Uranian is a 19th-century term that referred to a person of a third sex—originally, someone with "a female psyche in a male body" who is sexually attracted to men, and later extended to cover homosexualgender variant females, and a number of other sexual types. The term was first published by activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in a series of five booklets collected under the title Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe. Ulrichs derived Uranian from the Greek goddessAphrodite Urania, who was created out of the god Uranus' testicles. Therefore, it represents the homosexual gender, while Dionian, derived from Aphrodite Dionea, represents the heterosexual gender. Ulrichs developed his terminology before the first public use of the term homosexual, which appeared in 1869 in a pamphlet published anonymously by Karl-Maria Kertbeny. The term Uranian was quickly adopted by English-language advocates of homosexual emancipation in the Victorian era, such as Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, who used it to describe a comradely love that would bring about true democracy, uniting the "estranged ranks of society" and breaking down class and gender barriers. Oscar Wilde wrote to Robert Ross in an undated letter : "To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble—more noble than other forms." The term also gained currency among a group that studied Classics and dabbled in pederastic poetry from the 1870s to the 1930s. The writings of this group are now known by the phrase Uranian poetry. The art of Henry Scott Tuke and Wilhelm von Gloeden is also sometimes referred to as Uranian.
Etymology
The word itself alludes to Plato's Symposium, a discussion on Eros. In this dialog, Pausanias distinguishes between two types of love, symbolised by two different accounts of the birth of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In one, she was born of Uranus, a birth in which "the female has no part". This Uranian Aphrodite is associated with a noble love for male youths, and is the source of Ulrichs's term Urning. Another account has Aphrodite as the daughter of Zeus and Dione, and this Aphrodite is associated with a common love which "is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul". After Dione, Ulrichs gave the name Dioning to men who are sexually attracted to women. However, unlike Plato's account of male love, Ulrichs understood male Urnings to be essentially feminine, and male Dionings to be masculine in nature. John Addington Symonds, who was one of the first to take up the term Uranian in the English language, was a student of Benjamin Jowett and was very familiar with the Symposium. However, it has been argued that this etymology, at least for the English-speaking countries, is unrelated to Ulrichs's "coinage". In his volume Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians, Michael M. Kaylor writes:
Ulrichs came to understand that not all male-bodied people with sexual attraction to men were feminine in nature. He developed a more complex threefold axis for understanding sexual and gender variance: sexual orientation, preferred sexual behavior, and gender characteristics. The three axes were usually, but not necessarily, linked – Ulrichs himself, for example, was a Weibling who preferred the active sexual role.
Taxonomy of ''Uranismus''
In these terms, -in is an ordinary German suffix usually meaning "female".
Urning: A person physically male at birth with a female psyche, whose main sexual attraction is to men.
Urningin : A person physically female at birth with a male psyche, whose main sexual affection is to women.
