In the 1980s Hubert Kennedy drew attention to the place of honor in the gay pantheon that Karl Heinrich Ulrichs ought to have received (Ulrichs: The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement [1988]). Ulrichs famously called for the decriminalization of homosexual acts at a jurists’ convention in Munich in 1867, the first person to do so publicly in such a forum. More recently, Robert Beachy hailed him as a hero in Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (2014) and devoted the entire first chapter to him (“The German Invention of Homosexuality”). Now Ralph Leck sounds the trumpet with even greater gusto, declaring Ulrichs the fons et origo of sexual science. He wants us to acknowledge not only that Ulrichs was “the inventor of a new science of heterogeneity” (xi) and the first to contest the “ascription of moral meaning to human sexuality” (16) but also that every subsequent serious scholar of sexuality owes a debt to him—even though many of them were apparently unaware of Ulrichs's often obscure writings.

Leck fires poisonous darts in the direction of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, who share “an indifference to the legacy of the sexual science movement” that supposedly originated with Ulrichs. Foucault is guilty of “a mnemonic erasure of the enormous body of scholarship produced by sexual modernists like Ulrichs,” and Butler's theory of gender suffers from “an overestimation of [her own] originality” (221). Other older and newer scholars are accused of grave deficiencies as well: “In pioneering works on lesbians, [Emma] Trosse and [Johanna] Elberskirchen made no mention of UIrichs. They may not have known that he put forth identical arguments decades earlier” (72). Vern Bullough, one of the most distinguished modern historians of sexuality, is made to sound rather naive: “Unbeknown to Bullough, he was channeling key aspects of Ulrichs's sexual modernism” (69).

Unlike Kennedy's biography of Ulrichs, this study does not focus exclusively on the man himself, but embraces every sexologist or thinker of any relevance in sometimes bewildering detail. Is a whole chapter on the predilections of the Marquis de Sade, who was writing in the century prior to Ulrichs, necessary? Leck himself admits that “Ulrichs did not write significantly about degeneration” (180). Some writers inadvertently gain an almost equal pride of place with Ulrichs in this survey, none more so perhaps than Karl Maria Kertbeny, who actually coined the term homosexual. Leck situates the “origins of sexual modernism in Central Europe” (77) in their comradeship and lively correspondence in the 1860s. Their shared quest for homosexual emancipation drew them close together, but they quickly fell out—which, Leck speculates, was over the question of Ulrichs's proposal for an “Urning League” (Urning was his term for a male homosexual): Kertbeny, he thinks, would have spotted in the organization's draft constitution that he, as a heterosexual, would have been excluded from membership. Or perhaps it stemmed from Kertbeny's “repugnance for effeminate men,” an appellation he “probably” used to describe Ulrichs (78). The plan evaporated, to Leck's great regret, because “if it had been successfully organized, the League would have been the first modern European organization primarily dedicated to equality for homosexuals” (57). He admits that Ulrichs was not, after all, the first to advocate this: it was, in fact, the Frenchman Charles Fourier, though the reader is left guessing as to when he did so. Because Ulrichs frequently changed his mind, Leck assures us, “he would have abandoned” eventually the strictly homosexual membership criterion for the League “in favor of an alliance with progressive heterosexuals” such as Kertbeny (57). But he did not. There is much in this book that makes Kertbeny seem the more level-headed of the two; by contrast, some of Ulrichs's notions were bizarre, such as his belief that “homosexual desire originated from an involuntary magnetic current” (118).

It is unclear who the audience of this study is supposed to be. The section on “Evolution, Religion, and Degenerative Science” seems aimed at students and contains standard material. At the same time, Leck scatters arcane terms throughout the book, which does not make this a readily approachable study. Readers will go scurrying for their dictionaries when, instead of finding straightforward and serviceable expressions, they are faced with “algolagnia” and “anthopophagy” (Leck's misspelling of “anthropophagy”) (186). Leck falters with foreign languages as well, not least Latin, and is shaky on German umlauts. Sometimes even plain English is flawed. What are we to make of this, for instance: “the cultivated pederast … prefers the active roll” (156)? (In the hay, presumably, but it should be “role.”) Magnus Hirschfeld did not counsel against “the succoring of the foreskin” (150), which sounds like the initiation of fellatio. In fact, if one checks Leck's original German source, it is clear that Hirschfeld was warning against the securing or closing of the foreskin with silver thread as a preventative measure against excessive masturbation.

The study nevertheless offers some useful analyses of pertinent players, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Iwan Bloch, John Addington Symonds, Havelock Ellis, and Alfred Kinsey, who all made significant but not always widely known contributions to sexual science. Yet here again students will find the theoretical jargon heavy going. Leck refers in passing and approvingly to the work of Harry Oosterhuis on Krafft-Ebing, which set me longing for the pellucid English prose of that Dutch scholar, who adroitly draws readers into his narrative (Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity [2000]). Vita Sexualis, by contrast, poses the danger of overwhelming readers instead.