Uranian

Not to be confused with uranic.

The proposed uranian flag.

An alternate uranian flag.

Uranian is another term for a homosexual man, meaning a man, man-aligned, or masculine-aligned person who is attracted to men, men-aligned, or masculine-aligned people.

The term is also sometimes used by neutral-aligned, abinary, or unaligned non-binary people who are attracted to men, men-aligned people, masculine aligned people, and other non-binary people who identify as uranians.

It is sometimes more broadly defined as non-women attracted to non-women, including all NBLM, MLNB, and NBLNB attractions. However, this definition is not the most commonly recognized, and not all non-binary people feel comfortable being included under uranian attraction.

It is the direct historical masculine equivalent of lesbian.

Etymology

The word refers to a dialogue in Plato's Symposium on male eros or love. In the dialogue, Pausanias distinguishes between two types of love, symbolized by two different accounts of the birth of Aphrodite, the goddess of love:

• Heavenly birth, born of Uranus or the heavens, a birth in which "the female has no part." Uranian Aphrodite is associated with a noble love for male youths and is the source of sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's term urning.
• Common birth, as the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Dionic 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 urnings to be essentially feminine and dionings to be masculine in nature.

History

The term was first published by sexologist and activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in a series of five booklets collected under the title Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe or The Riddle of Man–Manly Love. Ulrichs developed his terminology before the first public use of the term homosexual.

Uranian was adopted by English-language advocates of homosexual emancipation in the Victorian era, such as philosopher Edward Carpenter and literary critic John Addington Symonds, who used it to describe a comradely love that would bring about true democracy. In a letter to lover Robert Ross, Oscar Wilde famously wrote:

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.

Flag

While there is no widely accepted symbol of uranian pride, Twitter user BelyaevValentin proposed a uranian flag on or before June 2020. The flag is similar to his alternate gay flag.

An alternate uranian flag was created by Tumblr user beyond-mogai-pride-flags on February 19, 2021.