Prime-Stevenson, Edward I.

views updated

PRIME-STEVENSON, Edward I.

PRIME-STEVENSON, Edward I. (b. 23 July 1868; d. 23 July 1942), writer.

Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson, a descendent of early European settlers in New England, was born in Madison, New Jersey, to Paul E. Stevenson, a Presbyterian minister and school principal, and Cornelia Prime, who was fifty-two years old at the time of his birth. He began to write for publication while still in school, and though he was admitted to the New Jersey bar, he never practiced law. He was a music critic and book reviewer for the New York Independent and was on the staff of Harper's Weekly. His writing was broad-based and he was widely recognized as a critic of music (particularly opera), drama, and literature. While almost nothing is known about his personal life, it has generally been assumed that he was gay.

Particularly interested in European and Asian literature, Prime-Stevenson claimed to be fluent in nine languages. He wrote several novels and short stories and it was in his early novels aimed at an adolescent market that he carefully and cautiously introduced the subject of homosexuality, particularly in The White Cockades: An Incident in the "Forty-five" and Left to Themselves: Being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald. The first, set at the time of the Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland, was later described by Prime-Stevenson as featuring a "passionate devotion from a rustic youth toward the Prince," which, with "its recognition," is "half-hinted at as homosexual in essence" (Intersexes, p. 367). Prime-Stevenson claimed the second novel conveyed a "sentiment of uranian [i.e., homosexual] adolescence" (Intersexes, pp. 367–368).

For much of his early life, Prime-Stevenson divided his time between the United States and various parts of Europe, moving to Europe permanently in 1900 because of his dislike for the homophobia of American society.

In 1908, under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne, Prime-Stevenson published Imre: A Memorandum, often regarded as the first homosexual novel by an American. The novel's plot centers around a love affair between Oswald, a thirty-year-old who is spending a summer of language study in Hungary, and the twenty-three-year-old Imre, a Hungarian cavalry officer. Prime-Stevenson's most important nonfiction book, The Intersexes: A History of Similsexualism as a Problem in Social Life, the first largescale study of homosexuality in English, was published that same year. It is an analysis of almost everything that had been published on homosexuality up to that time in both the homophile movement press in Europe and in the psychiatric and medical literature. Since homosexuality, he believed, was inborn, it could not be cured. Although the "uranian" might suffer from social disapproval, homosexuality was neither an abnormality nor a disease, and the homosexual individual would not and could not be other than he is.

The most valuable aspect of the book (written under his pseudonym) is his first-hand observations of the LGBT subculture in the United States and Europe, ranging from the nobleman in his salon to the hustler on the street. He also recounted scandals associated with the exposure of homosexuals, the dangers of real and threatened blackmail, and the names of illustrious figures of the past whom he regarded as homosexual. In short, in modern research terms, he was an outstanding participant-observer of the LGBT scene and his observations were not matched, at least in English, until the latter part of the twentieth century.