Two men walk into a café in Budapest. Start of a really bad and cheesy joke, right? Wrong, this is a start of a story about the meaning of love, the different types of love, and what said love entails. The two men are called Oswald and Imre von N and each are from different countries with very different backgrounds. The story is told from Oswald’s point of view, and readers get to learn and discover with him the complications of finding out whether or not his male friend has strong and passionate feelings for him.
Oswald and Imre meet in a café and just strike up a conversation like anyone might in a new place, looking to make an acquaintance . Imre is from Hungary and is on leave from the military—where he is a Lieutenant in the A. Honvéd Regiment—and Oswald is taking a vacation from his native England. The two are the only there alone, and they make eye contact and what follows is like a five hour conversation concerning everything about each other. Family history, why they are in Hungary, favorite music, and things they like to do were just some of the different subjects that they touched on. Eventually the night had to end, but they both agreed to meet up again the next day and the next and the next and the next. This started a relationship that had everybody in shock; nobody could understand how these two virtual strangers fit together and just complemented each other so well.
Imre is written by Edward Prime-Stevenson and was published in 1906. This novel was very radical and rebellious compared to the few other gay and lesbian themed stories that where being published. An article from The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide says, “The novel tells the story of two homosexual men who gradually disclose their nature to each other in a time of sexual subterfuge, and who wind up, not dead or punished, but together and happy by the story’s end.” This review sums up why this book was such a shocker when it first came out. It was one of the first times a novel had been published with LGBT characters whose lives ended happily ever after. Most books about LGBT characters before this either had their character dying in some way—usually by suicide—or their partner leaving them to marry someone of the opposite sex. People were afraid that if the LGBT community thought that being gay and being in a relationship could lead to a happily ending, then this would encourage more people to be gay.
Another way this novel stood out was that the story is not action-packed with twists and turns—according to the Prime-Stevenson—it is about discovering one’s true self. The story is all about Oswald and Imre’s growing relationship, how homosexuals are portrayed in public, and the stigma attached to that word. Some people insult members of the gay community to turn suspicion away from themselves; they wear figurative masks in public to hide their true identities. For most of the book, Oswald does not know if Imre is gay. Oswald at one point in this novel is pacing and worrying about how Imre truly feels about him and says, “Was Imre von N. what is called among psychiaters of our day a homosexual, a Urning in his instincts and feelings and life, in his psychic and physical attitude toward women and men? Was he a Uranian? Or was he sexually entirely normal and Dionian? Or a blend of the two types, a Dionian-Uranian?”
Oswald and Imre have to work through many different layers of armor to discover that they love one another. They had to take a leap of faith and throw off their masks to expose themselves to each other and to be prepared for rejection, scorn, and disgust. The happy ending makes their and Prime-Stevenson’s investment worth the risk.
