STANDARD HISTORIES of young adult literature date its emergence to the United States in the late 1960s, when publishers and librarians began promoting more realistic novels targeting teenagers with spending money as a specific consumer demographic. However, its genealogy stretches back at least a century earlier to the publication of boys’ boarding school fiction, such as Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days in 1857, and domestic novels about girlhood development, such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women in 1868/69. Although purportedly for middle- and high-school readers between the ages of twelve and eighteen, YA literature has become a publishing juggernaut by also appealing to pre-teens and adults, and some of the most profitable authors of the past 25 years have made their careers in YA, including Suzanne Collins, Rick Riordan, Stephenie Meyer, and John Green. Given its emphasis on contemporary social issues and its role in helping youth navigate adolescence, YA books about gay teenagers finding love, encountering homophobia, and coming out have become an important subgenre.
Scholars of gay young adult literature understandably focus on the Stonewall era and later, pointing to John Donovan’s 1969 novel I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip, published the same month as the Stonewall Riot, as the first to allude to a physical same-sex encounter between two teenage boys, Davy and Altshuler. One authoritative source (Cart and Jenkins, 2006) dubbed it “the first young adult novel with gay content” and “the first to deal with homosexuality.” However, Donovan’s book was neither the first adolescent novel to make same-sex love explicit nor the first work of fiction for youth to depict a sexual encounter between boys.
Sixty years before Donovan’s book, Edward Irenæus Prime-Stevenson published a comprehensive 1909 study of homosexuality titled The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life. Best known now as the author of the first explicitly gay American novel, Imre: A Memorandum, in 1906, he wrote as a humanist and covered topics such as history and art, in contrast to most other book-length works of sexology from the turn of the century, which were written by physicians and psychiatrists for an audience of medical professionals.
Born in New Jersey in 1858 but later settling abroad, Prime-Stevenson astonishingly acknowledges the existence and value of homosexual youth, whom he calls “young Uranians,” and includes a section on homosexual juvenile fiction in which he names his own two boys’ novels as examples. The term “Uranian” derives both from 19th-century German homosexual rights pioneer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who proposed it as the name for same-sex-loving men, and from Greek mythology, in which Aphrodite Urania represented heavenly or spiritual love as opposed to sensual or earthly passion. “Fiction for young people that has uranian hints naturally is thought the last sort for circulating among British boys and girls,” Prime-Stevenson writes. Not much has changed in this respect since 1909.
James Gifford, a trailblazing scholar of gay literature, was one of the first to call attention to Prime-Stevenson’s “subversion” of the boy book form by the injection of overt same-sex love between adolescents. His first boy book, White Cockades: An Incident of the “Forty-Five” from 1887, follows the late-19th-century vogue for boys’ historical fiction and depicts a sixteen-year-old Scottish lad named Andrew, who helps Charles Edward Stuart evade English soldiers after the Jacobite defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Anticipating later gay lingo, Prime-Stevenson repeatedly describes Andrew as hiding Bonnie Prince Charlie in a secret chamber of the family manor referred to as “a sort of closet.” When the villain, a sadistic English officer, finally insists on searching the hiding place, he demands to be shown “this wonderful hole.” In The Intersexes, Prime-Stevenson refers to Andrew’s “passionate devotion” for the Great Pretender and describes the youth’s feelings as “homosexual in essence.”
Filled with suspense, White Cockades depicts much fearful grasping and clutching in the closet and declarations of love between the youth and the prince. When Stuart finally makes his escape, Andrew leaves Scotland with him. Prime-Stevenson concludes the novel by noting that Stuart “and his gallant looking protégé seemed inseparable even in private,” as Andrew remains forever by his side. These characters lack the language Davy uses in I’ll Get There to discuss his relationship with Altschuler, but Prime-Stevenson nonetheless makes clear both the emotional connection and physical affection between Andrew and the young prince.
Prime-Stevenson describes his second boys’ novel, Left to Themselves: Being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald (1891), as even “more distinguishable” for its “sentiment of uranian adolescence.” Seventeen-year-old Philip, an orphan in the care of a resort proprietor, rescues a young boy staying at the hotel from assault by a tramp, and the two fall instantly in love. When Gerald’s widowed father writes to summon his son to meet him in Nova Scotia, Philip chaperones the youth as they make the journey from upstate New York while evading a mysterious antagonist who pursues the boys and seeks to kidnap the handsome Gerald. The youths must deal with a shipwreck, Gerald’s serious illness during their brief time as castaways, and an attempt to blackmail Philip over his dead father’s criminal past before the elder youth successfully confronts the villain and turns him over to police.
Like White Cockades, Left to Themselves ends with the central pair remaining lifelong companions, and Prime-Stevenson confirms this reading in The Intersexes, where he summarizes the novel and its conclusion 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 unexpected events that throw them together—for life.” Philip and Gerald refrain from any action more intimate than clasping hands and embracing passionately, but their romantic feelings and committed companionship seem clear. Both of his boy books anticipate later gay YA literature by depicting adolescent youths who come to realize their same-sex desires and must confront hostile forces while doing so.
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Another tale for a teen audience preceded I’ll Get There in depicting a sexual encounter between two boys. C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s 1908 short story “Evensong and Morwe Song” presents a remarkable case for its reference to an obvious sexual act in a story for and about two adolescent schoolboys. Scott Moncrieff, born in Stirlingshire, Scotland, in 1889, is best known now for producing the first English translation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as Remembrance of Things Past (1922–1930). As a youth, he attended an elite English boarding school for boys, Winchester College, where he cofounded and edited a literary magazine for students titled The New Field. According to his biographer Jean Findlay, Scott Moncrieff discovered his homosexuality as a youth and developed passionate crushes on several schoolfellows, to whom he dedicated love poetry.
Findlay describes how Scott Moncrieff had read and been inspired by Uranian writers such as Laurence Housman and by his encounters with friends of Oscar Wilde such as Robbie Ross and Ross’ private secretary Christopher Sclater Millard. Published in The New Field while Scott Moncrieff was in his final year at Winchester, “Evensong and Morwe Song” features a sexual relationship between two boys, and the fallout from the ensuing scandal may have doomed the otherwise accomplished scholar’s admission to Oxford. Instead he studied law and English literature at the University of Edinburgh, received a commission, fought in the Great War, and may have had a romantic relationship with celebrated war poet Wilfred Owen. He later embarked on a career as a literary translator but died from cancer at age forty in 1930.
Scott Moncrieff came into the orbit of a loosely affiliated group of late-19th- and early 20th-century gay men who mostly published poetry about the beauty of male youths. In addition to his friendships with Wilde’s associates, he met Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge through a mutual friend while Bainbrigge was at Cambridge, and the two became lovers. Bainbrigge was killed at the Battle of Épehy in September 1918, but he wrote a play while an undergraduate at Cambridge titled Achilles in Scyros, which he dedicated to Scott Moncrieff. It was published posthumously in 1927 by Cayme Press, known for its Uranian publications. Bainbrigge’s dedicatory verse about Scott Moncrieff refers to “Eros boy-like” whose nude form reveals “his toy (like/ Some curious peach) that nestles warm between/ His dainty rosy thighs.” Seven years before Scott Moncrieff’s own death, Francis Edwin Murray, who had published major volumes of Uranian verse by writers such as John Gambril Nicholson, re-published “Evensong and Morwe Song” as a pamphlet for private circulation.
The title of Scott Moncrieff’s story comes from the General Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “If even-song and morwe-song accord,/ Let see now who shall tell the first tale.” Set at the fictional school of Gainsborough in the 1880s, the story opens with two schoolboys in a field. Maurice kneels in front of Carruthers, clearly an allusion to the former having just performed fellatio on the latter.
“And if we are found out?” asked Maurice. He was still on his knees in the thicket, and, as he looked up to where his companion stood in an awkward fumbling attitude, his face seemed even more than usually pale and meagre in the grey broken light. It was with rather forced nonchalance that Carruthers answered, “O, the sack, I suppose”—and he stopped aghast as the other’s expression.
Carruthers avoids detection, graduates, and matriculates to Oxford, later taking holy orders and becoming headmaster at a less prestigious boys’ school. Maurice, however, acquires a reputation for his encounters and indeed finds himself expelled, later writing to Carruthers to blame him for his corruption and cursing him because his shame will mean that his own sons will be forced to attend the kind of lesser school they had scorned as boys. Years later, Carruthers, now a headmaster himself, must decide what to do about two boys caught in a sexual encounter, and Scott Moncrieff emphasizes the adult Carruthers’s hypocrisy as he excoriates the boys: “His weighty arguments (mainly borrowed from the boys’ housemaster), his ears deaf to excuse or contradiction, his flaying sarcasm and his pessimistic prophecies drew great salt tears from the younger boy’s eyes.”
He allows the penitent youth to return to his house but decides on the harshest penalty of expulsion for the older youth, Hilary. Only when looking up his address to write to his father does he realize the disgraced boy is the son of Maurice, with whom he himself had engaged in a tryst. He attempts to recall Hilary, presumably to express his change of heart about the expulsion, but the boy has already left for the train station. The story has understandably been read as the young Scott Moncrieff’s condemnation of adult hypocrisy, which it no doubt was, but reading the story in the context of Uranian boys’ literature foregrounds Scott Moncrieff’s criticism of fellow youths as well.
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In the juvenile stories of Uranian poet and Anglican priest Edwin Emmanuel Bradford, mostly published in the popular The Boy’s Own Paper between about 1890 and 1910, same-sex love between boys appears as an ideal that takes the form of chivalric romantic friendship. Bradford’s collections of Uranian verse for adults, beginning with Sonnets, Songs and Ballads in 1908, explicitly celebrated the love of youth, which reviewers recognized. On the occasion of his 1923 publication of a verse novel titled Ralph Rawdon: A Story in Verse, The Poetry Review observed: “Mr. Bradford is a lover of boys and he has sought for his inspiration amongst them with great success. He exalts the love of man and man or man and boy over that of man and woman.” Bradford’s stories for boys and youth prove similarly explicit.
In his juvenile magazine fiction, Bradford’s boys often undertake adventures together in imperial Russia or colonial North Africa or face everyday challenges at English public schools, demonstrate pluck and courage by defending their companions from thieves or bullies, and commit to the highest ideals of virtue, honesty, and love. In his story “Deo Dante Dedi: A Story of Charterhouse School,” co-authored with a Charterhouse student named E. Gascoigne Hogg, Bradford writes about the passionate friendship of Rawdon Currell, described as so beautiful he appears like a Greek god, and a delicate youth named Sinclair, who falls ill from pneumonia. Though a successful and popular athlete and son of a famous cricketer, Currell decides not to play in an important cricket match to keep vigil at his friend’s sickbed, which Bradford represents as a tremendous sacrifice. Currell risks the threat of shame and social ostracism for his romantic friend and chooses loyalty and love over self-interest.
Scott Moncrieff’s depiction of young Carruthers in “Evensong and Morwe Song” proves at odds with the self-sacrificing boy-friends of Bradford’s stories. Carruthers, with “forced nonchalance,” callously admits to the terrified Maurice that they might be expelled if caught. Carruthers’ failure to demonstrate care for the younger boy, his guilt in actively seducing him, and his smug judgment of Maurice for later developing a “reputation” for sexual activity with other boys indicate that Carruthers is already corrupt as a boy long before he becomes a hypocritical adult. Uranian boys’ literature instead emphasizes chivalric care for other boys and intimate bonds between chums, not fleeting sexual encounters marked by shame or cruelty. The narrator in “Evensong and Morwe Song” indicates that this is the first offense for Hilary, Maurice’s son, who bravely remains silent in the face of the headmaster’s harsh condemnation. With his younger companion escaping with just a severe scolding, Hilary bears his much harsher punishment and quickly leaves school as commanded. What adds to the adult Carruthers’ shame is that Hilary does what he did not: accept the punishment on behalf of the boy he seduced.
The existence of these works by Prime-Stevenson, Bradford, and Scott Moncrieff depicting love or sex between adolescent boys does not diminish the importance of Donovan’s I’ll Get There as a milestone in gay YA literature. It does, however, indicate a longer chronology for explicit works of homosexual juvenile fiction than has generally been acknowledged. Revisiting these earlier books and stories can reveal how they navigated a time of intense anti-gay hostility and evaded censors while still offering representations of sympathetic, courageous, and empowered gay youths. Not merely fun reads from gay literary history, these precursors to contemporary queer YA may hold valuable insights for the present.
References
Cart, Michael and Christine A. Jenkins. The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969-2004. The Scarecrow Press Inc., 2006.
D’Arch Smith, Timothy. Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English “Uranian” Poets, 1880 to 1930. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Findlay, Jean. Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
Gifford, James. “Left to Themselves: The Subversive Boy Books of Edward Prime-Stevenson (1858-1942).” The Journal of American Culture, vol. 24, no. 3-4, Fall-Winter 2001.
Prime-Stevenson, Edward [as Xavier Mayne]. The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life. 1908.
“Summary Judgment and Other Short Reviews [Review of E.E. Bradford’s Ralph Rawdon: A Story in Verse].” The Poetry Review, vol. 14, no. 2, March/April 1923.
Eric L. Tribunella is the author, most recently, of Uranian Children’s Literature and the Early Gay Movement in England: The Romance of Youth (Routledge, 2026).
