Between Boys: Edward Stevenson's Left to Themselves (1891) and the Birth of Gay Children's Literature

Literary critic James Gifford describes Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson (1858-1942) as "the first modern American gay author" ("Stevenson" 686), and both Noel I. Garde and Byrne Fone credit him with having written the first openly gay American novel (Garde 185; Fone 194). Seven years before E. M. Forster began writing Maurice, Stevenson's Imre, published in 1906, offers an explicit representation of avowed love between adult men and, like Maurice, ends happily with the two men as companions. Stevenson, now mostly forgotten, broke other literary ground as well. Fifteen years before publishing Imre, he released a children's novel titled Left to Themselves: Being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald. The book depicts the passionate friendship between two male youths and, like Imre, concludes with a description of their lifelong companionship. Remarkably, Stevenson identifies his writing for children as "homosexual in essence" and Left to Themselves in particular as a depiction of "Uranian adolescence" (Intersexes 368). "Uranian" is a nineteenth-century term for "homosexual," so Left to Themselves could be described as quite possibly the first avowedly gay American children's book.¹

In 1908, two years after Imre was privately published in Italy under the pen name Xavier Mayne, Stevenson released The Intersexes: A History of Simili-sexualism as a Problem in Social Life, a study and defense of homosexuality in which he comments on the possibility of homosexual children's literature. In The Intersexes, he offers as an antidote to the absence of uranian books for children his own White Cockades (1887), about a romantic friendship between Prince Charles Stuart and a devoted Scottish youth named Andrew, and Left to Themselves, which he calls even more distinguishably homosexual.² Stevenson describes Left to Themselves as "a romantic story in which a youth in his latter teens is irresistibly attracted to a much younger lad, and becomes, con amore responsible for the latter's personal safety, in a series of events that throw them together—for life" (Intersexes 368).

In this essay, I note the significance of Stevenson's work to the history of children's literature, and to gay or queer children's literature specifically. Children's books such as these provide a vitally important contribution to literary and cultural discourses on childhood and sexuality and merit more attention than they have traditionally received. In fact, whereas only 500 copies of Imre were produced, Left to Themselves was printed multiple times (Gifford, Introduction 22, 25). Reading Stevenson's boys' books can reveal how same-sex love was represented to children at the end of the nineteenth century, just as homosexual identity itself was crystallizing and receiving more acknowledgment in American culture. I argue here that Left to Themselves codes homosexuality and the dynamics of the closet through its depiction of blackmail, secrecy, and self-disclosure, and promotes same-sex love through the conflict between the shamelessly amorous boys and their mysterious antagonist, also coded as homosexual.

Edward Stevenson and the Queer Tradition in Children's Literature

In its representation of same-sex desire, Left to Themselves anticipates gay children's literature of the twentieth century. Standard histories of depictions of homosexuality in children's and young adult literature understandably trace its emergence to the Stonewall era of the late 1960s. Kenneth Kidd, one of the first scholars to address gay children's literature critically, writes in 1998 that "explicitly themed works have appeared only in the last several decades" (114). Critics frequently cite John Donovan's I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip. (1969) as the first gay American novel for children or young adults (see Jenkins 180; Trites 144). To be sure, many homosocial works for children, including those depicting passionate same-sex relationships, long preceded Donovan's novel, though I'll Get There has appeared to be one of the first to do so more self-consciously and explicitly. Stevenson's Left to Themselves is another much earlier example.

A clear tradition of homoeroticism and homosociality prevails in boys' fiction pre-dating Stevenson. Kidd notes that "many classics...