The man who invented the word "homosexual"

On 28 February 1824, a boy was born in Vienna whose name hardly anyone knows today. But millions of people use a word he invented every day: homosexual.

Karl Maria Benkert, as he was first called, grew up in Pest, became a bookseller and wanted to become a writer at all costs. At the end of the 1840s, he changed his name to the more Hungarian-sounding Kertbeny. He travelled restlessly through Europe, met Heinrich Heine and Hans Christian Andersen and translated the Hungarian national poet Sándor Petőfi into German. With his pushy manner, however, he made more enemies than friends. Karl Marx judged him "a self-important, muddled, importunate literary loafer".

He left his real mark on history in 1868. In a letter to the jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, now considered one of the first openly gay activists, Kertbeny wrote down the words "homosexual" and "heterosexual" for the first time. They were meant as neutral terms. A year later came two anonymous pamphlets. In them he called for the abolition of Prussian Paragraph 143, which made sex between men a crime. The state, he argued, had no business interfering in the private lives of its citizens.

He was hardly heard. Shortly afterwards, the criminal provision became Paragraph 175 of the German Empire's criminal code. And his coinage only caught on around the turn of the century, when doctors and sexologists took it up, now, however, with the connotation of an illness.

Kertbeny himself always described himself as "normalsexual". His notebooks tell a different story; they record encounters with young men. He died in Budapest in 1882, half-paralysed after two strokes. He did not live to see the triumph of his word.