GLR May-June 2025

ESSAY In the Beginning Was the Word D OUGLAS P RETSELL

S AME-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 his tory. 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 ac tivism of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the place we know as Ger many. 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

personality. Ulrichs described the urning identity as fixed, in nate, 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 Hun garian 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

powers Prussia and Austria. Each state had its own legal system. Some had harsh penalties for sodomy, while others had re formed their legal systems to remove the anti-sodomy law. In a climate of conser vative 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 de cided to do something about it. Using the pseudonym Numa Numantius , he pub

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 exam ple, he acknowledged the existence of in dividuals attracted to both sexes, whom hecalled Uranodioning (bisexual), and he recognized that there was a spectrum of gendered types of urning from the effem inate 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

Portrait photo of Karl Maria Kertbeny, ca. 1865.

lished two pamphlets in 1864. Prior to Ulrichs’ writings, sexu ality was thought of and described entirely in terms of sexual acts, and there were no words that accurately described indi viduals attracted to their own sex. Ulrichs addressed that by in troducing 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 de sire for other men). Ulrichs proposed the urning as a third gen der, positioned between men and women. The urning’s feminine desire for men was accompanied by a characteristic effeminate Douglas Pretsell, a historian at Keele University in the UK, is the au thorof Urning: Queer Identity in the German Nineteenth Century (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2024).

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 be hind 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 geopoliti cal jeopardy, a former Austrian spy traveling with a falsified

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