THE FORGOTTEN REAL HEROES OF GAY LIBERATION: Number 1, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs
Without any doubt,Ulrichs is one of the truly great heroes of gay liberation. He was hardly celebrated in his lifetime and forgotten in the years that followed but his contribution to what we call LGBTI rights these days is probably more enormous than any single other person.
Born in 1825 in the kingdom of Hannover , Ulrichs had a wealthy upbringing and, though his father died in his childhood, he went on to become a talented scholar and studied at Göttingen and Berlin before joining Hanoverian state service as lawyer in 1848.
He was aware of his own sexuality from early on and became aware of and probably had contact with the gay subculture in Prussian Berlin when he was a student there. He had a particular liking for young men in uniform and, with Prussia manoevering to conquer and unite all Germany - which was then a succession of individual states, there were soldiers all over the place.
By 1853 he has become assistant judge at the court in Hildesheim. Unlike the UK at the time, in many German states including Hannover it was not actually a crime to have same sex relations though it was not regarded as socially acceptable. Ulrichs by his own account wooed soldiers throughout his period as a judge but at all times tried to be discrete. Since homosexuality was regarded as scandalous and immoral, it was not deemed to be proper conduct for a lawyer in state’s service.
In late 1854 a blackmailer threatened Ulrichs with exposure. Ulrichs was outraged at the threat as homosexuality was not illegal and he may not have believed that blackmailer would follow through. So he refused to give in. Sadly for Ulrichs, the blackmailer did follow through and he was exposed to his colleagues. Realising his position was now untenable he immediately resigned, thus avoiding the disgrace of dismissal.
For several years he worked as a journalist and also as a secretary in the service of the delegate for Liechtenstein in the Frankfurt congress. He dabbled in politics and took a progressive line supporting himself in part with the money he had inherited from his mother. Throughout this time though he was studying and writing about sexuality and was approached by men in the states where it was illegal to be gay to mount defences on their behalves in the courts. These were mostly unsuccessful as the prosecution could always rely on authoritative psychiatric and legal authorities who took a very negative view of what they regarded as “degeneracy” whereas Ulrichs could rely on no authority at all for there were none. Not one single progressive pro-LGBTI legal or psychiatric text in existence.
And so Ulrichs decided it was time he wrote an authoritative legal and anthropological work himself. Before he did so and knowing the risks he ran he wrote in 1862 4 letters to his deeply loving but fiercely Lutheran family “coming out” to them as homosexual and telling them that he was about to start a campaign to change the world’s mind.
In March 1864, under the pseudonym “Numa Numantis” he submitted for publication two pamphlets “Inclusa” and “Vindex” laying out his theory of sexuality. The word homosexuality had not been invented so he took a lead from Platonic and Greek thought and called it “Urningthurm” and gay men “Urnings”. Straight people were “Dionings” and he conceived of urnings initially as men with the inner characteristics of women (though this theory shifted and was refined over time). These terms are in reference to a section of Plato’s Symposium in which two kinds of love are discussed, symbolised by an Aphrodite who is born from a male (Uranos), and an Aphrodite who is born from a female (Dione).
Over the next 6 years he was to publish in total 12 pamphlets, which together became known as the “Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe” (Research into the riddle of man-manly love). The very first authorititative anthropological description and investigation into atypical sexuality that had ever been accomplished with an open mind.
Unlike some of the people who came after him, Ulrichs did not just focus on homosexuality, but also addressed bisexuality, lesbianism, transvestism, intersex and a variety of different types of each. Through a vigorous correspondence with many great authorities around the world he accrued substantial medical, biological, anthropological details which he then fed into his theory. He also hoped that some of these authorities would take up the cause in particular the great Viennese psychiatrist, Richard Freiherr von Krafft- Ebing.
So much of the correspondence he received was positive and supportive that Ulrichs felt that the now united Germany was on the cusp of reform. So on August 28, 1867, Ulrichs took to the stage of at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich in front of all of the assembled legal profession from across the German speaking world and made a call to debate his resolution urging the repeal of anti-homosexual laws. He was shouted down but his victory was in getting to the stage at all.
From then on he published his pamphlets in his own name. And from then on his difficulties began. A lot of powerful forces wanted him gone and proceeded to make things difficult for him. The correspondence with Ebbing revealed that though he had been convinced that the law should change by Ulrichs he nevertheless believed that homosexuality was a disorder that should be medically treated.
A series of prominent court cases and the adoption by all the German states of the Prussian legal code including Paragraph 175 (the antisodomy law) eventually convinced him to leave Germany. He walked from Munich over the Brenner pass into Italy in 1879 and never once came back, dying in obscurity in L’Aquila, Italy in 1895.
Ulrichs was not the first to call for gay liberation (Heinrich Hössli did so 30 years before in a by now lost but by all accounts dreadfully written tome) and nor was his nomenclature adopted (Carl Maria Kertbeny, his contemporary, coined the word “homosexuality” that was popularized by Havelock Ellis) but his works can be seen as the first serious attempt to mount the intellectual and scientific case for gay liberation. He was also a man of extraordinary bravery and when he spoke at the congress of jurists in 1867, 100 years before the Stonewall Riot, he became the world’s first publicly protesting gay activist.
To give you a feel for how ahead of his time Ulrichs was, here is a passage from his pamphlet Araxes of startling similarity to modern gay rights narratives but written 145 years ago!:
“The Urning, too, is a person. He, too, therefore, has inalienable rights. His sexual orientation is a right established by nature. Legislators have no right to veto nature; no right to persecute nature in the course of its work; no right to torture living creatures who are subject to those drives nature gave them.
The Urning is also a citizen. He, too, has civil rights; and according to these rights, the state has certain duties to fulfill as well. The state does not have the right to act on whimsy or for the sheer love of persecution. The state is not authorized, as in the past, to treat Urnings as outside the pale of the law.
To be sure, legislators do have the right to make laws to contain certain expressions of the Uranian drive, just as lawmakers are empowered to legislate the behavior of all citizens. Accordingly, they may prohibit Urnings from:
(a) seduction of male minors;
(b) violation of civil rights (by force, threat, abuse of unconscious people, etc.);
The prohibition of the expression of the sex drive, i.e., between consenting adults in private, lies outside the legal sphere. All grounds for legal prosecution are lacking in this case. Legislators are hindered from doing this by human rights and the principle of the constitutional state. The legislator is hindered by the laws of justice, which forbid applying a double standard. As long as the Urning respects guidelines (a), (b), and © above, the legislator may not prohibit him from following the rightful law of nature to which he is subject.
Within these guidelines Uranian love is in any instance no real crime. All indications of such are lacking. It is not even shameful, decadent or wicked, simply because it is the fulfillment of a law of nature. It is reckoned as one of the many imagined crimes that have defaced Europe’s law books to the shame of civilized people. To criminalize it appears, therefore, to be an injustice officially perpetrated.
Just because Urnings are unfortunate enough to be a small minority, no damage can be done to their inalienable rights and to their civil rights. The law of liberty in the constitutional state also has to consider its minorities.
And no matter what the legislators have done in the past, the law of liberty knows of no limitation.
Legislators should give up hope at the beginning of uprooting the Uranian sexual drive at any time. Even the fiery pyres upon which they burned Urnings in earlier centuries could not accomplish this. Even to gag and tie them up was useless. The battle against nature is a hopeless one. Even the most powerful government, with all the means of coercion it can bring to bear, is too weak against nature. On the other hand, the government is capable of controlling the battle. The reasoning and consciousness of the Urning’s own sense of morality offer the government wholehearted cooperation toward this goal.”
