Urning

Ulrichs used the word from Vindex, the first pamphlet he published under the pseudonym Numa Numantius in 1864, and explained its origin there. It rests on the speech of Pausanias in Plato’s Symposium, which divides the goddess of love in two: Aphrodite Urania, born motherless of the sky god Uranus alone, stands for love between men, while Aphrodite Dionea, daughter of Zeus and Dione, stands for the love of men and women. From the first name Ulrichs formed “Urning”, from the second “Dioning” for the heterosexual man. He wanted a neutral name in place of words such as “pederast” that reeked of contempt and punishment. He called the love itself urnische Liebe and the phenomenon as a whole “Uranism”. Unlike Plato, whose Uranian love was a manly love, Ulrichs saw the Urning as essentially feminine.

The idea received its most systematic statement in Memnon (1868), whose title page bears the Latin motto “Anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa” (a female soul confined in a male body). In the preface Ulrichs called the Urning “a riddle of nature”: his love drive is a woman’s, and only in body is he a man. He explained this by embryonic development. Every embryo begins as a “primordial hermaphrodite” carrying the germs of both male and female genitals and the germ of a love drive that has as yet no sex. If the formative nature develops the genitals as male but the love drive as female, an Urning results; if it does the reverse, a woman with a male love drive, an “Urningin”. Because the germ of the love drive is already laid in the embryo, Uranism is inborn and cannot be changed.

Drawing on the testimony of the many Urnings who wrote to him, Ulrichs refined his classification. At one end he placed the Mannling, whose bearing, character and manner of desire are all male and only the direction of whose love points to men; at the other the Weibling, male only in body and female in everything else; between them ran a regular series of intermediate stages. Those who loved both men and women he called Uranodionings, of a conjunctive and a disjunctive kind. Men who were not Urnings by nature but turned to men for lack of women or out of habit he set apart as “uranised men”. This continuous series between the two poles was the first challenge to the model of only two sexes.

The political conclusion of Ulrichs’s argument was that what is inborn cannot be a crime. He argued that the statutes against “unnatural fornication” did not fit the Urning at all and demanded their abolition. On 29 August 1867, at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich, he became the first to make that demand in a public speech, but was shouted down before he could finish, and recorded the episode in Gladius furens. In Memnon he summoned the forensic writings of Johann Ludwig Casper, the third edition of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and a letter from Rudolf Virchow as scholarly testimony that the disposition is inborn. In Incubus and Argonauticus (1869) he used the same vocabulary to deal with criminal cases and the rights of Urnings.

Many men who read Ulrichs’s pamphlets began to call themselves Urnings. In English, John Addington Symonds was the first to take up the word as “Uranian”, linking it with Ulrichs’s term, and he and Edward Carpenter used it for a comradely love that would cross class lines and bring about true democracy. Oscar Wilde, too, defended “uranian love” as noble in a letter. English poets who wrote pederastic verse steeped in the classics from the 1870s to the 1930s are known as the Uranian poets.

In 1868 the writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny first used the word “homosexual” (Homosexualität) in a letter to Ulrichs and made it public the following year in anonymous pamphlets against the Prussian sodomy statute. Kertbeny differed from Ulrichs in holding that homosexual men were not by nature effeminate. As “homosexuality” took hold in medical and legal debate, “Urning” gradually became an old-fashioned word. Ulrichs’s idea of intermediate stages between man and woman, however, was taken up by Magnus Hirschfeld and refined into the theory of sexual intermediaries, and through the image of a “third sex” it became the theoretical starting point of the twentieth-century homosexual emancipation movement.