He is regarded as a pioneer of the movement for the equal rights of homosexual and genderqueer people. Already in the mid-19th century he called for the decriminalization of same-sex love. Although streets and squares across Germany are named after him, many are unaware how important he is to modern history. On August 28, 2025, the sexual researcher Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who was born in Aurich, would have turned 200 years old.
The man who actually worked as a jurist and journalist engaged with the question of how and whether men can love each other like no one before him, scientifically. That same-sex love has existed since the dawn of humanity is widely known. However, public discourse on it had for centuries been suppressed.
His “Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe” are an early milestone in the nascent field of sexology. In the twelve-part work, he describes the “Uranismus” (the word “homosexual” was coined only later) as a completely normal activity and not a disease, as the prevailing view at the time held.
In the same logic, he distinguished, influenced by deities from Greek mythology, “Dioninge” and “Urninge” – heterosexual and homosexual individuals. For homosexual women he used the term “Urninde.” He himself came out as an Urning and drew attention to the repression that homosexual men, in particular, suffered from the Prussian state apparatus, but also from society at large.
Ulrichs Rede vor dem Juristentag 1867 gilt als erstes Coming-out
When, in a speech before the German Juristentag on August 29, 1867, he openly advocated for the marriage of men, he was ridiculed and chased from the podium. He described the hatred he faced as a “thousand-year-old, many-thousand-headed Hydra” that sprayed “poison and foam” and had already driven many to suicide.
He did not let himself be deterred by this. Nor by the increasing surveillance by Prussian and later Reich German authorities. Looking back on his speech, which to this day is regarded as the first coming-out, he writes confidently: “Yes, I am proud that I found the strength to deliver the Hydra of public contempt its first lance thrust and set the course,” he wrote.
Ulrichs is also regarded as a pioneer of the so-called Zwischenstufentheorie. This theory breaks the binary gender model and asserts that there are more than just two genders. It was later elaborated and popularized by the sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld.
Historian Norman Domeier describes Ulrichs as a very courageous person. After all, at the beginning of the 19th century, individuals were occasionally burned at the stake for homosexual acts. At the same time, he was not, however, an activist as one might imagine today. It is only in the last roughly 30 years that greater attention has been paid to his work, says Domeier. So far there has been a lack of a deep scholarly examination of Ulrichs’ life and work.
