Urning: Queer Identity in the German Nineteenth Century

In 1864, the German jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs coined the term “urning” as a word for same-sex attracted men. Over the next few years, first anonymously and then publicly, he campaigned against the public persecution of these men. In response, some of his readers took on the urning terminology for themselves and engaged with Ulrichs to negotiate the finer points of their new identities.

In Urning, Douglas Pretsell writes of same-sex attracted men in German-speaking Europe who used the neo...