Kertbeny died in the Hungarian capital on January 23, 1882, officially from a stroke but reputedly from syphilis. Contrary to popular belief and probably because of his designation as "Dr. M." by Jäger (a designation perpetuated by Havelock Ellis and curiously persistent in modern scholarship), Kertbeny had no medical, scientific, or legal training.

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On June 29, 2002, the Lambda Budapest Gay Fellowship erected a tombstone in Fiumei Street National Graveyard to commemorate his largely forgotten achievement. To this day, his writings are available only in German. Relevant excerpts, however, are frequently translated.

The term "homosexuality," coined in 1869, with "heterosexuality" as its opposite, has led to a binary concept that oversimplifies the complexity of human sexual behavior.

Henry Havelock Ellis--British psychologist and writer--was one of the first modern thinkers to challenge Victorian taboos against the frank and objective discussion of sex.

German-born Magnus Hirschfeld deserves recognition as a significant theorist of sexuality and the most prominent advocate of homosexual emancipation of his time.

The most important sex researcher of the twentieth century, Alfred C. Kinsey contributed groundbreaking studies of male and female sexual behavior in America.

The carefully detailed case studies of nineteenth-century psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing shed light on the sexual habits of a wide spectrum of men and women.

Although the Napoleonic Code is sometimes said to have decriminalized homosexuality in France, that distinction belongs to the French Revolution.

Paragraph 175 was the German law prohibiting sex between men; strengthened by the Nazis, it was the statue under which homosexuals were sent to concentration camps.

Nineteenth-Century German activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was both the first modern theorist of homosexuality and the first homosexual to "come out" publicly.

The multifaceted Gore Vidal is important in the gay literary heritage because of the straightforwardness with which he pursued gay themes and included gay characters in his work.