Karl Maria Kertbeny, born , ; also ; 28 February 1824 – 23 January 1882) was an Austrian-born Hungarian journalist, translator, memoirist and human rights campaigner. Kertbeny coined the words heterosexual and homosexual as the German nouns and .
He translated works by Hungarian poets and writers Sándor Petőfi, János Arany and Mór Jókai into German. Among his acquaintances were Heinrich Heine, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Hans Christian Andersen, Karl Marx, and the Brothers Grimm.
Early life
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Karl Maria Benkert was born in Vienna into an artistic Hungarian family 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 and was 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.
In his fiction, quite apart from his political advocacy, Kertbeny included homosexual characters in several works, including , and the short story "".
Writings on sexuality
He settled in Berlin in 1868, when he was still unmarried at 44. Kertbeny 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. 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 was innate was called by Kertbeny "a very interesting riddle of nature" that was 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: as part of his system for defining sexual types to replace the pejorative terms sodomite and pederast, which were used in the German- and French-speaking world of his time. In addition, he called those who masturbate monosexualists, practitioners of anal intercourse pygists, those who have sex with animals heterogenists, and a man who prefers women sexually normalsexuals (), term of which he used to describe himself. The concept of bisexuality was named as ().
He also used German terms that did not influence his contemporaries but suggest how he was considering terms that did not rely on classical languages, including ("those of the same sex") and ("the same-sex act").
Death
right|thumb|The grave of Károly Kertbeny in the cemetery on Kerepesi út in Budapest
Kertbeny died in Budapest on 23 January 1882 at the age of 58. (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".
The Hungarian writer and literary historian has described him in these terms: "This moody, fluttering, imperfect writer is one of the best and undeservedly forgotten Hungarian memoir writers ... 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!"