ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines Stevenson’s two boy books, White Cockades (1887) and Left to Themselves (1891), the former a historical novel set in Scotland during the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the latter an adventure novel in the style of Alger. Both feature passionate attachments between boys or between a male youth and a young man and offer some of the most explicit representations of same-sex desire in homosexual children’s literature. In addition to expressions of same-sex affection, loyalty, and love, Stevenson employs a series of strategies for coding the boys as homosexual youth, including the use of physical hiding places to suggest concealment and revelation and a blackmail plot that evokes associations with the pervasive threat of blackmail faced by homosexual men during this period. Both works feature acts of bravery by which a youth, coded as homosexual, saves or recuperates another boy or man, constructing Uranian youth as the source of salvation. Stevenson insists on ending his homosexual boys’ books happily, suggesting what is possible for the future.
