SAME-SEX ATTRACTION is evident throughout history, but the way we live now—the identities, sensibilities, and cultural accretions that make up the modern homosexual—has a much shorter history. The terminology and parameters of a modern sexual orientation were first articulated in the 1860s. The notion of a fixed and innate sexual identity that was centered around sexual object choice drew on the ideas and activism of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the place we know as Germany. It was also there that the term “homosexual” was coined by Karl Maria Kertbeny. This article will outline the events and ideas that coalesced in Germany over the concluding decades of the 19th century to give us the modern homosexual.
Germany as a sovereign nation did not yet exist in the 1860s. Instead, a patchwork of principalities, kingdoms, bishoprics, and free cities—the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire—was held together in a loose confederation dominated by the regional powers Prussia and Austria. Each state had its own legal system. Some had harsh penalties for sodomy, while others had reformed their legal systems to remove the anti-sodomy law. In a climate of conservative prejudice and inconsistent legal jeopardy, a brisk trade in blackmail made life intolerable for some unlucky same-sex-attracted men.
In his hometown of Burgdorf in the Kingdom of Hanover, former judge and freelance journalist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was poised to challenge the prejudice against same-sex sexuality. Discovery of his sexual assignations with soldiers had already deprived him of his career as a judge, and by the early 1860s he had decided to do something about it. Using the pseudonym Numa Numantius, he published two pamphlets in 1864. Prior to Ulrichs’ writings, sexuality was thought of and described entirely in terms of sexual acts, and there were no words that accurately described individuals attracted to their own sex. Ulrichs addressed that by introducing his own neologisms: “urning” for same-sex-attracted men and “dioning” for men attracted to the opposite sex. The urning identity centered on the orientation of desire (men’s desire for other men). Ulrichs proposed the urning as a third gender, positioned between men and women. The urning’s feminine desire for men was accompanied by a characteristic effeminate personality. Ulrichs described the urning identity as fixed, innate, and natural. If you were born an urning, you would be that way for life, whether or not you ever practiced any sexual act. Ulrichs crafted the urning identity as part of his argument for tolerance and reform, but it would also transform the way his readers saw themselves.
Soon after publishing, Ulrichs received a letter from a Hungarian German journalist, Karl Maria Kertbeny. Born in Vienna and brought up in Pest, Kertbeny had spent short periods as a book seller, an Austrian soldier and spy, a literary publisher, and a wine importer before settling on a career as a literary- and celebrity-focused freelance journalist. Kertbeny’s work meant that he could live where he wanted, and he used the opportunity to move from city to city with stays of only a few months in each. When he wrote to Ulrichs, he was living and writing from Brussels. Kertbeny referenced Ulrichs’ pamphlets in his own writing and included a clipping of the article in his letter. Ulrichs gleefully reported on it, his first citation, in his next pamphlet.
Ulrichs’ readers wrote to him by the hundreds. This positive response led him to write and publish three more pamphlets in 1865 where he used the responses he had received to give greater insight and nuance to the urning identity. For example, he acknowledged the existence of individuals attracted to both sexes, whom he called Uranodioning (bisexual), and he recognized that there was a spectrum of gendered types of urning from the effeminate Weibling through the masculine Mannling. Ulrichs also reproduced some of the correspondence, and these letters reveal that already there were German-speaking same-sex-attracted men who were calling themselves “urning” and adopting Ulrichs’ formulation as a personal sexual identity.
Between 1864 and late 1866, Kertbeny and Ulrichs had a sustained correspondence, which has mostly not survived. It is likely that they used the opportunity to discuss sexuality and activism. Kertbeny was a sexually active same-sex-attracted man but kept that side of his life closely under wraps. Ulrichs may have been one of the few people that he confided in. The epistolary friendship between the two men may have been behind Kertbeny’s decision in 1866 to leave Brussels and move to Hanover. Unfortunately, he could not have chosen a worse time to do so. Simmering tensions between Prussia and Austria erupted into war in June, and Prussia invaded and annexed Hanover. Kertbeny suddenly found himself mired in geopolitical jeopardy, a former Austrian spy traveling with a falsified passport and stranded under Prussian military occupation.
Ulrichs was horrified by the imposition of autocratic Prussian rule and started agitating in public meetings against Prussian occupation. In early 1867, the Prussians clamped down on the Hanoverian protests, and Ulrichs was twice arrested and detained at the fortress in Minden. In the process, the authorities searched his apartment and found his works and correspondence and made sure the press reported that Ulrichs was the one who had published the urning pamphlets as Numa Numantius. Ulrichs was released into Bavarian exile, where he was now free to use his own name in his writings. He used the opportunity to make a protest on the stage of the Odeon Theatre in Munich during the Congress of German Jurists, the world’s first instance of public queer activism. Ulrichs published his account of the experience under his own name in his sixth pamphlet.
While Ulrichs had found new strength from his persecution and incarceration, for Kertbeny the experience was rather different. Events saw to it that they would not meet, but the Prussians had got hold of the letters he had sent to Ulrichs. On top of his passport troubles, this must have presented him with several difficulties. Kertbeny’s diaries record that he was burning all documentation of his friendship with Ulrichs at this time, and he later wrote of the traumatic difficulties he had experienced with the authorities. The whole experience spurred him to move away from Prussian military rule and into the relative anonymity of the Prussian capital, Berlin. It was from there, in 1868, that he wrote the draft of a letter to Ulrichs, the only one that has survived in the archives. This letter included, for the first time, his alternative neologisms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” and articulated a decisive rejection of Ulrichs’ tactics and theories. Kertbeny wrote that Ulrichs’ use of a third gender, a biologically determined fixed and innate sexual identity, would just mean the urning would be pitied like a cripple. He instead said that they should be fighting for the universal right of all men to have the freedom to choose a partner of either sex. In this letter, Kertbeny signaled his own intention to write on male and female homosexuality.
Prussia was making plans to consolidate its rule over the whole of North Germany when a horrific crime in Berlin dominated the headlines. The main suspect, Carl Zastrow, who was almost certainly innocent, called himself an urning and possessed a copy of Ulrichs’ most recent pamphlet—facts that were reproduced in the newspapers. Ulrichs’ ideas were being disseminated in the local and national press on the coattails of a crime of unmitigated depravity. All this coincided with the legislative passage of the new legal code and the decision whether to keep or remove the anti-sodomy provision.
Ulrichs and Kertbeny realized that something must be done to challenge the prevailing narrative. Ulrichs published two pamphlets arguing that the incendiary media coverage made it very difficult for there to be a fair trial and that an urning was no more likely to be an abuser than anyone else. Ulrichs later wrote that these pamphlets had gained him more supporters than any of his other writings. The urning had in the process become a public personage on the fringes of German society and a sexual identity that an increasing number of men were adopting openly.
Kertbeny published two open letters to the interior minister and published them as anonymous pamphlets. This is where he laid out his alternative to Ulrichs’ theory using his own “homosexual” terminology. Kertbeny positioned homosexuality as a taste for certain sexual acts rather than as an innate, biologically determined personal identity. He argued that masculinity was the ideal for all men, whatever their sexual taste, and that all men should have the right to have consensual sex with other adult men. He also pointed out that the private practice of these sexual acts was far more prevalent than the comparatively few cases that reached the courts. The law was not just an infringement of personal liberty; it was also ineffective as a deterrent.
These efforts by both men marked a high point in their simultaneous campaigns for legal reform. Unfortunately, it was not enough. When the final decision came down, the Prussians retained the anti-sodomy law over the whole of northern Germany. Kertbeny was working on a longer manuscript when he suffered a stroke in January 1870. In the same year, Ulrichs published two more pamphlets, and then fell silent. Within months, Prussia extended its rule over the whole of southern Germany. Now the renumbered anti-sodomy law, the infamous paragraph 175, extended to cover all of Imperial Germany. Unable to write, Kertbeny left Berlin and ultimately returned to Hungary in 1875. After publishing his final pamphlet in 1879, Ulrichs set off on foot into Italian exile in 1880.
The two men left Imperial Germany believing that their campaigns had failed. At this point, in 1880, there was a class of men across Germany who called themselves urnings and largely adopted Ulrichs’ identarian ideas as their own. Kertbeny’s ideas about sexuality and his terminology had gained no apparent social foothold. It was only after the two men had left the scene that Ulrichs’ identity and Kertbeny’s terminology were amalgamated, and that process was mediated by science.
The psychiatric study of human sexuality, pioneered in Germany, mostly adopted Ulrichs’ ideas about a biologically determined sexual identity in the 1870s. However, psychiatry rejected his terminology, preferring the awkward formulation “contrary sexual feeling.” In the late 1880s, the Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing took the study of human sexuality onto new levels of detail with his comprehensive encyclopedia of sexual types, Psychopathia Sexualis. Krafft-Ebing was seen as sympathetic, and over the course of the multiple editions of Psychopathia Sexualis, he attracted a following of urning readers. One of these wrote a letter to him in 1887, referencing Kertbeny’s “homosexual” terminology. Krafft-Ebing started using the word in works from 1889 but as a synonym for both “contrary sexual feeling” and “urning.” He used the three terms interchangeably. Over time, the balance shifted incrementally in favor of “homosexual.” It appears that Krafft-Ebing’s same-sex-attracted followers also began to switch away from their use of “urning.” Increasingly, “homosexual” became the word of choice for both the men it described and the scientists who studied them. Ulrichs’ third-sex identity with all its parameters intact had been relabeled with Kertbeny’s terminology.
There is a particular irony in the use of a neologism coined by someone who argued against the idea of a fixed sexual identity to describe just such a concept. Of course, neither Kertbeny nor Ulrichs was alive or in a position to object. By the early decades of the 20th century, the homosexual and its binarized opposite, the heterosexual, emerged as the dominant concepts, hybrids of the two men’s ideas and repurposed for the modern world.
Douglas Pretsell, a historian at Keele University in the UK, is the author of Urning: Queer Identity in the German Nineteenth Century (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2024).
