Karl-Maria Kertbeny

Karl-Maria Kertbeny or Károly Mária Kertbeny (born Karl-Maria Benkert) (1824 – 1882), was an Austrian-born Hungarian journalist, memoirist and human rights campaigner who coined the word homosexual, was born in Vienna, the son of a writer and a painter. The Benkert family moved to Budapest when he was a child—he was equally at home in Austria, Hungary or Germany.

As a young man, while working as a bookseller's apprentice, Benkert had a close friend who was a homosexual. This young man killed himself after being blackmailed by an extortionist. Benkert later recalled that it was this tragic episode which led him to take a close interest in the subject of homosexuality, following what he called his "instinctive drive to take issue with every injustice."

After a stint in the Hungarian army, Benkert made a living as a journalist and travel writer, and wrote at least twenty-five books on various subjects, none of them of any lasting value. In 1847, he legally changed his name from Benkert to Karl-Maria Kertbeny (or Károly Mária Kertbeny), a Hungarian name with aristocratic associations. He settled in Berlin in 1868, still unmarried at 44. He claimed in his writings to be "normally sexed," and there is no direct evidence to contradict this, despite the scepticism of subsequent writers.

Nevertheless, from this time he began to write extensively on the issue of homosexuality, motivated, he said, by an "anthropological interest" combined with a sense of justice and a concern for the "rights of man." In 1869, he anonymously published a pamphlet entitled Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code of 14 April 1851 and Its Reaffirmation as Paragraph 152 in the Proposed Penal Code for the Nordeutscher Bund. An Open and Professional Correspondence to His Excellency Dr. Leonhardt, Royal Prussian Minister of Justice.

A second pamphlet on the same subject soon followed. In his pamphlets, Kertbeny argued that the Prussian sodomy law, Paragraph 143 (which later became Paragraph 175 of the legal code of the German Empire), violated the "rights of man." He advanced the classic libertarian argument that private consensual sexual acts should not be subject of the criminal law. Recalling his young friend, he argued strongly that the Prussian law allowed blackmailers to extort money from homosexuals and often drove them to suicide.

Kertbeny also put forward the view that homosexuality was inborn and unchangeable, an argument which would later be called the "medical model" of homosexuality. This contradicted the dominant view up until that time, that men committed "sodomy" out of mere wickedness. Homosexual men, he said, were not by nature effeminate, and he pointed out that many of the great heroes of history were homosexual. He was the first writer to put these now-familiar arguments before the public.

During 1869, in the course of these writings, Kertbeny coined the word "homosexual" as part of his system for the classification of sexual types, as a replacement for the pejorative term 'pederast' that was used in the German and French speaking world of his time. He called men who are attracted to women, heterosexual, he called masturbators monosexualists, and called devotees of anal intercourse, pygists.

Once self-identified homosexual men, such as Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, began to campaign for homosexual rights, Kertbeny faded from the scene. If he was homosexual, he was never prepared to say so. In 1880, he contributed a chapter on homosexuality to Gustav Jäger's book Discovery of the Soul, but Jäger's publisher decided it was too controversial and omitted it. Nevertheless, Jäger used Kertbeny's terminology elsewhere in the book.

The German sex researcher Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) borrowed the terms homosexual and heterosexual from Jäger's book. Krafft-Ebing's work was so influential that these became the standard terms for differences in sexual orientation, superseding Ulrichs' word Urning.

Kertbeny did not live to see this wide acceptance of his ideas. He died in Budapest in 1882 at age 58.

He translated Hungarian poets' and writers' works into German, eg. those of Sándor Petőfi, János Arany and Mór Jókai. Among his friends were Heinrich Heine, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.

Hungarian writer and literary historian Lajos Hatvany referred to him in this way:

"This moody, fluttering, imperfect writer is one of the best and undeservedly forgotten Hungarian memoir writers".

His tomb was revealed in 2001 by sociologist Judit Takács (see the link below) who made extensive research on his life. His tomb was found in Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest, a resting place of numerous Hungarian celebrities in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The gay community placed a new tombstone over it, and since 2002 it has been a recurring event at Hungarian gay festivals to set a wreath on Kertbeny's grave.

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