone else — were revolutionary.
“I think it is reasonable to describe him as the first gay person to publicly out himself,” historian Robert Beachy said in an interview. “There is nothing comparable in the historical record. There is just nothing else like this out there.”
His speech was also deeply unwelcome at the 1867 meeting, where the audience erupted in shouts of “Stop!” and “Crucify!” that ultimately forced Ulrichs off the stage.
Ulrichs helped forge the concepts of gay people as a distinct group and of sexual identity as an innate human characteristic in a series of pamphlets he wrote from 1864 to 1879 — at first under a pseudonym, but under his own name after he gave his speech at the 1867 conference.
“By publishing these writings I have initiated a scientific discussion based on facts,” he wrote in a letter published in 1864 in Deutsche Allgemeine, a pan-German newspaper.
“Until now the treatment of the subject has been biased, not to mention contemptuous,” he added. “My writings are the voice of a socially oppressed minority that now claims its rights to be heard.” His work was widely read by sex researchers.
Ulrichs was born on Aug. 28, 1825, in Aurich, in the kingdom of Hanover in northwestern Germany, to an upper-middle-class family that included several Lutheran pastors. He studied Latin and Greek before beginning his legal studies at the University of Göttingen.
He secured prestigious positions in the Hanoverian Civil Service, but rumors about his same-sex relationships — and laws against public indecency — led him to resign his post as an assistant judge in 1854. He became a journalist for Allgemeine Zeitung, a pan-German newspaper published in Bavaria.
In the years before the invention of the German word “homosexualität,” a term that eventually found its way into English and other languages, Ulrichs’s pamphlets provided readers with a morally neutral vocabulary to describe themselves.
He coined the words “urnings” to refer to people we now call gay men, “urinden” to refer to people we now call lesbians, “dionings” for people we now call heterosexuals, and “uranodionism” for what is today called bisexuality.
Those terms were inspired by his study of the classics, in particular the story of Uranus, the god of the heavens, who was portrayed as both father and mother to the goddess Aphrodite in Plato’s Symposium.
By 1872, the Prussian sodomy law, also known as Paragraph 175, had been adopted by all the states of the new German Empire. It was a crushing blow for Ulrichs.
He published one final pamphlet in 1879 and then crossed the Alps by foot and settled in Italy, where his public advocacy for urnings ceased. He spent his remaining years editing a small Latin-language literary journal. He died on July 14, 1895. He was 69.
Ulrichs was celebrated by early-20th-century gay activists like Magnus Hirschfeld, but after the rise of Nazism his contributions to history were forgotten for decades. Today there are streets named for him in Berlin, Munich, Hanover and other parts of Germany.
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