The first man to champion law reform

While the LGBTI rights movement in the English speaking world dates back a half a century, the beginning came 100 years earlier.

This week marks the birth and political coming out of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs — the first man to identify himself publicly as a homosexual and call for homosexual rights.

Ulrichs was born to a middle class family in Hanover on August 28, 1825.

At age nine he recorded his first infatuation with another boy, Eduard, who was two years older.

The family moved to Burgdorf the following year after the death of Ulrichs’ father. Eduard signed a goodbye note for him which remained a treasured possession for years to come.

As he grew older, Ulrichs felt drawn to the bodies of the Greek statues he saw in books and to the young soldiers he saw on patrol around town.

At 18 he wrote a poem to a male sweetheart, recording, “How we embraced so snugly, wandering under boughs, as evening’s twilight fell”.

A year later, he was studying among the handsome students at the University of Gottingen. But although the French had decriminalised homosexuality in much of Germany during the Napoleonic Wars, acting on his feelings would have killed his reputation in the small university town.

Two years later Ulrichs transferred to Berlin, where the cover of a big city allowed him to finally act out those sexual longings.

In 1848 he graduated with a law degree and befriended August Tewes, a heterosexual lawyer who would be his closest ally in his campaign for law reform in Germany.

By 1854, Ulrichs had come out to his family. Despite their religiosity, they did not reject him.

Rumours of his sexuality may have also circulated among his colleagues and he abandoned his legal career to write for newspapers, while pursuing private studies to better understand his sexuality.

Ulrichs attempted to have his ideas on sexuality published in the German press but by 1863 it was clear he would have to self-publish to be heard.

He penned two booklets, which soon grew to five, collectively known as Researches on the riddle of love between men.

He would eventually publish 12 volumes over a decade in print runs of thousands before the money dried up.

In these booklets he explained his theory of “the third sex”. Homosexuals, who he termed “Urnings”, were the result of a female consciousness being born in a male body.

He thought such individuals numbered perhaps one in every 500, but later came to realise there were many times more.

Having only limited experiences with other gay men, Ulrichs believed all Urnings were effeminate and naturally paired with heterosexual men.

That the rough trade he slept with could be gay or bisexual and in the closet did not occur to him, although he would later accept that Urnings could love each other.

Ulrichs argued that if Urnings were naturally inclined to be attracted to people of the same sex, then they could not be convicted of “unnatural acts”.

If anyone was to blame, it was the heterosexual who chose to use an Urning for his relief.

Police raided his publisher, confiscating nearly all copies of the first pamphlet — but the second had already been sent.

Published anonymously the booklets, led to a flood of letters from gay men all over Germany.

Ulrichs also began sending booklets to politicians, doctors and lawyers — including judges trying sodomy cases.

In his next booklets, he wrote of lesbians and of heterosexual men who displayed feminine characteristics, envisaging a spectrum of sexuality — an idea that would resonate with American sex researcher Alfred Kinsey nearly a century later.

But Ulrichs was about to ratchet his activism up a notch and enlisted August Tewes in the task.

Together they planned to present a resolution, “That inborn love for persons of the male sex is to be punished under the same conditions under which love of the female sex is punished,” before the Association of
German Jurists, the top legal fraternity in the German Confederation.

The resolution was excluded from the agenda but, undeterred, on August 29, 1867, Ulrichs and Tewes returned to speak.

Although nearly drowned out by the audience, Ulrichs was able to read out his proposal, “[addressing] the revision of the existing material penal code, especially the final repeal of a specific unlawful paragraph … handed down to us from past centuries.

“It is directed at abolishing this paragraph of the penal code which discriminates against an innocent class of people.

“It is also a question of the establishment of a unified law in Germany … Bavaria and Austria both presently condemn prosecution, and their law stands diametrically opposed to the rest of Germany.

“Finally it is a matter … of cutting of the source of abundant suicides.”

In 1868, Ulrichs published a booklet with his full name emblazoned on the cover and was soon so well known that his books were being reviewed in medical journals, and even Karl Marx had heard of him.

Ulrichs’ books were soon being read as far away as Moscow and New York and he could name 20 prominent Germans who had echoed his call for law reform — all of them non-Urnings.

But when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, the smaller states fell in line to become a united German empire under the Prussian Kaiser, Wilhelm I, who extended the notorious Paragraph 175 law, later used to persecute homosexuals by the Nazi regime, across all of Germany.

Ulrichs published his final booklet, Critical Arrows, in 1879, then walked over the Alps into Italy, roaming for three years before settling in the mountain town of Aquila where died 12 years later.

Ulrichs message to the world is best summed up in his booklet, Araxes.

“The Urning, too, is a person. … His sexual orientation is a right established by nature. Legislators have no right to veto nature … no right to torture living creatures who are subject to those drives nature gave them.

“The Urning … has civil rights; and according to these rights, the state has certain duties to fulfil as well.

“Legislators should give up hope … 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.”

In his lifetime Ulrichs inspired Karl Maria Kertbery, the man who would coin the term “homosexual” in 1869, and was a direct inspiration for German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld who, two years after Ulrichs’ death, founded the world’s first homosexual rights organisation, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee.

In 1921 the group held its First Congress for Sexual Reform, leading to the formation of a World League for Sexual Reform that aimed to take the fight for justice global.

By 1932, congresses had been held in England, Denmark, Czechoslovakia and Austria.

However, in 1933 Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took control of Germany and Hirschfeld died in exile in France in 1935.