1825–1895
○ Natural causes
German jurist who devised the “Urning” theory and first publicly demanded the decriminalisation of homosexuality
At the German Jurists’ Congress in Munich in 1867 he rose before 500 members to demand that same-sex acts go unpunished; the hall erupted and his speech was cut short.
A Hanoverian jurist who lost his post and his right to practise over rumours of homosexuality. From 1864 he set out the theory of the “Urning” (in English, “Uranian”), a female soul in a male body, declared himself one, and at the Jurists’ Congress in Munich in 1867 became the first to demand publicly that homosexuality go unpunished. He died in L’Aquila, Italy.
Activities and affiliations
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1864–1879
Scholarship and theory
Related historical events
The Urning theory and the Munich speech of 1867
Born near Aurich in East Frisia, he studied theology and law in Göttingen and history in Berlin. In 1854, as a court assessor in Hildesheim in the Kingdom of Hanover, he was investigated on a rumour that he engaged in “unnatural lust with other men” and left the civil service at once; in 1859 he was barred from practising as a lawyer as well and lived as a journalist and tutor. From 1864 he published twelve volumes of Researches on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love, calling a man with a female soul in a male body an “Urning”, treating this as an inborn disposition rather than a disease, and demanding that it go unpunished. Taken from Aphrodite Urania of Greek myth, the word passed into English as “Uranian” and was used by Victorian advocates such as Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds; he called a homosexual woman an “Urninde” and a heterosexual man a “Dioning”. He declared himself an Urning, and his speech at the Jurists’ Congress in Munich in 1867 is counted as the first public coming-out in Germany; that same year the Prussian authorities seized and destroyed his papers. His idea of intermediate stages between the sexes was later developed by Hirschfeld into the theory of sexual intermediaries, and Krafft-Ebing came to the subject through his writings. In 1883 he moved to L’Aquila in Italy, where he published a Latin magazine until his death in 1895.