be, not to prepubescent youths.37 Ulrichs’s claim that the feminine sexual desire of an urning is natural and innate allows him to argue the basic injustice of suppressing an integral part of one’s desire: “Lifelong suppression of the erotic drive cannot be demanded of anyone.”38 At the same time, he approvingly cites a newspaper editorial that supported his arguments on the sodomy laws with the liberal observation that “one must have the right to control one’s own body.”39 From these rights arguments, he draws a series of practical conclusions: an accused urning deserves to be protected from the irrational rage of the mob and the police should not be keeping lists of otherwise innocent urnings.40 He is more than willing to work with allies in the Catholic Church, such as the priest in Mainz who agrees that urning love as described by Ulrichs cannot be a sin.41 His belief in the possibilities of a religious acceptance of urnings goes so far that he enthusiastically reports on two urnings in Moscow, both Protestants, who had married each other: “They had thereby created on their own a sanctioning form for the urning love bond, which urnings miss so deeply.”42 Ulrichs concludes Argonauticus with a list of additional activities that he proposes: he wants to establish a legal defense fund for urnings in legal trouble, he hopes to organize a boycott of Germany should the North German Confederation recriminalize sodomy, and he would like to further the development of urning community by introducing urnings to their “circles” from Hamburg to Munich.43
Ulrichs was consistently involved with leftist politics and civic affairs. He tried to get a job working for the Frankfurt National Assembly, which was founded after the 1848 revolution. In 1867, he spent January 25 to March 20 and April 24 to July 5 in prison, “because of anti-Prussian agitation in the press and in the societies.”44 Ulrichs spent years attempting to receive legal redress for his incarceration in 1867; he also wanted back the books and papers, especially those on uranism (love between urnings), that were confiscated during this time. He was apparently in the small town of Burgdorf studying for his law exams when the revolutionary activities of 1848 broke out in Berlin, but his subsequent political battles with Prussia and the forces of reaction make clear his progressive sympathies.45 He even sent one of his 1869 writings, Incubus, to Karl Marx, who passed it on to Friedrich Engels. Engels responded to Marx on June 22, 1869: “That’s a very curious ‘urning’ whom you have sent me. Those are extremely unnatural revelations. The pederasts are beginning to count themselves and they’re finding that they are a power in the state. Only organization is lacking, but according to this it seems already to exist secretly.” Engels fears that the new slogan will be guerre aux cons, paix aux trous-de-cul (French in the original: “war on the cunts, peace to the assholes”) and remarks that “it’s lucky that we are personally too old to have to fear that with the victory of this party we would have to pay bodily tribute to the winners.” He concludes that such piggishness, such a Schweinerei, is only possible in Germany.46 Engels’s references to “pederasts” and his fears of rapacious urnings exacting tribute show that he doesn’t understand Ulrichs’s argument, for the feminine urning is supposed to be quite a different species from the pederast, and delicate and nonviolent at that. Nonetheless, Ulrichs’s effort to reach out to Marx shows his interest in cultivating support from leftist political thinkers. Marx’s willingness to send the publication on to Engels suggests he does not dismiss Ulrichs’s radical sexual proposals out of hand, even if Engels’s response is curt and derisive.
Ulrichs sets down in his writings a vision of same-sex desire that resonates powerfully throughout the following century. While his assumptions on gender are traditional, his notion that an innate, natural, fixed and biologically provable sexual desire can ground a claim to human and civil rights that ensures equal protection under the law and in the eyes of religion still remains a basic structure for many apologists for homosexuality. His calls for the creation of a stronger sense of community among urnings and the establishment of a legal defense fund for urnings remain relevant today. Arguing first for the elimination of sodomy laws and then for the right of urnings to marry, his practical concerns resemble those of twenty-first-century Western gay rights organizations.47
Karl Maria Kertbeny and the Homosexual
Karl Maria Kertbeny (1824–1882) was born a Benkert, into a German-Hungarian family in the Habsburg Empire. An enthusiastic proponent of Hungarian nationalism, he changed his name to the Hungarian-sounding Kertbeny and devoted himself to promoting the Hungarian cause, including translating and championing Hungarian literature throughout Europe.48 Habsburg police reports give an instructive summary of his life: “Benkert, Karl Maria, also known as Kertbent and Remkhazy, writer from Pest, was a partisan for democracy and the Hungarian insurrection of 1848.”49 He wrote biographies of such Hungarian nationalist poets as Sandor Petöfi (1823–1849) and published anthologies of Hungarian poetry. Although he claimed to have medical training (for which reason some historians of sexuality have listed him as one of the physicians who helped medicalize homosexuality), he did not practice medicine and instead supported himself as a man of letters. This was not a lucrative career path, for which reason Kertbeny’s usual pattern can be summed up as Herzer does: Kertbeny would (1) arrive in a European city, (2) make contact with local literary and leftist political figures, (3) borrow money, and (4) get out of town when the creditors showed up.50
Despite this pattern, Kertbeny enjoyed relative stability from 1868 to 1874, when he lived in Berlin, in part to encourage the German intelligentsia to support the Hungarian cause. There he became embroiled in the discussions concerning the fate of the sodomy laws in the North German Confederation, publishing two lengthy pamphlets on the subject, addressed to Leonhardt, the Prussian Minister of Justice, encouraging him to decriminalize sodomy. It is Kertbeny’s lasting contribution to the history of sexuality that he is the first person in any language known to have combined the Greek prefix homo (same) with the Latin noun sexus (sex) to create a word describing someone who is sexually attracted to members of his own sex. He refers, for instance, to “the natural riddle of homosexuality [Homosexualität].”51 At other times, he uses the term Homosexualismus (homosexualism), as well as the adjective homosexual and the noun, der Homosexuale.
Given that Kertbeny supported himself primarily as a translator and man of letters, his linguistic coinage perhaps deserves more respect than it usually receives.52 Although the term is often dismissed as an ugly linguistic hybrid, it joins a successful set of global vocabulary that similarly combines Greek and Latin roots to describe modern phenomena: the Greek auto (self) and Latin mobilis (to move) form “automobile” and Greek tele (far) and Latin visio (to see) stand behind “television.” Men who were products of a nineteenth-century central European education based on the classical tradition that consisted of a variety of Greco-Roman elements were in a strong position to name technologies that changed the course of history. Kertbeny was not working on his own in developing his terminology, as he and Ulrichs had met in the early 1860s and considered each other “comrades.”53 In fact, prior to its use in public in 1869, the term “homosexual” appears in an 1868 letter from Kertbeny to Ulrichs, although Ulrichs never adopted the word.
In print, Kertbeny writes, “in addition to the normal sexual drive of all of humanity and the animal kingdom, nature seems in her sovereign whimsy to have given a homosexual drive [den homosexualen Trieb] at birth to certain male and female individuals, to have bequeathed upon them a sexual fixedness, which makes the affected physically as well as psychologically unable, even with the best of intentions, to achieve a normal sexual erection.” Kertbeny continues by saying that this condition “exposed them to a direct horror of the opposite sex and made it therefore impossible for those affected by this passion to escape the impressions that particular individuals of the same sex have on them.”54 In this passage, a number of characteristics of Kertbeny’s “homosexual” emerge: first, homosexuals can be of either sex—there isn’t a conceptual distinction between male sodomites and female tribades, to use an earlier vocabulary. Additionally, homosexuals have sexual “drives.” The drive transcends the barrier between mind and body, affecting both equally; it is, as Judith Butler
