IT WAS 1:30 A.M. when I entered the absolutely highest bid I was willing to make and held my breath. Everyone who has ever had an eBay moment can empathize. Surely every other gay book collector in the world was after this scarce title, and I could only wonder how rich they were. But in a moment the screen was flashing and I was screaming to my partner, “Paul, I’ve won! I’ve won!” Copy #116 of Edward Prime-Stevenson’s The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life was mine.
Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson (1858–1942), although known to a few gay scholars, is not exactly a household name. This is not surprising, if only because he always hid behind a pseudonym when writing his gay-themed works. He also lied about his age and enjoyed hoodwinking an audience whenever he could. More to the point, his works are to this day not easy to find. The general outlines of his life are established, though details are hard to come by. Born in Madison, New Jersey, he was modestly known in his day as a music critic and writer of fiction and poetry. In mid-career, he abandoned all this and fled to Europe, where he wrote two classics in gay literature, Imre and The Intersexes. He died largely unknown in a Lausanne hotel with a carton of unpublished works in tow. Rediscovered in the 1950’s by Noel I. Grade (Edgar Leoni), who referred to him as “the father of modern homosexual literature,” Stevenson remains more skeletal than a fleshed-out literary figure.
In 1906, he published with a private press in Italy a book titled Imre: A Memorandum. The novel tells the story of two homosexual men who gradually disclose their true nature to each other in a time of sexual subterfuge, and who wind up, not dead or punished, but together and happy by story’s end. Stevenson’s novel beat E. M. Forster’s Maurice, a better known gay romance, by five years—or really 65, since Forster’s book wasn’t published until the early 1970’s. Imre is a gorgeous piece of writing, designed to appeal to gay men of some learning who might see themselves reflected in its text. The novel goes light on the sex, understandably, but it offers dramatic psychological landscapes and moving situations. Stevenson meant it as a manifesto, and apparently he oversaw its very limited circulation closely, since he knew where each numbered copy went. While the book was published under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne, Stevenson delighted in hearing of readers’ attempts to guess his identity. But if Imre was a venture in belles-lettres, Stevenson’s other work, written concurrently but not published until 1909, was a work of scholarship. Intended to loosen the medical establishment’s pathological grip on homosexuality, The Intersexes was a 640-page tome that was published privately by an unknown Italian press, probably in Naples, in an edition of 125 copies. In a letter to his friend and literary editor Paul Elmer More in 1906, Stevenson outlined his hopes for Intersexes, as “a very full, carefully systematized, minutely complete History of Homosexualism, and study of the homosexual instinct—reviewing it in every social phase, every relationship to human civilization, and analyzing, or presenting, clinically and typically each projection so to say of this mysterious impulse.” Intersexes was the first great defense of homosexuality in English, appropriately enough written by a freedom-loving American who could only speak freely by escaping American shores for what he termed the “light” of Europe. Stevenson insisted that his work would depict everything typical or exceptional, “classic or modern, barbarous or civilized, oriental or occidental, vicious and debased, æsthetic or practical, ennobling and ethic[al].” Here was a Henry James character in the flesh, combining the daring and rawness of America with the sophistication and savoir-faire of Europe. Stevenson’s choice of Xavier Mayne as a penname reflected no desire to hide but rather the realization that his own name, one with no scientific credentials, would hurt his book’s chances for serious consideration by the medical establishment. He had seen how homosexual author John Addington Symonds had had to resort to finding a co-author in scientist Havelock Ellis in order to find a voice in Sexual Inversion (1897), and he knew that Symonds’ contribution had indeed been subsequently belittled as amateurish. He wanted the arguments of Intersexes to speak on their own merits. Defending homosexuality as a product of nature, The Intersexes was painted on a broad historical canvas. Stevenson dedicated the volume to Richard von Krafft-Ebing, “that pioneer in dispassionate, humane, scientific study of similisexualism,” without whose prompting and help the book would never have been written. Stevenson adopted the scientific style of earlier sexologists, with case studies and reasoned analysis to augment his theories. Stevenson bragged that his ability to speak six languages and his being “at ease in dozens of mighty diverse grades of social class” would give his book a new wrinkle that earlier works lacked. He called it “a sincere, and scientific work” with “popular aspects,” and he added: “[A]s it has some popular good to do, I want it to have them.” Of what significance is The Intersexes to our own day? First, the work stands as a significant historical moment in gay rights, a brave counterattack upon negative attitudes and a challenge to the medical establishment. Stevenson clearly wanted to speak to gay people themselves, lending solace and reasonableness where little of either could be found. Second, the book stands as a valuable window on the past. Stevenson shows us how his world saw homosexuality. The work’s vast stock of anecdotes and case studies can illuminate our understanding of 19th- and early 20th-century attitudes. It casts light onto a largely dark subject by revealing the kinds of lives that homosexuals were able to lead in this era. Consequently, Intersexes remains a major marker in gay studies. The shame is that, outside of gay literary studies, the book is not well known, and it’s extremely difficult to find a copy outside of a few libraries where copies exist. Was Intersexes ever for sale, or was its distribution strictly up to its author? The only clue is a printed notice tipped into a recently discovered copy of Imre, which identifies four bookstores where both Imre and Intersexes could be obtained—in Naples, Florence, Geneva, and New York. No records of these bookstores of the past are extant, but we now know that Intersexes could indeed have been purchased in the U.S. Unfortunately, no surviving copies bear booksellers’ labels. What part did Stevenson directly play in distributing his books? Only six of the surviving copies show his handwriting. Four of these direct Intersexes to libraries where he knew the book would be welcome: Lausanne University Psychiatric Center (#15)* and Lausanne University (#41)—obvious choices since this city is where he spent his final years; the French National Library (#60); the British Library (#115), with spidery cursive attesting it as a “gift of the author 14 Oct 1911.” Copy #95 also says “With the compliments of the Author,” but there’s nothing to indicate where it was going. Another copy (#3), recently sold to a private collector for $15,000, is coyly inscribed to Norman Douglas: “To N.D—with the kind regards of the Literary successor of the author of ‘The Intersexes’/B-U.S.A., 1868† /D. Calcutta, 1918. X.M.” Certainly such a joke lets us know that Stevenson and Douglas were close buddies. Stevenson often visited Capri (which is close to Naples, where Intersexes was probably printed), and it was there that Douglas held court with his circle as a great gay gossip of his time. He had settled there after getting busted for picking up boys in the British Museum. One squealed, and he’d had to flee in 1916. Among Douglas’s circle were two men who we now know also owned copies of Intersexes. Quite notorious was the owner of #25, Alphonsus Montague Summers (1880–1948), an eccentric scholar of the Gothic and the occult. He claimed to be a Catholic priest, and #25’s ornately designed bookplate shows St. Hieronymus (Jerome) in prayer. He was quite the character when haunting the British Museum reading room (apparently a center for early gay studies!) wearing a black cassock, cloak, and shoveled hat. He wrote an essay on the Marquis de Sade for the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, and he belonged to the Order of Chaeronea, a homosexual secret society. Summers’ copy went to Duke University by way of Gershon Legman (1917–1999), a collector of dirty jokes who’s credited with inventing the vibrating dildo at the age of twenty. Another Intersexes owner was Thomas Spencer Jerome (1864–1914), a friend of Norman Douglas who left copy #87, heavily annotated and thoroughly read, to his alma mater, the University of Michigan. Jerome, a socially prominent American lawyer, had abandoned his legal career in 1899 to become the American Consul in Capri, where he lived with Charles Freer and where he became an expert on the emperor Tiberius. As part of the Douglas circle, he probably knew Stevenson as well. More infamous yet, the Douglas circle also included the dissolute Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, a French writer in exile after fleeing Paris following a homosexual scandal, who was the basis for the fictional character Dayneford in Stevenson’s 1913 story “Out of the Sun.” While only these six copies are directly traceable to Stevenson, the author is probably responsible for sending a copy (#44) to the Library of Congress and to the New York Public Library (#120), Stevenson’s old stomping-ground—but both copies have long since disappeared from the shelves. Because Intersexes makes clear his debt to Magnus Hirschfeld, the famed founder of the Institute for Sexology in Berlin, it is highly probable that he sent a copy to that library in Berlin, which would have been destroyed by the Nazis in the 1930’s. We also know that a copy was in the collection of Jacob Schorer (1866–1957), the president of the Dutch branch of Hirschfeld’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee, probably also a Stevenson gift, but Schorer’s library was seized by the Nazis in 1940. Only one other copy (#33, privately owned) suggests a direct if mysterious line to Stevenson: it is blind-stamped as belonging to a “William R. Smith/Au Delá [sic].” The explanation may lie in a letter to young Leonard Bacon from Stevenson that extols the freedom of Europe over the repression of America: “No wonder that so many of your compatriots and mine will rather live in a garret au-deça, than in a Commonwealth Avenue or Riverside-Drive palace au-delà.” Like all writers, Stevenson loved to repeat his bon mots, and it is my guess that Smith was someone known to him—well enough to get a copy of Intersexes, a correspondent who had not made the same “escape” to Europe that Stevenson had, but remained “hamstrung” in America. Placed into #33 are newspaper clippings from about 1917, one recounting a college student’s inexplicable suicide, and another concerning an elevator-boy’s lawsuit for millions against a rich old man’s estate. Clearly these clippings harmonize with similar instances that fill Intersexes. Was Smith saving them to send to Stevenson for his files? In addition to the above, we know of several other Intersexes owners. Anthony Reid, a noted British anthologist of homosexual verse, owned a copy (#23, now privately owned). After dogged research I discovered who Neil Little was, the owner of #65, now in Monash University in faraway Australia. Little was a British painter who was good friends with Chester Kallman, the partner of W. H. Auden, and all three were habitués of Ischia and Capri, suggesting that they knew the Capri circle. Another copy, #27 (for sale), was once owned by Edgar Leoni, who was (as noted above) an early champion of Stevenson in articles written as Noel I. Garde. Several other owners, not surprisingly, had a more overt interest in sexology, and we recognize the handwriting of Dr. Erik Undritz of Basel (1901–1984), who lavishly inscribed his copy of Intersexes (#8, University of Zurich), which he called “this curious book,” to three colleagues in his field (“the Zurich Intersex Study Triad Stars”) in 1956. Number #47 (Yale) has written on the cover “To Dr. W. O. Stillman” (1856–1924), an Albany physician who as a humane society leader and medical author and lecturer apparently had an interest in this subject. The copy in the Oxford-Bodleian Library (#48) belonged to a famous authority on European erotica, Charles R. Dawes (1879–1964), whose collection now fills the “Private Cases” of the British Library. Duke University Medical Center’s copy #100 belonged to Thomas Painter (1905–1978), an activist-researcher who made considerable contributions to the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, a 1930’s American group. Painter, who was gay himself, convinced many gay contemporaries to take part in the study; but as a non-professional in a scientific field, his own work was suppressed until he went to work for the Kinsey Institute. Alfred Kinsey himself owned a copy of Intersexes that he bought on the Continent in 1943; number #117 is now in Bloomington, Indiana. Copy #66 (coll. Raimondo Biffi) is inscribed to Leonard Abbott (1878–1953) from Alden Freeman, the philanthropist and founder of New York’s libertarian Ferrer Modern School. Abbott was a major anarchist of his day, a close friend of the fascinating bisexual author and fellow anarchist George Sylvester Viereck. Copy #68 (University of Wisconsin) belonged to Theodore Schroeder (1864–1953), a lawyer and a member of Leonard Abbott’s Free Speech League. Very much an advocate of freedom of the press, Schroeder annotated his copy with further examples of scandals to complement Stevenson’s collection. The third copy from anarchists’ hands is my own (#116). Yes, that precious eBay purchase is in good condition, stamped a dozen times with the words “Property of the Detroit I.W.W. Unions.” Somehow #116 wound up in an American “Wobblies” library, thence to a Chicago owner, and finally to a little barn in the middle of Indiana, where an auctioneer described the book as involving “an alternative lifestyle,” whereupon bidders literally backed away from even looking at the book. Thank God my eBay seller Vic Bagley was brave enough to buy it! In the end, of the 125 copies that were printed, 34 are accounted for. Four are currently for sale on the Internet (#2, #10, #95, #103) at prices ranging from $3000-7500. Four are missing from their institutions, but two locations (Lausanne and Duke) own two copies each of this rare book. Eighteen copies are in libraries where you can see them, and the rest are in collectors’ hands. Though the majority of copies are hard-bound, six remain in the paperback format of their original issue. This suggests that most owners thought highly enough of this work to try to preserve it, or to extend its circulation life. One last factoid: only seven other books have ever, so far as I know, had a complete census taken of their whereabouts (the First Folio of Shakespeare, the Gutenberg Bible, Audubon’s Birds of America, Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus, Darwin’s Origin of Species, the King James Bible, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass). What all this sleuthing leads me to is the conclusion that gay networking was strong a hundred years ago, especially in educated and literary circles. Just as we know that copies of Stevenson’s novel Imre were circulated in manuscript as well as in print, I believe that many copies of Intersexes followed a similar route. Certainly the Capri circle needs further study. But aside from a few friends, it seems clear that Stevenson wanted to direct copies to the “psychiaters” of his day as well as to learned institutions, places where he felt they would do the most good. While it had only a small, private printing, Intersexes was clearly written to be read. As more copies come to light, Stevenson’s original plan will become clearer, doubtless with more surprises on the way. But in the end I have a great respect for both his zeal and method, as he was indeed able to broadcast his noble and monumental defense in spite of very limited means. Thanks to Raimondo Biffi, Jean-Claude Féray, Tom Sargant, Burton Weiss, David Deiss, and librarians at the universities and libraries mentioned in the text. James Gifford is professor emeritus at Mohawk Valley Community College, NY, and most recently edited Glances Backward: An Anthology of American Homosexual Writing, 1830-1920
