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 homosexual gender variant females, and a number of other sexual types. It is believed to be an English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 adaptation of the German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 word Urning, which was first published by activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

for the periodical directory, see Ulrich's Periodicals DirectoryKarl-Heinrich Ulrichs , is seen today as the pioneer of the modern gay rights movement.-Early life:...

 (1825–95) in a series of five booklets (1864–65) which were collected under the title Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe ("Research into the Riddle of Man-Manly Love"). Ulrich 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

Karl-Maria Kertbeny

Karl-Maria Kertbeny or Károly Mária Kertbeny was an Austrian-born Hungarian journalist, memoirist, and human rights campaigner...

 (1824–82).

The term "Uranian" was quickly adopted by English-language advocates of homosexual emancipation in the Victorian era

Victorian era

The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...

, such as Edward Carpenter

Edward Carpenter

Edward Carpenter was an English socialist poet, socialist philosopher, anthologist, and early gay activist....

 and John Addington Symonds

John Addington Symonds

John Addington Symonds was an English poet and literary critic. Although he married and had a family, he was an early advocate of male love , which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships. He referred to it as l'amour de l'impossible...

, 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

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

 wrote to Robert Ross in an undated letter (?18 February 1898): "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

Pederasty

Pederasty or paederasty is an intimate relationship between an adult and an adolescent boy outside his immediate family. The word pederasty derives from Greek "love of boys", a compound derived from "child, boy" and "lover".Historically, pederasty has existed as a variety of customs and...

 poetry from the 1870s to the 1930s. The writings of this group are now known by the phrase "Uranian poetry

Uranian poetry

The Uranians were a small and somewhat clandestine group of male pederastic poets who published works between 1858 and 1930...

". The art of Henry Scott Tuke

Henry Scott Tuke

Henry Scott Tuke, RA RWS , was a British visual artist; primarily a painter, but also a photographer. His most notable work was in the Impressionist style, and he is probably best known for his paintings of nude boys and young men....

 and Wilhelm von Gloeden

Wilhelm von Gloeden

Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden was a German photographer who worked mainly in Italy. He is mostly known for his pastoral nude studies of Sicilian boys, which usually featured props such as wreaths or amphoras suggesting a setting in the Greece or Italy of antiquity...

 is also sometimes referred to as "Uranian".

Etymology

The word itself alludes to Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

's Symposium, a discussion on Eros (love)

Eros (love)

Eros is one of the four words in Ancient Greek which can be rendered into English as “love”. The other three are storge, philia and agape...

. In this dialog, Pausanias

Pausanias (Athenian)

Pausanias an Athenian of the deme Kerameis, and was the lover of the poet Agathon.Although Pausanias is given a significant speaking part in Plato's Symposium, very little is known about him. Ancient anecdotes tend to address only his relationship with Agathon and give us no information about his...

 distinguishes between two types of love, symbolised by two different accounts of the birth of Aphrodite

Aphrodite

Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation.Her Roman equivalent is the goddess .Historically, her cult in Greece was imported from, or influenced by, the cult of Astarte in Phoenicia....

, the goddess of love. In one, she was born of Uranus

Uranus (mythology)

Uranus , was the primal Greek god personifying the sky. His equivalent in Roman mythology was Caelus. In Ancient Greek literature, according to Hesiod in his Theogony, Uranus or Father Sky was the son and husband of Gaia, Mother Earth...

 (the heavens), 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

Zeus

In the ancient Greek religion, Zeus was the "Father of Gods and men" who ruled the Olympians of Mount Olympus as a father ruled the family. He was the god of sky and thunder in Greek mythology. His Roman counterpart is Jupiter and his Etruscan counterpart is Tinia.Zeus was the child of Cronus...

 and Dione

Dione (mythology)

Dione was a Greek goddess primarily known as the mother of Aphrodite in Book V of Homer's Iliad. Aphrodite journeys to Dione's side after she has been wounded in battle protecting her favorite son Aeneas. In this episode, Dione seems to be the equivalent of the earth goddess Gaia, whom Homer also...

, 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

Benjamin Jowett

Benjamin Jowett was renowned as an influential tutor and administrative reformer in the University of Oxford, a theologian and translator of Plato. He was Master of Balliol College, Oxford.-Early career:...

 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:

Development of classification scheme for sexual types

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

Sexual orientation

Sexual orientation describes a pattern of emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to the opposite sex, the same sex, both, or neither, and the genders that accompany them. By the convention of organized researchers, these attractions are subsumed under heterosexuality, homosexuality,...

 (male-attracted, bisexual, or female-attracted), preferred sexual behavior (passive, no preference, or active), and gender characteristics (feminine, intermediate, or masculine). The three axes were usually, but not necessarily, linked — Ulrichs himself, for example, was a Weiblinge (feminine homosexual) who preferred the active sexual role.

The taxonomy of Uranismus

• Urningin (or occasionally the variants Uranierin, Urnin, and Urnigin): A female-bodied person with a male psyche, whose main sexual attraction is to women. ("lesbian" or "straight trans man
  Trans man
  A trans man, transman, trans guy, or FTM is a transgender or transsexual man: a person who was assigned female at birth, but who identifies as male....
  
  ")
• Urning: A male-bodied person with a female psyche, whose main sexual attraction is to men. ("gay" or "straight trans woman
  Trans woman
  A trans woman is a male-to-female transsexual or transgender person and the term trans woman is preferred by some individuals over various medical terms. Other non-medical terms include t-girl, tg-girl and ts-girl...
  
  ")

• Dioningin: A "normal" (heterosexual and feminine) woman.
• Dioning : A "normal" (heterosexual and masculine) man.

• Uranodioningin: A female bisexual.
• Uranodioning: A male bisexual.

• Zwitter: Intersex
  Intersex
  Intersex, in humans and other animals, is the presence of intermediate or atypical combinations of physical features that usually distinguish female from male...
  
  ual

Urningthum, "male homosexuality" (or urnische Liebe, homosexual love) was expanded with the following terms:

• Mannlinge: very masculine, except for feminine psyche and sex drive towards effeminate men ("butch gay")
• Weiblinge: feminine in appearance, behaviour and psyche, with a sex drive towards masculine men ("queen")
• Manuring: feminine in appearance and behaviour, with a male psyche and a sex drive towards women ("feminine straight man")
• Zwischen-Urning: Adult male who prefers adolescents. ("pederast", "hebephile")
• Conjunctive, with tender and passionate feelings for men
• Disjunctive, with tender feelings for men but passionate feelings for women ("metrosexual
  Metrosexual
  Metrosexual is a neologism derived from metropolitan and heterosexual coined in 1994 describing a man who spends a lot of time and money on shopping for his appearance...
  
  ", "bromance
  Bromance
  A bromance is a close but non-sexual relationship between two men, a form of homosocial intimacy.-Etymology:Bromance is a portmanteau of the words bro or brother and romance...
  
  ")
• Virilisierte Mannlinge: Male Urnings who have learned to act like Dionings, through force or habit ("straight-acting gay")
• Uraniaster or uranisierter Mann: A dioning engaging in situational homosexuality (e.g. in prison or the military)