Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825 to 1895) was a German lawyer, jurist, journalist and sexologist, a pioneer of sexology and of the modern gay rights movement who also championed Living Latin. Born in the village of Westerfeld in the Kingdom of Hanover, he graduated in law and theology at Göttingen in 1846, studied history in Berlin, and from 1849 to 1854 worked as a lawyer in the Hanoverian civil service, joining the bench as an assistant judge at the district court of Hildesheim before resigning in 1854 to avoid dismissal. From 1862 he published pamphlets, collected as Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe, that explained same-sex love as natural and biological and coined terms such as Urning. In 1867 he stood before the Association of German Jurists in Munich and became the first homosexual to speak out publicly in defense of homosexuality, urging reform of the German laws against it. He lived in exile in Italy after 1879, founded the Latin journal Alaudae and died in L'Aquila in 1895.