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Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson

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Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson
Born(1858-01-29)January 29, 1858
Madison, New Jersey
DiedJuly 23, 1942 (aged 84)
Lausanne, Switzerland
Pen nameXavier Mayne
OccupationNovelist, journalist
NationalityAmerican

Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson (January 29, 1858 – July 23, 1942) was an American writer. He used the pseudonym Xavier Mayne.[1]

Biography

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Prime-Stevenson (also known as Edward Stevenson, Edward Prime Stevenson, and E. Irenaeus Prime Stevenson) was born in 1858 in Madison, New Jersey,[1] 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.[1]

After studying law, Stevenson decided to become a writer and a journalist.[1] 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,[1] a defense of homosexuality from a scientific, legal, historical, and personal perspective.

Death

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In 1901, he moved to Europe, living in Florence and Lausanne. He died in Lausanne of a heart attack in 1942, aged 84.[citation needed]

Quotes

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"Between a protozoan and the most perfect development of the mammalia, we trace a succession of dependent intersteps...A trilobite is at one end of Nature's workshop: a Spinoza, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven is at the other... gone on insisting that each specimen of sex in humanity must... follow out two programmes only, or else be thought amiss, imperfect, and degenerate [?] Why have we set up masculinity and femininity as processes that have not perfectly logical and respectable inter-steps?".

— Xavier Mayne, History of Similisexualism[2]

Bibliography

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  • Prime-Stevenson, Edward; Trow's Printing and Bookbinding Company (1887), White cockades : an incident of the "forty-five", Charles Scribner's Sons, OCLC 2163459
  • Prime-Stevenson, Edward (1891), Left to themselves: being the ordeal of Philip and Gerald , New York, Hunt & Eaton, OCLC 9777119
  • Prime-Stevenson, Edward (1906), Imre: A Memorandum, The English Book-Press
  • Prime-Stevenson, Edward Irenaeus (1908), The intersexes : a history of similisexualism as a problem in social life 
  • Prime-Stevenson, Edward (1913), Her enemy, some friends and other personages, stories and studies mostly of human hearts, G. & R. Obsner, OCLC 458170986
  • Prime-Stevenson, Edward (2024), Aan hun lot overgelaten, Carolus den Blanken

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e Bullough, Vern L. Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context, Haworth Press Inc, 2003, pp. 35–36.
  2. ^ Haggerty, George (2000). Gay Histories and Cultures. Garland Publishing, Inc. pp. 298–299. ISBN 9780815318804.
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