Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was a 19th-century German jurist and writer who publicly advocated for men attracted to men and opposed laws criminalizing same-sex relations.

Hanover: A historic German kingdom and city-state in northwestern Germany, incorporated into Prussia in 1866. Ulrichs was born in the Kingdom of Hanover and worked within its legal institutions.
Urning: Ulrichs’s term for a man whose sexual and emotional attraction was directed toward men. He used this identity category to argue that same-sex desire was an innate disposition.
Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe: A series of pamphlets by Ulrichs, published from 1864, examining love between men and arguing for its naturalness. The series supplied his sustained case against criminalizing male same-sex desire.
Magnus Hirschfeld: A German physician and sex researcher who founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897. Hirschfeld later cited Ulrichs as a forerunner of organized gay-rights advocacy.
German Confederation: A loose association of German states that existed from 1815 to 1866. Ulrichs first published his arguments while German states maintained separate criminal laws.
Dioning: Ulrichs’s term for a man attracted to women, contrasted with his category of the Urning. The paired terms show how he organized sexual desire into distinct types.
1867 German Jurists' Conference: A meeting of German legal professionals held in Munich in 1867. Ulrichs publicly urged the conference to oppose criminal penalties for consensual relations between men.
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee: A German organization founded in 1897 to campaign against the criminalization of homosexuality. Its campaign against Paragraph 175 continued the cause Ulrichs had advanced publicly.
Prussian Criminal Code: The body of criminal law enacted by Prussia, including provisions against sexual acts between men. Prussia’s criminal law became central to Ulrichs’s opposition after Hanover’s annexation.
Third gender: A category of gender outside or beyond the binary of man and woman in particular cultural or theoretical systems. Ulrichs described Urnings through a theory of feminine traits in male bodies.

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