“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 for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt” – Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

Lawyer and writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs is considered to be the first person to publicly ‘come out’ in the modern sense, in a 1867 meeting with the Association of German Jurists in Munich.

Ulrich advocated for the need to decriminalize queerness by repealing ‘sodomy’ laws in German-speaking areas, and unlearning the conflation of deviance through mental illness that was associated with queer and trans people.

Ulrichs had lost their job as an official legal adviser for being who they were, and was forced off the stage during the meeting.

“The ideas in Ulrichs’s speech — that such attraction was innate, and that those who experienced it should be treated the same as anyone else — were revolutionary,” according to the New York Times.

Ulrichs coined the term ‘Urning’ to describe gay men, and as a way to disconnect ‘an act’ from a person. The lawyer rejected the term ‘homosexual’ when it came around, and was “working to expand the understanding of queerness to be seen beyond sexual acts” according to Making Queer History.