LEFT TO THEMSELVES.....
Said to be the first-ever gay youth novel, this 1891 story follows the adventures of twelve year-old Gerald Saxton embarking on a trip from New York, to meet his father in Nova Scotia. He is chaperoned by seventeen year old Philip Touchtone. During the trip, their steamer sinks, they are shipwrecked, and marooned on an island. In addition, a shady antagonist is stalking the two. And while all this is happening, a friendship of mutual affection develops between the boys.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY.....
Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson (January 29, 1858 – July 23, 1942) was an American writer. He used the pseudonym Xavier Mayne. Prime-Stevenson (also known as Edward Stevenson, Edward Prime Stevenson, and E. Irenaeus Prime Stevenson) was born in 1858 in Madison, New Jersey, the youngest of five children born to Paul E. Stevenson and Cornelia Prime. His father was a Presbyterian minister and a school principal; his mother came from a distinguished literary and academic figures.
After studying law, Stevenson decided to become a writer and a journalist. During the 1880s, he began a career as a critic in New York City for Harper's Weekly, a political magazine, and as book reviewer and music critic for the weekly Independent. In 1896, Stevenson published The Square of Sevens, and the Parallelogram: An Authoritative Method of Cartomancy with a Prefatory Note by Robert Antrobus that was supposedly written in 1735. However, it is believed that Prime-Stevenson was the author. In 1906, under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne, Stevenson published the homosexually themed novel Imre: A Memorandum, and in 1908 a sexology study, The Intersexes, a defense of homosexuality from a scientific, legal, historical, and personal perspective.
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