uranian

Definition

Or: uranist , a term first used by the German homosexual rights activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1864 as part of his theory of homosexuality. He extrapolated that only a female psyche could be attracted to a male body and coined the word urning to describe a man who is like a woman, which is to say sexually attracted to men and sexually repelled by women. The term later became synonymous, in the German gay community, for homosexual male.

ETYMOLOGY: Ulrichs borrowed the term from Plato's Symposium , in which homosexuality exists under the protection of the ninth muse, Urania, and from the Greek ouranios , meaning 'heavenly'.

SEE ALSO: urning; urninde.

QUOTE: Oscar Wilde, in R. Hart-Davis, Letters (1962): ' To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble '.