The first urning

The first man to call himself an urning was the Hanoverian jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Ulrichs was the inventor of the word urning in 1864.

Ulrichs was born in 1825 in Westerfeld near Aurich in the far north west of the Kingdom of Hanover. He trained as a lawyer and entered state service but had to resign when his sexuality became known. Several years later when he was working as a journalist and parliamentary secretary in Frankfurt in 1864, he decided to publish two pamphlets under the pseudonym ‘Numa Numantius’ making the legal case for greater tolerance of same sex attracted men.

Ulrichs wrote his first two pamphlets in order to persuade lawyers and doctors on the need for reform. However, the letters he received from his readers showed that it was same sex attracted men who most enthusiastically responded to his ideas and his new terminology.

Ulrichs went on to publish ten more pamphlets over the next two decades. Over this period, Hanover was invaded by Prussia and Ulrichs was thrown into prison at Minden. The press revealed that Ulrichs was the man who had published pamphlets as Numa Numantius and from that time on he published using his own name.

Released into exile in Bavaria, Ulrichs attended the Congress of German Jurists (Deutsche Juristentag) in Munich in 1867 and on the final day, 29th August, in the Odeon Theatre, he mounted the first public protest by a same sex attracted man.

His writings were hugely influential on contemporary psychiatrists investigating sexuality and also upon a whole generation of same sex attracted men who adopted his terminology and its description as a personal identity. However, his campaigns around the legal status of same sexuality were less successful. When the German Kaiserreich emerged as a nation state in 1872, its legal code included Paragraph 175 – a carbon copy of the Prussian antisodomy law.

Ulrichs lingered in Germany publishing his final pamphlets until 1880 when he walked over the Alps into Italian exile. He settled in Aquila where he was visited by the English writer John Addington Symonds and published a Latin newspaper, Alaudae, until his death in 1895.