Vita Sexualis: Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science by Ralph M. Leck (review)

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) was, in a sense, “the first homosexual,” Ralph M. Leck writes in his new intellectual history of Ulrichs, Vita Sexualis: Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science (x). Why, then, is Ulrichs largely forgotten today beyond academic circles?

More than a century before the Stonewall Riots, Ulrichs, a Hanoverian lawyer, published a series of tracts in which he advocated for the rights of what he called “Urnings.” He even went so far as to publically identify himself as an Urning and to call for same-sex marriage (xvi, 121). Ulrichs’s interlocutors included Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Karl Kertbeny, the Hungarian journalist who, Leck writes, invented the terms “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” (58). Today, however, few beyond academic circles know Ulrichs, though Leck’s book joins a growing body of scholarship on Ulrichs and his era of sexual politics. Surely the neglect of Ulrichs—not to mention the erasure of Heinrich Hössli, who published decades before him—is due, at least in part, to the profound dissimilarities between these nineteenth-century Central European bourgeois and what many people today understand gay politics to be.

Vita Sexualis contends that Ulrichs is not only unjustly forgotten, but misunderstood. He was more than a hero of gay history, Leck writes. He was the first in a series of “social theorists” (ix), most of them male, who sparked a transformation of the basic assumptions that made up the very fabric of European societies. Ulrichs did much to usher in modern sexuality as we know it. It was Ulrichs who brought us the ideas that sexual desire is a universal feature of human subjectivity, that there is nothing uniquely natural about heterosexual monogamy as opposed to other forms of sexual expression, and that spectrums, not binaries, best describe sexual desires and gender expressions in populations of humans. These ideas challenged, and ultimately shattered, Victorian (or, for Ulrichs, Prussian) repression. Ulrichs was “the inventor of a new science of sexual heterogeneity” (xi). An additional theme for Leck is that many of the male (and a few female) authors in this school of thought were themselves homosexual or bisexual. Their “sexual orientation,” he writes, was possibly a key cause of their “sexual modernism” (129). These thinkers, led by Ulrichs, fought “bigotry, ignorance, and compulsory heterosexuality” (224), and helped to create “a politics of inclusion and equal rights” manifested in the recent legalization of gay marriage in some countries (230).

Vita Sexualis is an intellectual history of Ulrichs and other thinkers, building a sweeping argument that includes authors who at first glance may seem to have little to do with Ulrichs, such as Alfred Kinsey and the Marquis de Sade. It offers much fascinating detail. For example, Leck examines Ulrichs’s falling out with Kertbeny, who criticized Ulrichs’s conviction that once people realized same-sex desire was natural, equality would follow, holding instead that “the argument about innate nature is a dangerous two-sided blade” (84). Despite Kertbeny, the “moral appeal to the authority of nature” went on to serve as the “philosophical bedrock of sexual modernism from Ulrichs to Kinsey” (97). In addition to Ulrichs, Leck looks in detail at the thought of Hössli, Iwan Bloch, Kertbeny, Eduard Reich, John Addington Symonds, and others. His reading of Ulrichs is admittedly a reparative one (220), seeking to show us what about him anticipated and even helped to create the early twenty-first century. A growing body of work on German homosexual emancipation is asking whether its relative conservatism, rather than its progressivism, is what defines it: Leck emphasizes progressivism.

As one among several new works that assert the significance of nineteenth-century thinkers, including Ulrichs, and seek to situate them in the wider arc of history, this book will excite many readers. Some, however, may at times feel unease. Vita Sexaulis displays weaknesses of its genre: the identification of the...