The “grandfather” of the world “gay rights” movement was a homosexual German lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895).  At the age of 14, Ulrichs was seduced by his riding instructor, a homosexual man about 30 years old (Kennedy in Pascal:15).  Observers familiar with the apparently high correlation between childhood sexual molestation and adult homosexuality might conclude that this youthful experience caused Ulrichs to become a homosexual.  Ulrichs himself, however, arrived at a hereditary rather than an environmental explanation for his condition.  In the 1860s Ulrichs began advancing a theory that defined homosexuals as a third sex.  He proposed that male homosexuality could be attributed to a psycho-spiritual mix-up in which a man’s body came to be inhabited by a woman’s soul (and vice-versa for females). He called members of this third sex “Urnings” (male) and “Dailings” (female).  Since homosexuality was an inborn condition, he reasoned, it should not be criminalized.
    Although Ulrichs was to be unsuccessful in changing the laws against homosexuality, his efforts did encourage widespread political activism. One early follower, a German-Hungarian writer named Benkert (under the pseudonym, Karoly Maria Kertbeny), coined the term “homosexual” in an anonymous open letter to the Prussian Minister of Justice in 1869 (Lauritsen and Thorstad:6). Steakley writes that prior to this, homosexuals were known as sodomites, pederasts, or “‘Knabenschaender’ (literally, ‘boy-ravishers’)” (Steakley:13). The first psychiatric study of homosexuality in Germany was published in 1869 as the result of Ulrichs’ efforts.  It advocated the decriminalization of homosexuality in favor of medical treatment (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:13).
    Ulrichs’ greatest intellectual impact on his own generation came from his invention of the term “Uranians,” which he introduced in 1862 as a new designation for homosexuals (both Urnings and Dailings).  He took the term from Plato’s Symposium, in which homosexual activity was said to fall under the protection of the ninth muse, Urania.  In the late 1800s German homosexuals frequently called themselves Uranians, and a militant homosexual slogan, “Uranians of the world, unite!” became popular internationally (Rutledge:41).  In the following quote Ulrichs uses the term in his explanation of the “third sex” theory, and graphically illustrates the mentality of the “Fems”:

Apart from the womanly direction of our sexual desire, we Uranians bear another womanly element within us which, it appears to me, offers proof positive that nature developed the male germ within us physically but the female spiritually.  We bear this other womanly element from our earliest childhood on.  Our character, the way we feel, our entire temperament is not manly, it is decidedly womanly.  This inner womanly element is outwardly recognizable by our outwardly apparent womanly nature (Fee:37).

    Ulrichs was publicly opposed to sadomasochism and pedophilia (perhaps because of his own molestation as an adolescent).  He wrote against the concept of “Greek love” and considered “sexual attraction to the prepubertal to be a sickness.”  In his attempts to repeal Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, Ulrichs advocated more stringent laws against pedophilia.  Ulrichs’ condemnation of man/boy sex, however, extended only to prepubescent boys.  As the following quote from his publication Forschungen Ueber das Raetsel der mannmannlichen Liebe (“Investigation of the Enigma of Homosexual Love”) reveals, Ulrichs was not opposed to sex between men and boys who were “sexually mature.”

The Urning is not by a hair’s breadth any more dangerous to immature boys than the genuine man is to immature girls.  For the rest, I gladly leave the child molester to his deserved punishment by the law.  Let the integrity of a will-less minor be sacred to every Urning.  I have no defense for whoever touches it.  Therefore, let the seduction of immature boys, I grant it completely, be a punishable indecent act (Ulrichs:16).

    This distinction between mature and immature boys was lost on many who followed the rise of the homosexual movement in Germany.  For example, Friedrich Engels, in a letter to Karl Marx about a book Ulrichs had written, said, “The pederasts start counting their numbers and discover they are a powerful group in our state.  The only thing missing is an organization, but it seems to exist already, though it is hidden” (Plant:38).  Engels considers Ulrichs a pederast despite his arbitrary age restriction for sex with boys.
    Ulrichs’ political activities paved the way for a large and powerful homosexual movement which grew both in numbers and in political and social influence in pre-Nazi Germany.  Barely a  quarter of a century after his death in 1895, homosexuality would become openly widespread in the Germany of the Weimar Republic era. Cities such as Munich and Berlin would become international Meccas for the practitioners of all forms of sexual perversion. As William Manchester observed in  The Arms of Krupp  “Wilhelmine Kulture's emphasis on masculinity had produced a generation of perverts.  Abroad, sodomy was delicately known as ‘the German vice’” (Manchester, 1968:232).
    Samuel Igra, a German Jew who published Germany’s National Vice in 1945 (a study of homosexual influences in Germany), commented on the rise of homosexuality after the turn of the century:

In Germany these unnatural vices became a veritable cult among the ruling classes. In 1891 the well-known German psychiatrist, Krafft-Ebbing, one of the great pioneers in that branch of psycho-pathology, published a book entitled Psychologia Sexualis in which he declared that sex perversion in Germany was alarmingly on the increase.  Commissioner Hans von Tresckow, who was head of a special branch of the Criminal Police Department in Berlin from 1905 to 1919, has published the following in his memoirs:
    I can confirm the statement (made by Krafft-Ebbing) that homosexualist groups have been steadily on the increase in recent decades, especially in the big cities. At the present time in Berlin there are for certain more than one hundred thousand persons who are addicts of this practice. They are closely banded together and even have their own paper, Die Freundschaft, which appears regularly and defends their interests" (Von Fuersten and Anderen Sterblichen, by Hans von Tresckow, p. 110. F. Fontane & Co. Berlin. 1922) [Igra:27f].