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. He translated works by Hungarian poets and writers into German such as those by 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 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. He made a variety of contacts in his travels. He was Charles Baudelaire's only personal Austro-Hungarian contact. 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". Writings on sexuality He settled in Berlin in 1868, when he was 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. 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. He argued that the Prussian sodomy law, Paragraph 143, which