The speech that nobody wanted to hear
A lawyer demands an end to the criminal laws against love between men. The hall shouts him down.
On 29 August 1867, a lawyer stood up in Munich and did something no one had dared to do before him. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs called on the Congress of German Jurists to abolish the laws against love between men. His motion was soberly worded. Innate love for persons of the male sex, he demanded, should only be punishable under the same conditions as love for persons of the female sex.
He did not get far. Even during his speech he was interrupted several times, the uproar in the hall grew, and in the end he had to stop. What he met with was ridicule.
And yet that afternoon is now regarded as the first public appearance ever made by a homosexual man. Ulrichs was not speaking about some unfamiliar group, but about himself. He had already come out to his family in 1862, and three years later he called on others to do the same. Only in this way, he wrote, could they gain a foothold in society.
The word homosexuality did not yet exist. Ulrichs coined the term Urning for it and between 1864 and 1879 published twelve writings on what he called love between men. He was also the first to demand recognition by the state and society and to call for marriage to be opened up.
His initiative failed. Four years after Munich, with the founding of the German Empire, Paragraph 175 was included in the criminal code. Disappointed, Ulrichs left his homeland, went to Italy and died there in 1895. Only around a hundred years later did the modern gay movement make public coming-out its creed.