Ulrichs
Invents Urnings
Germany, 1864. Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs published Vindex: Social and Legal Studies on Man-Manly Love, the
first of twelve book-length pamphlets, to defend "Man-Manly Love". He
offered the pamphlet as proof that man-manly love "is as undeserving of punishment as
the love for women" and that it "cannot legally be punished according to the now
existing laws of Germany."
He argued that men who love men, men he called Urnings, have an inborn
sexual orientation directed toward other men that is as natural as the love of men for
women. How, he pondered, can the state prosecute Urnings for acting on their inborn
nature?
A Theory of Same-Sex Love
In order to bolster his legal arguments, Ulrichs developed a scientific
theory of Urning desire in his second book, Inclusa, which he produced
immediately after Vindex in 1864. Ulrichs based his theory on embryology.
According to the primitive science of his day, a viable human embryo contains both
a male and a female "germ". At twelve weeks, one germ predominates and
suppresses the other. If the male germ prevails, the child is born a male; if the
female germ wins out, the child is a girl. Ulrichs theorized that in hermaphrodites,
both germs are expressed so that the child is born with a combination of male and
female sexual organs. In some embryos, the hermaphroditic process operates, but the
female mind is the only feature of the female germ that is expressed. The result is a
child with a male body and a female mind, an Urning.
Since Urnings have female minds, their sexual desire is naturally directed
at "real men", Dionings. In this early theory, Ulrichs wrote that Urnings
can't be attracted to each other because they find female minds sexually repulsive.
This construction provokes an immediate objection: it is natural for Dionings to
seek females as sexual partners, but isn't it unnatural for them to have sex with Urnings
who are at least physically men? Ulrichs' answer is self-serving and unsatisfying,
but he had to try. He argued that since it is morally acceptable for Dionings to
have sex with physical hermaphrodites, it's certainly OK for them to have sex with Urnings
since Urnings are, after all, hermaphrodites of the mind.
Ulrichs work quickly gained a following among people who saw themselves in
Ulrichs' description of the Urning, and many of his readers wrote him. The new
information they supplied shot holes in his early theory. Some correspondents
complained that though they loved other men, they detected not the least bit of femininity
in their minds. Women wrote to tell Ulrichs that they, too, found themselves
attracted to members of the same sex and still other writers reported that they liked both
women and men as sexual partners, a phenomenon that Ulrichs theory seemed hard-pressed to
address.
Responding to the complaints of masculine Urnings, Ulrichs created a
continuum between the most manly, whom he called Mannlings, and effeminate Urnings whom he
called Weiblings. Urnings who fall between Mannling and Weibling he called
intermediates. Based on his reader's comments, Ulrichs conceded that Urnings can be
attracted to each other, and he theorized that men who fall on the Weibling side of
the scale tend to be attracted to men who fall on the Mannling side, and vise versa.
He addressed the issue of woman-loving women in just the same way, except
that he femininized the words. Female Urnings are Urningin, female Weiblings are
Weiblingin and masculine women are Mannlingin.
One problem for Ulrichs' theory was what we would call bisexuality.
Ulrichs gave the phenomenon a characteristic name - he called bisexuals
Uranodionings - but he never really managed to extend his theory to account for them.
In his 1868 book, Memnon, he admitted that Uranodionings exist, but he
conceded that "I have not been able to come to any definite conclusion about their
nature". Although he went through theoretical contortions to try to accommodate
Uranodionings, he never resolved a basic contradiction: How can a Uranodioning have
a male and a female mind at the same time?
The Uses of Urning Theory
Karl Ulrichs was not a scientist, yet he devoted much of his writing to
his emerging scientific theory of same-sex love. As he tried to account for the
broad range of phenomena his readers told him about, his theory became unwieldy and
even self-contradictory. So why did he spend sixteen years of his life
developing it?
Ulrichs used his scientific theories as a tactic to strengthen his legal
arguments. The war he was fighting was against legal proscriptions, and the blackmail they
occasioned, but Ulrichs felt that the first step was to change the perception of men who
love men. Most people who thought about the men they called "pederasts" believed that sodomites were
debauched. Doctors and laymen alike believed that such men, devoted to the base
pleasures of the flesh, had exhausted the possibilities of sex with girls and women, so
they turned to boys and men for new thrills.
Urning theory posited a new reality, a reality in which a special kind of
person existed with same-sex desires. The Urning was no debauchee, but had a special
"natural" way of being in the world. Thus, Ulrichs exempted Urnings from the
morality that applies to Dionings.
Though Ulrichs never saw the pro-Urning movement he hoped for, his ideas
and example inspired the homosexual emancipation movement in Germany founded by Magnus
Hirschfeld just two years after Ulrichs died.
Sources and Further Reading
Quotations from Ulrichs' work are from Michael Lombardi-Nash's 1994
translation.
Boon, L. J., 1988. "Those Damned Sodomites: Public Images of Sodomy
in the Eighteenth Century Netherlands." in Journal of Homosexuality Vol. 16
Nos. 1&2.
Greenburg, David F. 1988. The Construction of Homosexuality.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kennedy, Hubert, 1988. The Life and Work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs:
Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement. Boston: Alyson.
Kennedy, Hubert, 1990. "Karl Heinrich Ulrichs" in Wayne
Dynes, ed., Encyclopedia of Homosexuality.
Kennedy, Hubert, 1997. "Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: First Theorist of
Homosexuality" in Vernon Rosario, ed., Science and Homosexualities. New
York: Routledge.
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, trans. F. J. Rebman, 1928. Psychopathia
Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic
Study. Brooklyn: Physicians and Surgeons.
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, trans. Michael Lombardi-Nash, 1994. The Riddle
of Man-Manly Love: The Pioneering Work on Male Homosexuality. Buffalo: Prometheus.
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© 1999
Andrew Wikholm
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