We do not know the names of most of the men who wrote to Ulrichs but some of his correspondents were identifiable and their life histories illuminate the emerging urning society in the three final decades of the nineteenth century.

The first of these is the journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny who was an early correspondent and rival to Ulrichs. It was Kertbeny who first used the word ‘homosexual’ in a letter to Ulrichs in 1868, although it was several decades before that word replaced ‘urning’.

Two trials, the Feldtmann trial in Bremen in 1867 and the Zastrow trial in 1869, saw the two accused publicly declare they were urnings and, though they lost their cases, the urning was discussed widely in the press and entered the public domain.

After that, some urnings did start to embark on more public forms of activism. Foremost among these was the Swiss activist Jakob Rudolf Forster who met Ulrichs in the late 1870s and would go on to campaign in Zurich for urning rights. Forster was repeatedly thrown into prison and it was the threat of that or blackmail that meant some maintained their activism behind a veil of anonymity.

Some urnings decided to continue the work that Ulrichs had started in lobbying psychiatrists and sent their anonymous sexual autobiographies to the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft Ebing.

Others preferred to work in the background to improve the lot of their fellow urnings, such as Adolf Glaser who worked behind the scenes in the Berlin police department to redirect police efforts towards tackling blackmail.

Up to the late 1880s, the urning had been mainly a character in the societies of German speaking countries and their neighbours. In 1889, the English writer John Addington Symonds discovered the works of Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing and began writing about them in English. As a result, the ‘uranian’ became a personnage in England briefly before the Wilde trial.