White Cockades: An Incident of the "Forty-Five" by [LGBTQ+] STEVENSON, Edward Irenaeus (Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson, aka. Xavier Mayne) - 1887

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1887. First Edition. Hardcover. The New Jersey author's first book, a juvenile novel set during the 1745 Jacobite uprising in Scotland and centered around "the romantic friendship between Prince Charles Stuart and a devoted Scottish youth named Andrew" (Tribunella, Eric L. "Between Boys: Edward Stevenson's Left to Themselves (1891) and the birth of gay children's literature." Children's Literature Association Quarterly (37:4) [Winter 2012], p.374-388). Stevenson was, "so far as is known, the first American male to write and publish a sympathetic and explicitly gay novel" (Austen, p.20). He produced these two novels, Imre: A Memorandum (1906) and The Intersexes (1908) under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne, and while best-known for these explicit works, by his own description, White Cockades contained a "half-hinted" erotic relationship between its characters. Tribunella notes that, while the novel "seems more consistent with the not uncommon homoeroticism of other boys' books of the period...nevertheless, the book is rather astonishing in its description of the intensity of the attraction between the two." White Cockades, as well as his subsequent juvenile novel Left to Themselves, Being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald (1891), were the first works in which Stevenson would explore the homoerotic subtext that would inform his later work. Scarce; no other copies in commerce (January, 2019); OCLC notes 13 holdings for the American edition. YOUNG 2440. Octavo (18.5cm); blue cloth (we also note a variant bound in brown cloth), with titling and pictorial elements stamped in gilt, white, and red on spine and front cover; blue-gray endpapers; [4],iv,216,[2],[8]pp ads; illustrated frontispiece. Wear to spine ends and extremities, sunning to spine, with scattered rubbing and a few faint stains to cloth on covers; partial crack to rear hinge, gutter cracked at title/copyright page, with three patches of glue residue to front pastedown; contemporary ownership signature (Roger Chew Weightman, 1898) in pencil to first blank page; text is clean, complete; a Good, sound copy.