EP20: Footprints in Time: Tracing the Legacy of Queer Pioneer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

As we tread the paths carved by pioneers of queer rights, we are reminded of the indelible marks they left behind. In our latest episode, we pay tribute to Karl Ulrich, a visionary of the 19th century, whose audacious stance on innate same-sex attraction and the concept of a "third gender" sparked the flame for modern sexology. Our discussion winds through Ulrich's advocacy, dissecting how his theories challenged the sexual norms of his time and how his legacy continues to influence the dialogue on queer identity today. We celebrate the New York Times' retrospective recognition of Ulrich's work, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging the crusaders who fought for the rights and recognition of the queer community when it was most perilous to do so.

The narrative of queer history is as diverse as the community itself, and our guest Kit provides invaluable insights into the multifaceted experiences during the Nazi regime. Reflecting on the tragic paradox of queer Nazi officers, we underscore the irony of their ultimate fate, mirroring those they oppressed. This poignant chapter of our heritage serves as a stark reminder of the need for continuous remembrance. We also dismantle myths around faith and sexuality, pointing to the inclusive aspects of various religions. Kit's perspective enriches our conversation, revealing the resilience and presence of queer individuals throughout history, urging us to honor these stories at all times, not merely when convenient.

Finally, we explore the intricate details of the Warren Cup, a Roman artifact that whispers tales of homoerotic art from a bygone era. Through this ancient piece, we glimpse into a world where expressions of queer love were etched in silver, offering a striking contrast to the narrative of queer invisibility throughout history. Our journey into the past concludes with honoring Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, whose terminologies and annual celebrations in Germany serve as a beacon of hope and inspiration within the LGBTQ+ community. Join us as we reflect on the profound legacy of queer history, reminding ourselves of the continuous battle for rights and recognition that echoes through time.

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Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:23

The way that those cultures describe people like that is they are their flowers. The earth needs flowers. The earth needs things that are different and look different. These people to these cultures, they're their flowers.

Speaker 1: 0:37

Kit is back this week. Yay, I love that, actually they. Yeah, are they okay for today?

Speaker 2: 0:44

I say at this point, I would say, for any day they, he would be totally fine.

Speaker 1: 0:50

And they're your actual pronouns, not your preferred ones or tolerated ones.

Speaker 2: 0:53

Those are the pronouns. I appreciate that the earth needs flowers.

Speaker 1: 1:04

Carl Ulrich. I never heard of him either, and it's crazy that we haven't heard of him.

Speaker 2: 1:08

No, really this is. He is one of the, if not the first, western pioneer of queer rights all the way back in. How does centuries work? When they talk about centuries, you talk about it as the century of. It would be the eight, the 19th century if it was the 1800s.

Speaker 1: 1:26

Exactly.

Speaker 2: 1:26

Thank you. I always get that a little mixed up. My brain hears that and goes it is confusing, yeah, it messes with me. So, yeah, he was like the 19th century, the 1800s. He was taking to the stage talking about queerness as not just sex acts, as not just who you're with, but as an identity, as who you are, as a piece of how you exist in the world around you. That's queer theory. That is only just now being really discussed. He was opening up the discussion to that in the 19th century. That's.

Speaker 1: 2:06

Yeah, it's pretty revolutionary and actually so. The New York Times put out an article just in 2020, they have a series it's called Overlooked, a groundbreaking New York Times series. It basically takes people that they missed that were revolutionary. They missed reporting on them all the way back to 1851. And so Carl Urech is a pioneering gay activist that they overlooked, and so they wrote up an article on him in 2020, which isn't that long ago.

Speaker 2: 2:36

That is wild. He was born in 1825. It was 1867 that he gave the first ever public speech as an openly queer person in support of homosexual rights.

Speaker 1: 2:49

Yes, okay, so back then the word homosexuality didn't even exist. It wasn't even coined a term Like that word didn't exist.

Speaker 2: 2:58

Yes, it actually became a thing in his lifetime, but he himself was not a fan of the word homosexual because of the fact that it had the word sexual in it. He wanted so desperately to separate queerness and queer identity from just the idea of sex and sex acts Right From it being sexualized. Mm-hmm For the time period.

Speaker 1: 3:21

Right yeah, he argued that same sex attraction was innate, which I love because innate we use in chiropractic all the time. We use it when we look at innate intelligence and looking from a lens of your body has the ability and the intelligence within to heal itself. Given that we remove the interference from your body, then it has the most optimal environment for it to heal to its highest potential. So I love the fact that he refers to innate, because he argued that same sex attraction was innate and those who experienced it should be treated the same as anyone else, because it's in you, it's born from nature and it just goes along with the concept of we were always here. So that's why I love that. Innate intelligence is smart. It's an intelligence that lives, that breathes, that expresses from a direct source of nature and is quite literally a direct expression of it, if you think about it.

Speaker 2: 4:19

Absolutely, and it's just. It's so cool to me because, even like at the time, he described it as a germ, because there were kind of no other words for him to be able to use. He used sexual. He described sexual attraction in general as a germ that exists in every person and just in queer people. It's a slightly different kind of germ.

Speaker 2: 4:44

It's a germ that is innate and is born in us, just like it is born in every other person, but it's a little different and it's so interesting to hear the words that he used that nowadays obviously we would be like, yeah, that's not quite, but he was applying terminology to things that didn't yet exist, to queer theory that would take another century to finally start to become a thing.

Speaker 2: 5:09

He was like putting together the building blocks of it when there kind of were none, like he was making them up as he went along and he inspired the queer people around him to do the same, to embrace their identities and come up with their own words for how to share their identities with the world around them so that they can be uniquely them. And that's how he learned about things like bisexual attraction and pansexual attraction and people being romantically attracted to men but sexually attracted to women, and how there's a difference between the two. Like he was one of the first to understand in sexology that there's a difference between romantic attraction and sexual attraction, that's something that we're still now dissecting.

Speaker 1: 5:56

I was just going to say. Do we even have an understanding of it today that is comprehensive or that we can delineate this from that?

Speaker 2: 6:04

Yeah, like, do we have an actual path of study for that that isn't just him?

Speaker 1: 6:09

and then now, Right, and that foundation lays the actual building blocks to then continue to be evolved.

Speaker 2: 6:16

Yes, and it's actually it's so cool Part of this whole coming up with your own terminology and things like that. They ended up coming out to friends and family as earning or a third gender. That would describe a female psyche in a male body and his own specific attraction to other men. So I feel like nowadays they would probably identify as non-binary.

Speaker 1: 6:39

Absolutely, he actually said in his proposal. He said, gentlemen, my proposal is directed toward a revision of the current penal law, and he described a quote unquote class of persons who faced persecution simply because nature has planted them in a sexual nature that is opposite of that which is usual, according to what you're saying, because same sex attraction was a deeply taboo topic at that time, they weren't allowed to explore that or uncover what exactly it was. So it's really cool to see how that sort of evolved and developed in his perception of it or his perspective of it.

Speaker 2: 7:20

It's just to think like the 1800s. Yeah, nowadays, when we look back on, it's very easy to look back at a lot of these centuries as just monoliths of time. You know, like it was so long ago everyone thought pretty much similarly. It was very much in the dark ages of Christianity and things of that nature you would imagine. It feels like monoliths of time that are very difficult to dissect differences in, you know, unless you really study them and you're like a history girl. You're like, you know like, and it's so interesting to see how many pockets of queerness existed throughout these monoliths. Like Carl was not the only one, he's just the only one we've found, right, you know, he's the one whose work got saved and got, you know, remembered to a certain extent enough to be re-remembered in this context. But just think of how many that just didn't.

Speaker 1: 8:24

Yeah, and it's crazy that we are talking about him and we just happened to stumble upon his name just recently but we didn't even know he existed and his work and contributions to the queer rights movement actually preceded Stonewall by 100 years. So it's just crazy how we typically in America see the Stonewall riots as the modern LGBTQ rights movement or the modern queer movement, but really it stemmed from 100 years prior, you know.

Speaker 2: 8:54

Yeah, even Orlik's life and work and writing and everything would go on to inspire queer movements that we are again only just now like really starting to recognize existed in pre-World War II Germany with people like Magnus Hershfield. Magnus Hershfield revolutionized queerness in pre-World War II Germany. That famous book burning that we all see in photos as like the beginning of the Holocaust. Those were his books, those were Magnus Hershfield's books and his library and his Institute studying trans people that was being burned.

Speaker 1: 9:32

That makes so much sense. That makes so much sense, like, I mean, one of the world's first gay rights movements was, I mean, 30 years later in Berlin, which is crazy because it's in the same country, you know.

Speaker 2: 9:43

Germany has a rich history of queerism Lily Elby. Lily Elby was the first person to have a gender reassignment surgery in the Western world, in Germany, under the care of Magnus Hershfield, before World War II.

Speaker 1: 10:01

Yeah, that is so crazy, especially considering the history of how sodomy laws across the German Empire would then later be used by the Nazis to target gay men, and thousands of them were killed in concentration camps.

Speaker 2: 10:15

Literally the pink triangle. Yeah, the silence equals death. The pink triangle came right after all of this and it's one of those things where, as we look at how far we've come with queer rights in our own lives and in our own country, we have to recognize the dangers when they're at our doorstep. When history repeats itself, pay attention.

Speaker 1: 10:41

That subculture in the 1930s in Berlin was said to have been a culture as open as they haven't seen anything like it before. You know how Berlin evolved in the 1930s. You didn't see that again until post-World War II, until the 1970s, post-Stonewall.

Speaker 2: 11:01

And actually I think it's extremely fitting that we're having this discussion on today, which is Holocaust. Remember and stay. I'm going to cry, but it is genuinely. Never again means never again for anyone. Period. End of discussion. Never again means never again for the globe and unfortunately that has not been the case. Never again means we have to recognize the signs as they're happening around us and collectively agree Never again. It seems like as more time passes and as more and more Holocaust survivors are lost to the ravages of time and even the ravages of poverty, which is insane to think about. But we have to remember that this wasn't again just a monolith of time. It didn't happen in a vacuum. It had so much leading up to it and it had so many warning signs of how bad things were going to get and how quickly they were going to get that bad. And we as a globe ignored them until we had no choice.

Speaker 1: 12:09

Yeah, beginning in 1933, the Nazi regime began to dismantle the communities that the Quirters had built. You know that started basically around the 1930s. They arrested a lot of droves of gay men under paragraph 175. And that was the statute of the German criminal code that banned sexual relations between men with other men. So the police, they arrested about 100,000 men for allegedly violating the statute and some of them they didn't even know whether or not they were actually queer.

Speaker 2: 12:40

And I also think that looking back on that period of time is a very good example of why the mentality of the leopards won't eat my face, isn't true? There were two separate high ranking Nazi soldiers that were both openly queer. Hitler knew they were gay men, didn't have a problem with it for a while because they were turning on their own, and they were, you know, helping the Nazis catch these queer communities, until one evening when both of them were dragged out of their home and lynched in the street. The hyenas will always eat your face when they run out of faces to eat. That's. That's how that goes. They're always going to turn on you. You're not one of them. It does not matter how much they make you think you're one of them. You're not.

Speaker 1: 13:28

And just as we say that there's no equal rights for women until there are equal rights for black women, among the Nazis, gay Nazis during that time there was a lot of diversity and there was a wide range of experiences. So, for example, gay men would be active in anti Nazi political movements. You had gay Jewish men which faced Nazi persecution and mass murder as Jews. Sorry, sometimes I get like stuttery.

Speaker 2: 13:55

These are heavy topics.

Speaker 1: 13:56

Yeah, you're right. I think it's the heaviness of I get pissed off and then I start to stutter.

Speaker 2: 14:01

Yeah, no, I understand it's, it's heavy, it's heavy. I didn't expect us to quite get this heavy, but yeah again, considering the day that it is that we happen to be doing this recording, I feel like it is extremely just that we get this heavy.

Speaker 1: 14:13

Yeah, but what I meant to say is that there are gay Jewish men and they faced the persecution by the Nazis and mass murder on a level that is inconceivable.

Speaker 2: 14:24

I mean, just look at again the present day. Just like there were gay Jewish men and gay German men, there are gay Gazans. There are gay Congolese people, there are queer people all over the globe, in every area that you see human suffering that you say like, oh no, I shouldn't worry about that because they don't like me for being gay. There are gay people there. Shocker, just how y'all like to. You know, we like to say like we're everywhere, we exist everywhere, that all we also have to face that when it's inconvenient for us there are gay people everywhere. Yeah, that's when it becomes the most important to face it, because that's how things like the pink triangle became a thing is because too many people said, oh no, I don't know a gay person, gay people aren't like me, that's not.

Speaker 2: 15:15

And then you know it's spread out from just trans people and gay people and queer people to literally everyone else, and even Romani people were very heavily a part of that first wave, because Romani people were looked down on by much of the rest of the globe. So because of that, queer people and Romani people were first on the chopping block and it was easy. And we can't let another population of people become the easy ones and we just keep doing it over and over and over again. It's just I can't. There's literally like a little triangle on the front of this book which, by the way, I recommend this book to everyone. It's called the Gay Agenda by Ashley Melissa and Chess Needham. I recommend it, but it has a triangle on the front. Triangles are still, to this day, very pivotal to the queer community. We remember our history, but we can't only remember it when it's convenient.

Speaker 1: 16:10

We have to remember it all the time Exactly, which is why I love so much that Karl Ulrich. History and contributions to the activism and the evolution of queer rights is now being discussed more than ever.

Speaker 2: 16:24

Which is nice to see, and I really hope we're able to find not only older voices from, like you know, rome and ancient Greek and, you know, like maybe we're able to correctly identify more people from the past as the queer activists that they were, but I hope we're also able to expand that to the rest of the globe Because, again, we exist everywhere and I want to see queer pioneers from Africa. I want to see Middle Eastern queer pioneers. I know they exist, I know they're historically out there. It just feels like we haven't. I don't know if we've found them. We haven't put them in the spotlight well enough, which I definitely have to. We should do something about that, which I think you and I are going to try.

Speaker 1: 17:07

Yeah, we're getting there. I also love how Karl I'm just going to call him Karl so I don't have to keep mispronouncing his last name but I also love how he was said to have been born into a middle class family that included several Lutheran pastors, and he studied Latin and Greek before his legal studies. But I just think that's interesting Because a lot of times people have this idea that you can't have God and be attracted to the same sex, and I'm not saying that everyone does, or that that's for you or not for you, but there are gay people out there who do have both.

Speaker 2: 17:40

Absolutely. There's a lot of queer deconstructioners, but there's also a lot of queer Christians and a lot of queer Lutherans and a lot of queer Presbyterians and a lot of queer Jewish people. Yes, judaism is an extraordinarily queer religion. I'm going to be so honest about that and it's a beautiful thing. It's because I say I have a friend who is in the process of converting and they've been showing me so, so much information and it's been a really, really cool experience. I may actually end up sitting in on a Shabbat service soon, which is really exciting.

Speaker 1: 18:10

That's awesome Right.

Speaker 2: 18:11

I'm so excited.

Speaker 1: 18:13

I love that. I've always been so curious about Judaism my entire life.

Speaker 2: 18:17

Yeah, exactly. And what I really find so interesting is it's a religion of questioning. It's a religion of flirting with the text, questioning the text, of arguing with the text. It's not just reading it and believing it as that's it.

Speaker 1: 18:34

As the end. All be all, or obey, or go to hell. Burn in the pits of fire. Text.

Speaker 2: 18:42

Exactly, it's a text that everyone is allowed to have a different interpretation of and everyone does have a different interpretation and that's okay, like those different interpretations are welcomed and celebrated and honored rather than being ostracized. I mean, I remember when my parents had to get a talking to from the nun at my Sunday school because I asked where God's pen was, I was like how could he have written the Bible? Where is?

Speaker 1: 19:08

his pen. It's so innocent and so cute. What Please tell me? I just want to know. I mean, that's valid and very woke of somebody who is a child.

Speaker 2: 19:18

I was just like listen. I just want to know if he wrote it how. Where does ethereal being meet page?

Speaker 1: 19:28

Children that are young, I mean, let's just say, children. In general, I like to think of them as being closer to the veil, so they're not already brainwashed or indoctrinated into whatever. Is there going to be their new culture? It's out of the mouth of babes. I just feel like their truth is so close and as close to truth as the definition of truth is or can be. No, it's so. It's a totally valid question and it's like wow, it really is Out of the mouth of babes. Now we got to think about this.

Speaker 2: 19:57

Oh yeah, no, that's, I appreciate that. I appreciate that, yeah, and thank you for thinking my question valid Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 20:04

So I don't know if you want to jump back to Carl's what he did.

Speaker 2: 20:08

I just think it's kind of important to discuss that whole first gay man in world history thing, because I do think that's a very interesting title to give to someone. He's remembered as the first gay man in world history, and it's one of those things where I kind of see the point of that. I kind of see where they're trying to go with that. I think they should have changed world to Western, but I also don't think that's something that at this point we, the major power structures, are capable of. I don't think major power structures that come up with things like that, like the first gay man, is really care enough to actually think through. Maybe we should say Western.

Speaker 1: 20:48

And also as other people's surface. Depending on where they are geographically located, that might change.

Speaker 2: 20:54

Exactly. I feel like it basically already has. We have seen examples within native indigenous cultures of two-spirited individuals of. I know Pacific Islanders have a very specific term for gender non-conforming and non-binary individuals. It begins with an F, but I do not in any way want to butcher that. The way that those cultures describe people like that is they are their flowers. The earth needs flowers. The earth needs things that are different and look different, and that's these people. To these cultures, they're their flowers.

Speaker 1: 21:32

Like that's. It brings colors closer together and helps them blend more.

Speaker 2: 21:36

Yeah, and I definitely. I see the point in them trying to give him a title like that because it is really important to remember him as one of the major pioneers, again in the Western world, of sexology, as a study of queer theory even I would say, at the end of the day, erlich was the basis of modern-day Western queer theory.

Speaker 1: 22:02

It's interesting to me too how he got into law and civil service, because he positioned himself perfectly for the advocacy he would then grow into because of the fact that he had so much influence on the legal system. And it gave him courage, after he knew how the legal system worked, to then be able to say I'm going to advocate for this population. And because he was queer himself, he was able to just pull out from within him what was true for him as one of the ways that he can draw and to advocate for others and the queer community at large.

Speaker 2: 22:38

I yes.

Speaker 1: 22:39

So cool.

Speaker 2: 22:40

Absolutely, and it's interesting because I think this is the second queer man of the past who we have covered, who went into civics Tchaikovsky.

Speaker 1: 22:52

Exactly Tchaikovsky yeah.

Speaker 2: 22:55

I think that's really it's interesting. It's very interesting to see the patterns of older society. History does not repeat, but it rhymes. It will always continue to rhyme. That's just a good example of a rhyme. I just appreciate that. It's a very, very, very crisp rhyme.

Speaker 1: 23:12

I love it too.

Speaker 1: 23:12

It reminds me of even current day.

Speaker 1: 23:15

If you look at older generations current day from you know, say, two generations older than us, say our grandparents it was just expected that they would find a career, find a job that they could spend 30 to 35 years in, get a pension and then retire, and that's how they viewed the world.

Speaker 1: 23:34

But nowadays you have people kind of branching off, going into more artsy things or more freelance things, or you have a lot of different options where you can work from home or Do you think it's online, or you can kind of piecemeal your income and your career and you can more freely express who you are from an artistic standpoint.

Speaker 1: 23:52

So if you look back to, say, tchaikovsky or Karl Ulrich time period, I think it was just expected of them to go into civil service type positions and one ends up being a composer who he is one of the most famous composers of all time, who is Russia's national treasure and people today are still using his nutcracker as a celebratory centerpiece over the holidays. And now you have we're talking about Karl Ulrich, who you know he left civil service to go into law to help effect change legally for the queer community and be one of the leading, most revolutionary people that we can trace back to anyway to date for the queer rights movement. And not only that, he was also a journalist. He wrote for a pan German newspaper, and so that was another outlet for him to express and get his get the message out.

Speaker 2: 24:47

At one point, for being so open with himself and exploring himself and things of that nature, he was dismissed from the court that he was working within and it was almost a blessing at the end of the day to have something like that happen, because of the fact that it allowed him to be even more vocal and open about his queerness. And that's when he really started getting on the train of writing. That's when he was really like all right, I am, I am diving balls deep into this, for lack of a better way to put it and I'm just I'm going for it Like this is going to be, this is going to be what I do. I'm going to write about queerness and I'm going to advocate for queer rights, and it's kind of like one of the first people in the Western world to like make that his job, almost like queer advocate. It's very interesting, like that's kind of like how it basically became like his thing.

Speaker 1: 25:34

Wouldn't that be cool. If it was a job, I mean, I like to think of it as more of a calling. It's a calling.

Speaker 2: 25:41

Yeah, no, absolutely yeah.

Speaker 1: 25:44

It's a. It's a, it's a rise to the occasion calling.

Speaker 2: 25:46

Yeah, and I would say he was probably one of the first, in like the Western world, to shape that out into what it now is. If you will, nowadays, with, you know, people branching out and doing so many different things and having the capabilities of doing so many different things, I also think a big part of it is just the fact that the idea of what our grandparents had that, like you know, go to work, work at the same place for 35 years, get good benefits, get good promotions and be able to retire with a 401k and be comfortable that died with their generation. Exactly it was butchered by their generation.

Speaker 2: 26:19

That idea doesn't exist anymore. It can't exist anymore. It was unsustaining from the get-go and it is officially collapsing in on itself and we are experiencing that late stage collapse, you know, yeah, like late stage capitalism is when an Eminem on a billboard starts talking to you and like knows your name.

Speaker 1: 26:37

You know what I?

Speaker 2: 26:38

mean, that's like when we've gone too far.

Speaker 1: 26:41

Our generation is kind of split in a way, with the tail end of that perspective and expectation of what to do with our lives. Certainly, our grandparents went into those jobs with the pensions and they're retired now and living on social security. And then our parents' generation. They're kind of at the tail end of that, where there's people that have worked in a job for X amount of years and they're banking on their social security as a retirement plan. And then there's the other half of the people where they kind of started to wake up and see the light and they're going oh man, the world is changing, I'm getting on board with it as fast as I can. And they developed and learned skill sets that allow them to be, I think, freer in how they participate in the world and an ability to grow their income and plan differently for retirement. That's sort of outside of the box. And then our generation. You see kind of the same thing, but you see more people leveraging time and energy and skill sets more than ever.

Speaker 2: 27:33

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think the younger you get, the more you see people being like I don't want to do that anymore. I want to have hobbies that aren't side jobs, that are just hobbies. I want to have rest days and not feel the endless guilt crushing my chest. I want to be able to have a little home in the woods with my family and be left the fuck alone, and that's it Like. I want to have just enough and live in contentment and I'm good with that, and that's kind of what I'm at.

Speaker 2: 28:05

Honestly, I'm so tired of the grind set. Yeah, I really am. I think I was born tired of the grind set, like just that whole idea of OK, so I am dedicating 90% of the only life I will ever have for green pieces of paper. That never made sense to me, that never tracked Like. I'm sorry, but my time means so much more than that. My father lived for 41 years. I don't even want to think about how many years of that he spent behind a desk wishing he could be anywhere else. That he couldn't because of the restraints that these systems that don't actually exist when we step outside of ourselves created around him. That's the kind of thing that makes me want to tear down capitalism with my bare fucking hands.

Speaker 1: 28:55

Yeah, and you're right. I mean, those ways of looking at things are certainly dated. The more modern way of looking at leveraging we'll throw it back to Carl Erlewich's word innate. You can leverage your innate wants, needs, expressions by learning how to monetize your interests and parts of who you are and by having more contributions to evolution in society.

Speaker 1: 29:18

The old way of looking at it is oh, we're going to work in exchange for money. That's a punching the clock mentality. We go, punch a clock, we exchange our time for money. Nowadays it's like OK, let's follow our innate wants, needs, desires, our innate intelligence that's within us. Let's let ourselves be attracted to the things that we're meant to do, that lead us toward our higher purpose, and learn how to monetize. There's a leveraging component in there that I think is the new modern way of looking at things, where if you don't learn to leverage, then you're going to be stuck punching a clock and exchanging time for money.

Speaker 1: 29:53

But if you get on board with the concept that money is energy, it's not just to be exchanged for time, because then you're giving up your life, you're looking at it as dollar for dollar. Well, if you can learn to take that money that you generate and leverage it by growing it, because money attracts money. So you can take a percentage of that money and that money is growing without you having to do anything. Or you collaborate with other organizations that let you leverage your time back. So sponsorships for podcasting is a great example. You're not exchanging. Oh, we're going to work for one hour tonight and we're going to make a flat fee of $40 a piece. It doesn't work that way.

Speaker 2: 30:31

No, I see where you're.

Speaker 1: 30:32

You know what I mean. Yeah, so I love that concept of innate because it reminds me of Steve Jobs. When he did a commencement speech he talked about how his parents he was adopted and his parents wanted him to go to college. When his parents adopted him, they promised his birth mom that he would go to college, because that would kind of solve the family lineage of just not getting further education.

Speaker 2: 30:54

I think I remember that from the movie, the Ashton Kutcher.

Speaker 1: 30:57

Oh, I didn't see the movie, but I did hear the speech.

Speaker 2: 31:00

Yeah, I think I saw it for school. Cool cool. I know that was a crazy time.

Speaker 1: 31:04

I guess what I'm saying is that Steve Jobs tells a story about how he dropped out of college after his first semester he wasn't really even sure why, he just knew that it wasn't right. And then he was led to take this course. Later on. It was some kind of interfacing that would later be used in the advent of Apple, which is one of the hugest, most successful world companies, and he would learn how to do interfacing to create fonts. So we have all these different fonts available to us when we open up Word documents and Photoshop and everything and we're designing. We have all these different font options when we build our websites, whatever. And the reason why we have that today is because Steve Jobs was led to take a course that he had no idea how that would play a factor in what he would do with his life or how he would contribute to society at large.

Speaker 2: 31:48

You know that's entirely fair. I actually find it so funny in the tech space how much of the internet that we use nowadays is built on code that no one knows what to do with, because whoever wrote that code has either retired or died 20 years ago. You'll see pieces of code where there'll be a thing on top and it'll be like attempts to debug and it'll be in like the hundreds, thousands and they could not get this code debugged because of how just nonsense it was put together by someone who died a decade and a half ago Insanity.

Speaker 2: 32:23

It almost makes me wonder. Every once in a while. I'm like I wonder if my dad had a hand in any of those pieces of messy code that still exists to this day, that no one can figure out, because the creator died a decade and a half ago.

Speaker 1: 32:36

I was just having this conversation with somebody recently. Do you remember MySpace, when that first was on the scene?

Speaker 2: 32:41

I wasn't allowed to have it, but yet I remember it Wow.

Speaker 1: 32:43

I don't know. Ok, so we had MySpace accounts and you had to use HTML code in order to be able to personalize your. You can use your own colors, your own fonts, your own sizes and platform to create awareness for them and hear their music. That went along with your brand, or your branding to get your music out there. And we had to learn code. We had to learn HTML code to be able to do that and it was really cool because I remember when that first came out, I was learning certain things of like. Right now, even colors have a text code and it's usually a hashtag. And then six numbers yeah, the hex codes, yes, so, like for white hashtag, six zeros.

Speaker 2: 33:20

Yep, and then black is, I think, f.

Speaker 1: 33:22

Yep hashtag 6Fs. But if you want any kind of like we were talking about colors earlier, they blend closer together and more of the time, or more of them. If you want a certain blue, let's call it neon blue then there's a certain Texco that correlates with that. So to jump back, carl Ulrich, yes, history is first.

Speaker 1: 33:40

Yeah, I was going to say, with his writings and stuff like that, they eventually found their way into, obviously, english and other languages. It's cool because, like what you were talking about earlier, about how he coined those terms earnings to refer to people like gay men earnings or gay men and you're a den, or lesbians Doinings are the heterosexuals Doining.

Speaker 2: 34:02

No, I think we need to bring back doinings so cool. Forget calling them straights, forget calling them the heteros. We're calling them the doinings so funny, because that's the funniest thing I've ever heard.

Speaker 1: 34:14

Yeah, so earnings for gay men earned in for lesbians, which kind of makes sense, right, because they have both had the same root word Doinings for heterosexuals. And then your rhino dianism. So your rhino dianism is the term that they used for bisexuality, and they currently I think, as I understand that they currently use it today, your rhino dianism.

Speaker 2: 34:37

I think in like Germany that's a word that's still used, that is so cool and actually you know, Germany to this day very much, honors and remembers Erlich. Like we as a globe may not, but Germany, on the other hand, is like no he's our guy Like we. You know, we got this. They have a park in Germany called the Karl Heinrich Erlich Plaza in Munich.

Speaker 1: 35:03

That's amazing, I had no idea which is pretty cool, very cool.

Speaker 2: 35:06

Yeah, and he's basically become a cult figure throughout German's queer community and he annually at that park they hold a poetry reading and party on his birthday Wow, so if you're ever in Germany around August 28th and you're able to get to the Karl Heinrich Erlich Plaza in Munich, you should check that out, because they're going to be throwing a birthday party and that's pretty cool. It is very cool.

Speaker 1: 35:33

I love that.

Speaker 2: 35:34

Right, yeah, and I think you know something to just like end our little discussion on Karl on, I think would be a quote from him discussing his contributions to the queer community at the time where, in his writing, he said I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt.

Speaker 1: 35:58

Wow.

Speaker 2: 35:58

And just remember, a hydra always grows more heads, so we got to keep cutting.

Speaker 1: 36:02

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 36:04

Okay, he's proud that he got to deal that first blow, but he recognizes that it is still a hydra.

Speaker 1: 36:11

Absolutely, and I'm so glad that he celebrated. So do you want to jump to the fun fact?

Speaker 2: 36:16

I would love to jump to the fun fact, and just a quick fun fact for our listeners. This fun fact is coming from that book I recommended earlier, so you know, maybe, maybe, check it out. The fun fact is about something called the Warren Cup. The Warren Cup is dated somewhere between five and 15 CE, which is a really, really, really long time ago Like I don't even know how to contextualize that in the span of really long time ago. So the Warren Cup is an ancient silver cup that is beautifully decorated in relief images of men having sex with other men. In ancient Rome there was a ton of homoerotic art, although it is less common than depictions of heterosexual eroticism. The cup is named after Edward Perry Warren, an American art collector. So, yeah, I recommend looking into the Warren Cup, which is, you know, a really, really interesting old piece of art that depicts queer love and specifically homoeroticism.