August 28th, 1825– Karl Ulrichs:
“The Urning is a person. He, too, therefore, has inalienable rights. His sexual orientation is a right established by nature. Legislators have no right to veto nature; no right to persecute nature in the course of its work; no right to torture living creatures who are subject to those drives nature gave them.”
Did you kids know that the Broadway Musical & the term “homosexuality” were invented almost simultaneously? Pure coincidence?
In the middle of the 19th century, beginning in Paris with Jacques Offenbach & in Vienna with Johann Strauss, the operetta was waltzing & can-canned its way across Europe. In the very same era, America stumbled upon a Musical Theatre style of its own. The Black Crook (1866) barely had a plot, loads of crappy songs & scads of spectacle. There had been American musicals before this show, but this was the first to be a great big SRO hit. It spawned hundreds more musical spectaculars with fantasy themes, known as “extravaganzas”. American audiences made these early musicals a major player of what was then referred to as “The Show Business.” The Musical Theatre Queen was born.
Meanwhile back in Europe, a lawyer, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs seemed restless, often moonlighting as a freelance writer. As a closet gay guy, he risked financial ruin & jail time in engaging in a relationship with a soldier or any other man.
When he was 34 years old, Ulrichs lost his government job because he was gay. He began publishing pamphlets explaining & defending the love between men. When he had just turned 42 years old, he addressed the German Congress, coming out of the closet publicly & demanding they repeal the anti-gay laws. He was shouted down before he could finish his speech. His books were banned.
Ulrichs’s goal was to free gay people like from the legal, religious, & social condemnation of homosexual acts as unnatural. He insisted that people like him were born this way. For this, he invented new terminology that would refer to the nature of the individual, & not to the acts performed. He used the terrific term “Uranian” (the term homosexual was not coined until 1869 by his Ulrich’s associate Karl-Maria Kertbeny). I wish we could go back to Uranian, it has a special ring to it. He continued writing about homosexuality for the rest of his life.
100 years before Stonewall, Ulrichs book Araxes stated the modern arguments in favor of Gay Rights. In 1879, he published Research On The Riddle Of Man Love. The film rights were snapped up by Channing Tatum’s production company. In bad health & sensing he had done everything he could for his cause in Germany, Ulrichs traveled to Italy where he settled in L’Aquila, where his health improved. I know that I always feel better in Italy.
Ulrichs continued to write prolifically & published his works (in German & Latin) using his own money. In 1895, he received an honorary diploma from the University Of Naples, shortly after he died alone & broke in L’Aquila, where he had lived as the guest of a local landowner, Marquis Niccolò Persichetti, who gave this eulogy at his funeral:
“With your loss, oh Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the fame of your works & your virtue will not likewise disappear… but rather, as long as intelligence, virtue, learning, insight, poetry & science are cultivated on this earth & survive the weakness of our bodies, as long as the noble prominence of genius & knowledge are rewarded, we & those who come after us will shed tears & scatter flowers on your venerated grave.”
Ignored in the USA, & mostly forgotten by nearly everyone else for decades, Ulrichs is now a cult figure in Europe. There are streets named for him in Munich, Bremen & Hanover. His birthday is marked each year by with a street party & poetry reading at Karl-Heinrich-Ulrichs-Platz in Munich. Every year, The International Lesbian & Gay Law Association gives the Karl Heinrich Ulrichs Award for distinguished contributions to the advancement of LGBTQ equality. The city of L’Aquila has restored his grave, the headstone reads: Exile & Pauper, & hosts an annual pilgrimage to the cemetery.
Ulrichs was the first person I know of that urged others to come out of the closet (first to family, next publicly); insist that homosexuality was not sin, disease, or crime; demand equal rights for everyone including women; abolish anti-gay laws, insist that churches accept homos; address suicide, murder, police harassment, blackmail, military, family values, hate crimes, privacy issues, economics, democracy, & even marriage.
My research finds that Ulrichs was quite delighted & amused by singing, dancing felines. I like to think that this most important of gay rights pioneers would have named Cats, now & forever, as his favorite Broadway Musical.
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