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Károly Mária Kertbeny (or Karl Maria Benkert) (28 February 1824 – 23 January 1882) was a Hungarian journalist, translator, memoirist, and human rights campaigner. He is best known for coining the words heterosexual and homosexual as the German nouns Heterosexual and Homosexual.[1]

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Károly Mária Kertbeny
Karl Maria Kertbeny, ca. 1865
Born	Karl Maria Benkert (1824-02-28)February 28, 1824 Vienna, Austria
Died	January 23, 1882(1882-01-23) (aged 57) Budapest, Hungary
Known for	Campaigning for gay rights, coinage of the terms homosexual and heterosexual (as the German nouns Homosexual and Heterosexual)

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

Early life

Karl Maria Benkert was born in Vienna to Hungarian parents on 28 February 1824. He moved with his family to Budapest when he was a child and was equally fluent in German and Hungarian. 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.

Career

Benkert left Hungary determined to become an advocate on behalf of Hungarian culture. He therefore arranged for his legal name to take the Hungarian form under which he lived and published for most of his life. Final approval on 22 February 1848 made him Kertbeny Károly Mária or, in the standard way of rendering a Hungarian name in other European languages, Károly Mária Kertbeny.[1]

He made a variety of contacts in his travels. He was Charles Baudelaire's only personal Austro-Hungarian contact.[2]

In his fiction, quite apart from his political advocacy, Kertbeny included homosexual characters in several works, including Errinnerungen an Charles Sealsfield, Spiegelbilder der Erinnerung, and the short story "Im Walde".[3]

Writings on sexuality

He settled in Berlin in 1868, still unmarried at 44. Kerbeny claimed in his writings to be "normally sexed". However, his diaries list a self-censored string of encounters with youths and men (“young barber lad"; "very much in love with the lad"; "I have done it"), and recurring fear following the arrest of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs with whom he corresponded ("Awful days!...Horrible nightmares. I have burnt all the dangerous letters"), which suggest he was secretly homosexual.[1]

He explained his interest in sexual minorities as his "instinctive drive to take issue with every injustice". His cited as a formative experience from his teenage years the suicide of a co-worker who was being blackmailed and threatened with exposure as a homosexual.

In 1869, he published two anonymous pamphlets[lower-alpha 1] He argued that the Prussian sodomy law, Paragraph 143, which later became Paragraph 175 of the penal code of the German Empire,[4] violated the "rights of man". He advanced the classic liberal argument that consensual sexual acts in private should not be subject to criminal law. He contended that the Prussian law allowed blackmailers to extort money from homosexuals and often drove them to suicide.

Whether sexual preference were innate Kerbeny called "a very interesting riddle of nature" best excluded from arguments for the decriminalization of sexual practices. Instead he considered the right of a government to intervene in private matters. He wrote:[1]

We should convince our opponents that exactly according to their legal notions they do not have anything to do with this inclination, let it be innate or voluntary, because the state does not have the right to intervene in what is happening between two consenting people aged over 14, excluding publicity [in private], not hurting the rights of any third party.

On the other hand he repeatedly described one's sexual drive as "innate and unchanging". This contradicted the dominant view up to that time, that men committed "sodomy" out of mere wickedness. Gay men, he said, were not by nature effeminate, and he pointed out that many of the great heroes of history were gay. With Heinrich Hössli and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, he was among the first writers to put these now-familiar arguments before the public.

In a letter written on 6 May 1868, Kertbeny published, in German, the terms homosexual and heterosexual[5] as part of his system for defining sexual types, as a replacement for the pejorative terms "sodomite" and "pederast" that were used in the German- and French-speaking world of his time. In addition, he called those who masturbate monosexualists and practitioners of anal intercourse pygists.

He also used German terms that did not influence his contemporaries but that suggest how he was considering terms that did not rely on classical languages, including Die Gleichegeschlechtlichen ("those of the same sex") and Der Gleichegeschlechtlicher Akt ("the same-sex act").[3]

Kertbeny made no further contribution to the debates about homosexuality, its legal status or origins. In 1880, he offered a chapter on homosexuality for Gustav Jäger to include in his book Discovery of the Soul, but Jäger's publisher decided it was too controversial and omitted it. Jäger nevertheless used Kertbeny's terminology elsewhere in the book.[6][lower-alpha 2]

Death

Kertbeny died in Budapest on 23 January 1882 at the age of 58. József Komócsy [hu] (1836–1894) eulogized him: "He devoted his life to serving his country, even when he was living abroad. He publicised our glory there amongst foreign peoples. His first literary activities were received with mockery, but he did not give up and he brought light to Hungarian literature for foreign people."[7]

Hungarian writer and literary historian Lajos Hatvany [de] has described him in these terms: "This moody, fluttering, imperfect writer is one of the best and undeservedly forgotten Hungarian memoir writers."^{[citation needed]} And he has also said: "He was born effeminately sensitive, soft, believing, fair, open minded and enthusiastic for beauty. He loved to love, and loved to be loved. He loved only the beautiful and he wanted the love of the best. Mária! - An old, vain, swindling, naughty, clownish, thick skinned, envious, literary adventurer became of him: Károly, poor, Károly!"[7]

Kertbeny's gravesite, identified in 2001, is located in Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest, the final resting place of numerous prominent Hungarians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The gay community set a new tombstone on it, and since 2002 a wreath is placed at his grave as part of Hungarian gay festivals.

Notes

References

Additional sources

• Robert D. Tobin (2005). "Kertbeny's 'Homosexuality' and the Language of Nationalism". In Margaret Sönser Breen; Fiona Peters (eds.). Genealogies of Identity: Interdisciplinary Readings on Sex and Sexuality. Rodopi. pp. 3–18. ISBN 9042017589.

External links

• Burroway, Jim (6 May 2008). "Today in History: The Love that Dares not Speak its Name Gets a Name". Box Turtle Bulletin. Archived from the original on 9 November 2017.

На других языках

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[de] Karl Maria Kertbeny

Karl Maria Kertbeny, vor 1847 Karl Maria Benkert (* 28. Februar 1824 in Wien; † 23. Januar 1882 in Budapest), war ein österreichisch-ungarischer Schriftsteller und früher Aktivist der Homosexuellenbewegung.

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- [en] Karl Maria Kertbeny

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[ru] Кертбени, Карл Мария

Карл Мари́я Ке́ртбени (нем. Karl-Maria Kertbeny, венг. Kertbeny Károly; до 1847 года — Карл Мари́я Бе́нкерт, нем. Karl-Maria Benkert; 28 февраля 1824 (1824-02-28), Вена — 23 января 1882, Будапешт) — австро-венгерский публицист, переводчик и политический активист, прежде всего известный как создатель терминов «гомосексуальность» и «гетеросексуальность»[2][3]. Переводил на немецкий язык венгерских авторов, в частности Шандора Петёфи и Мора Йокаи. Жил преимущественно в Будапеште и Берлине.

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