GLR May-June 2025

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 sex ual 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 “homo sexual” 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 infringe ment of personal liberty; it was also ineffective as a deterrent. These efforts by both men marked a high point in their si multaneous 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 Ger many. Kertbeny was working on a longer manuscript when he

suffered a stroke in January 1870. In the same year, Ulrichs pub lished 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. Kert beny’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 Ger many, mostly adopted Ulrichs’ ideas about a biologically deter mined sexual identity in the 1870s. However, psychiatry rejected his terminology, preferring the awkward formulation “contrary sexual feeling.” In the late 1880s, the Austro-German psychia trist Richard von Krafft-Ebing took the study of human sexual ity 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 “homo sexual.” It appears that Krafft-Ebing’s same-sex-attracted fol lowers 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 iden tity 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.

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