Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The First Queer Activist

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

On 29 August 1867, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs stood in front of the Congress of German Jurists in Munich and urged them not to extend sodomy laws across the soon to be unified Germany.He was booed off stage, but this stands as the earliest public queer protest in history. Similarly, his definition of his own identity and sexuality serves as one of the first times this was put into words. So how did Ulrichs define his own sexuality? What is an ‘urning’? And what did Ulrichs believe was behind his attraction to men?In this episode, Kate is introduced to Ulrichs and his early queer identity by Douglas Pretsell.*WARNING There are adult themes in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Twice a week, I get the absolute joy of making a podcast about things that really fascinate me, but something that always holds my attention is the history of sexual identity. How did people in the past understand their sexuality? Today we say, I'm straight, I'm gay, I'm bi, I'm lesbian, whatever it is. But that didn't exist. Not even that long ago, when people didn't have the words to vocalize these things. So how did people in the past understand their sexuality? Well, today, we're looking at a real unsung hero of queer history.

Carl Heinrich Ulrichs, who some people say invented queer identity. Hmm, let's get into it. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect coppence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time.

Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Oh, we're back for yet another episode of Betwixt the Sheets with me, Kate Lister. Carl Heinrich Ulrichs was the first person that we know of at least to put into words the idea that sexuality was part of who you are. It was your identity. He lived in the 19th century when saying such things risked real persecution. He not only said this, but he would stand up, publicly identify himself as a man who fancied other men,

and protested for gay equality in the 19th century. We can't even imagine a world now where these things aren't discussed. But let's look at a time when that was exactly the case, and one man who started the fight for gay rights. I'm joined today by Douglas Pretzel, the man who absolutely knows about Carl Heinrich Ulrichs, who can tell us his story and is here banging the drum for this un-sung hero. to Dr Douglas Pretzel who is joining me from the lands down under.

Hello, how are you? Hello, although I'm from Scotland originally, but I live in Melbourne. See, you get around. What's it like being a Scottish person living in Melbourne? Have you adjusted? I haven't adjusted to the heat, no. But at the moment it's winter, so that's just like our summer. That's so true.

But you know what, we are not here to talk about Scottish people in temperate climes. We are here to talk about an absolutely fascinating, but very much underrepresented, very much forgotten hero of LGBTQ history. We are talking about Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Am I saying that correctly? You are? Absolutely. And there'll be some people listening to it going, oh great, I know where this person is. And there'll be plenty more people going, who? So Carl Heinrich Ulrich was the man who invented the queer identity. He called it Erning when he wrote.

but it's what we call gay or homosexual today. And this was a seismic change in the way society saw itself. Placing an identity around one's sexual orientation with something revolutionary and new. It had never been done before. Specifically, Carl Heinrich Ulrichs was a lawyer from the Kingdom of Hanover in the north of Germany. At that time, Germany didn't exist.

There were lots of little princely states and things. He wrote 12 pamphlets between the years of 1816. in 1879, arguing for the human rights of men who were attracted to other men. Now, at that time, they didn't have a word for that. So Ulrich's invented a word, earning. You have to be very careful when you're describing this period of history. You can't use the word gay or homosexual because they hadn't really been constructed as words or associated with same-sex sexuality.

So the word we use is Ulrich's word, earning. Now Ulrichs lobbied the authorities for the human rights of these men and as such he can be called the first queer activist in history. Wow. And this was in the 1860s? Yes, so he wrote his first pamphlets in 1864. This is impressive for all kinds of reasons. Obviously, gay people, same-sex attraction, all of those things, they have been with us for as long as there have been people to fancy, basically.

We can just do away with that idea right now. So what is very significant about what he is doing? One of the things he did, he was a lawyer. So when he wrote his first few pamphlets, they were written as arguments for law reform. And in order to do that, he gave a specific name, Erning, to people who were same-sex attracted. And he invested in that all sorts of characteristics

about who you loved, who you didn't love, and what kind of behaviour you had. So in effect, he was creating an identity. He didn't see it that way, though. This was just for a strategic thing for producing an argument. But almost as soon as he produced the pamphlets, he received hundreds of letters from men who'd read the pamphlets and recognised themselves in what was written.

And these men started calling themselves earnings. That's, for me, why what he did was so revolutionary, because it changed the society around him. It's huge, really. Like, that's a real watershed moment, isn't it? And because you have written books about this, and you are the person to talk to, What was in his pamphlets? What was he talking about? Like, when you said that he was helping to create an identity, what was he writing about it? What was he saying?

One of the things he did is he put forward a scientific theory where he talked about embryos and specific point in embryo development when the love drive was differentiated. And he said at that particular point in embryo development, it develops in a different way. So that when an earning is born, they have within themselves the love driver for woman. So they would tend to be directed. towards a man. So he used a Latin expression to suggest a woman's soul within a man's body. And I think some people have interpreted that to mean, you know, something like transgender. That's not what he meant at all. He was talking about love drive. And where did the name Earning come from? He was a classical scholar as well as a lawyer and he took an interest in Greek and Latin. And in Plato's Symposium, there's a speech by someone called Paisanias who looked at the fact that there were two legends about the birth of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Either Aphrodite was born of Dione in a heterosexual, earthly relationship,

or she was born in a celestial manner from the testicles of Uranus. So Pausanias said that these two emblems of love represent two kinds of love. The Dionne represented the love between a man and a woman, which was earthly and procreative, and the Uranus represented the love between man and man, which was platonic and celestial. So Orricks was kind of making a joke by saying that the earning was the more celestial, the better.

And this was earning was the German-manified version of what we would say uranium in English. It's a very early gay German joke. It is. One of the rarest subsections. Yeah. It was only really funny to anyone in New Greek, which was a very small number of Germans. There's a rule as if you've got to explain a joke.

It's probably not funny. I see what he's doing. So is this like the early sexologist the 19th century, Havelock Ellis, they started to theorise around same-sex attraction after Carl had done his. And they called it inversion, didn't they? And is that a similar idea to this? Yeah. So from the beginning of his campaign,

one of the things he did with his pamphlets is he sent them to all were well-known doctors in Germany. And after a while, by 1869, a group of these doctors got together and they held a little conference where they discussed Sturricks's ideas. And shortly after that one of them, Carl Vestval, published a paper where he called it contrary sexual feeling or sexual inversion. Those two things he used in the paper. And after that, psychiatrists and then sexologists used sexual inversion and contrary sexual feeling. Effectively, they were talking about the same thing that Ulrichs was, but they just rebadged it, gave it a different name, made it sound scientific. He's the OG. He was the original.

He was the original, yeah. That came from his work. What Orricks did was revolutionary. To that point, no one had thought of an identity where sexuality or sexual orientation was front and centre, what you would call a minoritising identity, so that someone who has this identity is separate from all other people. Up until then, sexuality had been a facet of the personality. You know, you might be a man, you might be a brother, a father, and have these inclinations. What Orricks was doing was creating a separate personality. And that was revolutionary, intensely different from anything that went before.

After Ulrich's did it, you could see it spreading throughout Germany, through Austria, through Switzerland. You see it starting to appear in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in France. And then right at the end of the 1880s, a guy called John Addington Simmons discovered Ulrich's works. And he translated passages of them in a pamphlet that was circulated in London. And what do you see straight after that? People start calling themselves Eurozone. in London. Wow. It's difficult to underestimate just what a seismic shift this was. And I wonder if you could explain a little bit more because it's quite a sort of a complicated thing to get your head around,

is when somebody says that gay identity was sort of created by this guy. That's definitely not saying that same-sex attraction was created. But the idea that it's an identity, the idea that today you'd say, I am gay. And it actually means a lot more than just who you fancy. Yeah. So the thing to understand is the biological part, the sexual attraction, the thing that we have very little control over is probably the same in every culture and a society as it's always been. What Orricks did was he created a social identity. And this was an identity that could be discussed. You could shape your personality around this identity. One of the things Orriggs talked about was that certain gay men were effeminate and other gay men were hypermasculum. And you start seeing a certain amount of

people trying to conform to that. Oh, that's interesting. So it's like he's not created the categories because of there. But there's this big idea in linguistic studies that language doesn't record the world around you, language creates the world around you. And that when you create identities, like the idea of a millennial personality, without that word, would that identity exist? Those people would exist, but what we mean by, etc. So he created the word earning and it changes culture and identity. And I think very specifically, you know, because you see in the 1860s, what I talk about in my book is people went from paper to personhood. So it was described on paper. Wow. And almost immediately people were calling themselves it. And actually owning that

is the most important thing about their identity. It's very difficult to try and get your head around it. But if you're someone that's struggling with same-sex attraction in the 1860s, first of all, we have a real problem going back to language is how do you express that? Because you can't say I'm gay or I'm queer, because those words just didn't exist. So how would you articulate it? And then to read a paper where somebody is saying, me too, this is what you are. That must have been, So I've got a quote here from someone who, about 15 years later, wrote down what the experience was like. And this man said, it was only when I was about 30 years old that I came across the writings of all ricks. And I cannot describe what a relief it was for me to learn that

there were many other men who were just as sexually inclined as I was. And that what I felt sexually was not an aberration, but a special sexual disposition inherent in me by nature. Since I let my earning nature run free, I am happier, healthier and more efficient. That's quite emotional, actually. That's really got me. Of all the work that is done in the fight for gay rights, and just there it is, he gave a name and said, first of all, you're not weird. Second of all, is it's not a moral thing. And thirdly, there are other people like you. That's right, because the name connects you to everyone else who takes that name. The fact that it's natural and not imbued with sinfulness.

or criminality or anything like that, it becomes something you can be proud of. Wow. We know that there was what we'd now call a gay subculture. Those words wouldn't necessarily exist. But was there a sense of identity? I'm thinking about sort of like the Mali houses in the 18th century. I have read accounts of people referring to themselves as Mollies, but that's a pejorative term, isn't it? Yeah, some of them are pejorative terms, but sometimes the pejorative terms are taken on board.

So, for example, in Berlin, at around about the time all was writing, there was a term shvula, which meant moist or damp or... It had a sense of seediness about it. But people called themselves that, and they called each other that. So I suppose what you would call these is subcultural secret names. The difference about the earning was the earning was something public. It was a universal entity that anyone could refer to. So it's not like you need to be in a certain click, in a certain place, at a certain time to understand what that means.

That's right. Fairly soon after Orrigg started writing, there were two very big court cases, one in Bremen and the other one in Berlin, that the word earning was mentioned, and all works were mentioned in newspapers, and it suddenly became the sensation of the land, the thing everyone was talking about. Wow. So this isn't private hushed up conversations. This is very much centre stage. That's right. Front page news in the Berlin newspapers. So I mean, as if this isn't enough that he's done this, and it kind of would be, really, if that's all he did. But he didn't just name it. He didn't just say, this is. what this is, he was actually fighting for what we're now called gay rights. In 1860, he's just

made up the word and now he's going to fight for gay rights as well. So he wrote five pamphlets, and I think he thought, you know, that's it complete now. Shortly after he'd written the five pamphlets, Prussia decided to invade Hanover. And Orricks, being a Hanoverian nationalist, he agitated against the Proshans and was thrown into prison. And as a result of that, he was banished to Bavaria, which was then independent and had no anti-sodomy law. Now, anyone else, might have given up. But what Ulrich did is he managed to get a paper lodged in the Congress of German jurists. This was a big conference taking place in Munich that had all the lawyers from all the German-speaking lands, and they were discussing reformed law packages that would come through

with the United Germany. And Ulrichs put forward a paper against the sodomy law. On the 29th of August 1867, he stood up on a platform, and he started to read his paper. It was shouted down. but it stands as the very first public protest of a queer activist in the world. He went into a conference of lawyers to do this. Hundreds and hundreds of them in the Odeon Theatre in Munich. I've got a quote from Ulrichs about his experience when he did that. And what he said is, until my dying day I will look back with pride

that I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the spectre which from time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because of all their unhappiness. in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt. Wow. The bravery there and the forward-thinkingness. Because what were the states of the laws around homosexuality in Germany at the time? What was he up against, really? The big thing was expected unification. There were two ways it was going to happen. The way that

Orricks wanted was confederated union, much like the European Union is now. But that's what he wanted, that would have democracy and would have progressive laws. The one that he didn't want was a Germany dominated by Prussia and the Prussian monarchy with repressive laws. So when you started, Hanover had no anti-gay law, Barden, Wartonburg, Bavaria, these were all quite big states in the Germanic area. And a number of smaller states as well didn't have any anti-sodomy law. Ulrichs was agitating really from the point to retain the legal rights that he had. in the state that he lived in. Unfortunately, the way it panned out, Prussia invaded everyone.

And when unification came, it was the Prussian anti-sodominy law that was put onto the statute. So it was passed. On that measure, Ulrich's campaign was a failure in that he didn't stop that happening. But he was very close to getting it across the line. He'd managed to persuade enough doctors that when the medical deputation advised the German government, they advised against bringing an anti-sodomy law. And that was really down to his lobbying, that was the case. Unfortunately, the religious lobby also had mobilised at that time, so it didn't get through.

I was quite surprised to hear that there weren't anti-sardomy laws there in the first place. I don't know why I assumed that there would be, but there were on the statutes of Britain since Henry VIII, weren't they? But not in Germany. So you've got to remember there was the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, and large parts of Germany were invaded. So some of those states, Bavaria in particular, in 1813, decided they would reform their law to be more like the French law because the French law had no anti-sodomy provision.

And one by one, other states started doing the same. So Hanover changed its law in the 1840s, Barden and Vortenburg in the 1850s, and so on. We'll be back very shortly with Douglas. Airplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships. Over on the patented podcast by History Hit, we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions and the people who claim these ideas as their own.

We uncover exceptional stories behind everyday objects. We managed to put two men on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. Unpack invention myths. So the prince's widow immediately becomes certain. Thomas Edison stole her husband's invention and her husband disappeared around the same time can only have been eliminated by Thomas Edison, who at the time is arguably the most famous person in the West. And look backwards to understand technologies that are still in progress.

You know, when people turn around to me and say, oh, why would you want to live forever? Life's rubbish. I just think that's a bit sad. I think it's a worthwhile thing to do. And the thing that really makes it worthwhile is the fact that you could make it go on forever. So subscribe to Patented from History Hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. So I'm hugely impressed by our friend Cal here, just the sheer balls of the man to talk to doctors, talk to Lois.

All right, he didn't win, but my God, he went down swinging, didn't he? But one of the areas that you're working on, and I understand that you can have a book coming about this. And I think it's really important is that he wasn't this kind of lone revolutionary, that there were people working with him. So can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so it wasn't a monomaniac. He wasn't sitting on his own, putting out pamphersonary. From the very start, he started receiving letters. And my research has looked at those letters.

Specifically, I've published those letters in translation in a book a couple of years back. But I used that as the basis to start examining the networks that were forming around Ulrichs. And what I started to discover was that there were certain people who, after Ulrichs had left for Italy, he went into exile in 1879, that carried on his work in Germany, in Germany, in Switzerland. Switzerland and in Austria. So one of those, for example, there's an extraordinary man called Jacob Ruralf Forster, who was a Swiss honey seller who happened to be in Germany trying to liquidate a failed business by selling honey. And he was in Frederickshaven when an earning, who was also a railway official, recognised that Jacob probably was as well, and gave him one of Ulrich's books.

Now, he was so bowled over by what he read in the books that he went to Stuttgart to find Allricks. And for a period of months, he studied with him before going back to Zurich, setting up a business that he used as a cover for advancing earning rights in Switzerland. Was it honey selling? Please tell me it was honey selling. No, no. He was a matchmaker, which is so wonderful. That's even better. Yeah, so the business he set up was matchmaking, which is partly about finding husbands and wives for Swiss people, but it was also about signing contracts, so buying companies, buying houses and things like that. But under the cover of that, he used it as a way to advance earning rights. Now, he was discovered, he was thrown into prison, and every time he was released, he would start

his campaign again and be thrown into prison for 10 years, until the authorities eventually gave up. They realised that there wasn't anything they could do to stop him, so he just carried on from there. Like Andy defrained them from the Shawshank. He just kept going and going and going. The thing about it, Forster, was he didn't come from an educated background. He'd actually been in prison before. He was a bit of a white boy, so his period in prison didn't really break him. This sort of queer del boy. This queer del boy honey seller matchmaking Swiss, why don't we learn about him? He sounds amazing. He should be on every history curriculum, shouldn't he? Who else was working with Hal? One of the groups that I find particularly interesting were a group of mostly professional

man who realised that the job hadn't been fully done with psychiatry. Psychiatry had taken on Ulrich's identity, you know, and they were calling for law reform, but they still believed that it was pathological, that it was a disease. So this group of men, they singled out the psychiatrist, Richard von Kraft Ebbing. To Richard von Kraft Ebbing, for anybody who was unsure, was one of the few very early pioneering what are called sexologists. So he composed multiple case studies in his psychopathia sex arlists about people's sexuality and what we'd now call gay sexuality as well. And it was a real groundbreaking work because it was kind of like an encyclopedia of different sexual expressions. And they targeted him with autobiographies that said, hey, look, we're not

sick. You know, we're not pathological. And the remarkable thing is craft having published these letter autobiographies. And in time, by 1901, he wrote that his opinion had come round to the views of the earnings. And he no longer believed it was pathological. So this was a campaign that Ulrichs had started that a group of professional men decided to carry on. And then the final one, which is one I really, really like, actually. There was a Jewish German author called Adolf Glazer. Through a blackmailer, he ended up being named in a massive scandal in Berlin in 1878, which pretty much destroyed his career.

But he decided after this that he would start trying to change the Berlin police. So what he did is he befriended the policeman who had responsibility for both, blackmail and the criminalisation of homosexuality. And he befriended him, gave him all rick's books. He started taking him out on the scene to meet the principal people. And ultimately, it meant the police changed their policy. They no longer used blackmailers. Instead, they chased blackmailers. And they maintained a uniformed presence in all the queer venues around Berlin to keep queer people say, which was an extraordinary turnaround. So the material difference before Adolf Glaser started his lonely campaign behind the scenes, and the end of it was a material change for queer people in Berlin.

But the structure of Imperial Germany was such that the Berlin Police Service was the head police service and other police services started following its lead in their treatment of queer people. So it meant that in 1897 when the very first gay rights organization was formed in Berlin, they could do it knowing they had the police on side, they had psychiatry on side, they had organisers like Forster making sure there were communities forming in all of the cities. And this is why Germany by the early 20th century is really the most advanced country when it comes to queer rights. My goodness. Is this the same with lesbian history as well? What was Carl's impact on lesbian culture, if any?

Really good question. Right at the beginning, Ulrichs wrote his books, and he said, I don't have any experience of this, but I think it's probably the same for women as it is for man. And he invented terminology for the women. But the first thing is, all the books said on the cover, they were about man-manly love. So that would have put off most lesbian Germans from picking up the books to read them in the first.

place. Actually, a more pertinent point was made by a woman called Anna Ruling, who joined with Magnus Hirschfeld in the early 20th century. And she said that in the 19th century, lesbian Germans really saw the need to campaign against the patriarchy for the rights to vote, right to go to university, right to hold a profession, was much more important than to fight for their relationships, especially when there was no law against lesbians in Germany. There was in Austria, but not in Germany. Isn't it, that lesbians just seem to have slipped under the legal radar in a lot of places? The very same year that Ulrichs wrote his books was the first year that an independent feminist group set up in Germany.

I think what was going on in society was the same on both sides. It's just it played out in different ways. So you only really start to see queer male and female people coming together really from about 1900 onwards. Before that, there were separate spheres. Do you think that the fact that he wrote his books, even though he wrote them and said, really not sure if women do it, but that might have actually inspired lesbians to come together and say, well, if you're not going to write it, we'll do it. Maybe, except there's no evidence for it. In Croft-Tubing's works, he did case studies of men and women.

And while most of the men call themselves earnings, it's a good measure of the penetration of Ulrich's ideas, none of the women called themselves women's. Okay, that is interesting. So what happened to Orricks in the end? because he wasn't successful in banning the anti-sodomil laws. But what happened to him after that? In 1879, after he'd written his final book, he walked from Munich over the Alps into Italy. And over a number of years, he tutored and moved around Italy.

There was no anti-sodomy law in Italy, and he could speak Italian. He taught for a while in Naples, and finally he settled in a place called Laquila. And in Aquila, he started publishing a Latin newspaper called Allaudet, which means locks. And it's a very charming newspaper full of little poems and little stories that he's dreamed up.

And it had a riddish it as far away as New Zealand and America. Do we know if he had a lover or a long-term partner? So when he started out, he didn't believe that earnings could have relationships with each other. Oritz had particular liking for soldiers. In Germany at that time, most of the states, because they thought there was instability going to be happening. had standing armies. So even small towns would have garrisons of soldiers who were poorly paid and needed to make a little bit of extra money. So Ulrichs, I think for his whole life,

was someone who had transactional sex with soldiers. I don't think there were any long-term relationships. That's interesting, isn't it? Oh, bless him. And he left because of the sodomy laws, did he? That's why he went to Italy. Well, he never actually said why he left for Italy. It's never been written down. But I think that would have played a part. 1872, the law. became standard across the whole of Germany, and in 1878, they stiffened the law and tried to make it apply very specifically in the area that Orricks was living in. So he may have felt after he published his last book, that things were getting a little bit hot for him there. The other thing that's quite interesting, there's a historian called Jen Stobbler, who uncovered a series of letters

in the chancellery in Berlin. When Orricks was arrested in Hanover, they confiscated all his letters and managed to draw up lists of earnings across Germany, including 500 from Berlin alone. And Ulrich's then spent the next 20 years writing letters to try and recover these letters and his other documents. Every time he wrote one of these letters, this series of memos would go back and forward through the Chancellor, people saying,

where are these letters? And it always ended up with someone called Wagner. So he was the Secretary Wagner, and he would instruct people that the Chancellor himself, Bismarck, had required that these were kept in a secret vocation and that they would be used against enemies of the Imperial Crown if and when it was needed. Wow. And what happened to those letters around today, do we know? So my understanding is when the Berlin Police Department started having their homosexual department,

and it was called the Homosexual Department, they then took these lists and started generating. lists of known homosexuals. Why don't we remember him as much as he should be remembered today, do you think? So I think there's been, among some historians, this feeling that Ulrichs failed in his campaign. And you get this sort of sense that people think he failed, he went away, and really things only got going in 1897 when Magnus Hirschfeld founded his committee. I just don't buy that. I don't buy that someone can have as high profile a campaign as that, but it would just disappear. So I call that the sleeping beauty hypothesis that queer rights flowers, then goes back to sleep for 30 years and then comes out again. I just don't think it's true. I think also in the

early years of historical thinking about sexuality, ideas were very dominated by Foucault and social constructionism. And Foucault very famously said that the birth certificate of homosexuality was Vesfow's paper in 1869. What Foucault didn't realize is that in that paper, there's a massive quote from Ulrichs. So Ficoe identified something real that happened, this transition from church and law to psychiatry over the 19th century. But he didn't recognise the mechanism that was behind that. And I think that meant that certainly in the 70s and 80s, people tended to overlook Ulrichs because he didn't fit in with that kind of history, really. And just my final question to you today, what do you think his legacy has been? What do we owe to Ulrichs today? So I try and think about,

what would the world be like if all of us hadn't existed? Various things wouldn't have happened. They might have happened in a different order and at different times. But I think the really critical thing that he left with us then, that we still have today, is the identity. And the identity is no longer just something in Germany. It is something in the UK. It's something in Australia.

It's something that has passed out over the whole world. That when you have identity, you can start talking about rights. You can start talking about a whole lot of things relating to community. More recently, it's interesting to see in developed countries, there is a hemorrhaging of identity. People see it as less important there because many of those rights have been achieved. I wonder if that was always there at the beginning when the identity was put together. It was a strategic identity to achieve certain goals. Wow.

That's so true. I noticed that even with the first-year students that I teach is their ideas around sexuality are vastly different already from my own, is that they aren't as attached to this idea of I'm gay, I'm straight, I'm by, they just kind of are. You might have a girlfriend, you might have a boyfriend, you might, it is much more fluid. And I suppose, as you rightly said, that's because you have to have the identity to fight for the rights. That's right. And only a generation ago, while we had clause 28, while we had unequal age of consent, it was critically important to have identity. And it was critically important to have a public identity as well. I don't think that's quite as necessary now. It is for transgender people, but less so for gay,

and lesbian people. That's amazing. I hope that Ulrichs would be proud. And if people want to find more about you and your research, and of course, Ulrichs, where can they look you up? Where can they find your work? I have one book and one paper. The book is the correspondence of Carl Hanrich Ulrichs 1846 to 1894,

published by Paul Grave, available in academic libraries. I am pending a contract with a well-known university publisher from my second book, which will be The Age of the Earning, which will hopefully be published in 2023. Well, I hope that they sought themselves out with that because that sounds like an absolute treat and I would love to read that. Thank you so much for talking to me.

Talking to us about this amazing person that should be more widely remembered than he is. Thank you so much, Dr. Douglas Pretzel, you absolute superstar. Thank you. I hope that you've enjoyed joining us and thank you so much to Douglas for sharing your time and your knowledge

and telling us all about Carl. an absolute legend. Please don't forget to like and review wherever you get your podcast. It does really help us. And don't miss the great stuff that's now available in our back catalogue. There's always more to come.

Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.