![]() ![]() His near obsessive record-keeping interested seminal sex researcher Alfred Kinsey who made Steward an integral collaborator at his Institute of Sex Research.ĭescribing his first meeting with Kinsey, Steward remembers, revealing, as well, the extent of his sexual records, “The thing that amazed him most of all was that I was a ‘record keeper’-’something all too rare,’ he said. Since he was a young man, Steward kept extremely detailed records of all his sexual encounters in what he termed the “Stud File” (don’t you love the name?). However, I know what all you, dear filthy readers, want to hear about: the sex. A fascinating read, Secret Historian is a sometimes gossipy, sometimes raunchy, sometimes melancholy, sometimes gleeful and always amusing ride through Steward’s life.Īs shown in Spring’s introduction, there are clearly too many details in the biography to insert in this gushing review from his double life as a tattoo artist in Chicago to his lifelong adoration of rough trade (unsurprisingly he was a huge fan of Genet) to his struggles with alcoholism and later, barbituate addiction. Embarking on an enormous amount of research, Spring resurrects Steward’s raucous, rebellious, role model-worthy and ultimately historically significant biography for readers, rendering Secret Historian arguably mandatory for anyone interested in queer history. Spring continues, “Steward’s journals, letters, memoirs, diaries, and archives of published materials brought all these various identities together into one man,” which is exactly what Spring accomplishes in his illuminating biography of Steward (xiii).īefore Secret Historian, few understood Steward’s entire story, mostly knowing one of his many alter egos. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder Thomas Cave, spiritual seeker Sam Steward, unofficial sex researcher for Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research Phil Sparrow, streetwise Chicago tattoo artist “Phil” and “Phillip von Chicago,” homoerotic illustrator Ward Stames, homophile journalist “Doc” Sparrow, official tattoo artist of the Oakland Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang and finally, Phil Andros, the homophile pulp pornographer who described the sexual underground of the American 1950s with passion, good humor, and charm” (xii-iii). Steward, the mild-mannered poet, literary novelist, and professor of English literature at a Catholic university in Chicago “Sammy” Steward, adoring young friend and fan of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. He states, “…I have come to know my subject as a complicated man of many identities. Full of cards and names and 'snippets of crinkly hair taken from my favourite persons', it provided the 'tangibles to which the imagination and memory could be tied, devices to stimulate nostalgia and the remembrance of things past'.In his introduction to the captivating Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist and Sexual Renegade, author Justin Spring discusses the almost unbelievably vast range of personas, lives and experiences of Sam Steward. That, he realised, was the true purpose of the Stud File. A remarkable work., didn't seem to want writing about himself to lead to self-knowledge and he didn't want it to recover lost time. ![]() Certainly the book will be taught in college classrooms, but it will find an extensive audience outside the university too because it is compulsively readable. One of the most remarkably daring and unusual accounts by an unapologetically renegade gay man of the 20th century., The material is intrinsically interesting Steward is an engaging prose stylist and Mulderig is a meticulous and reliable editor who lays out sound editorial principles and accompanies each chapter with judicious notes, glossing the various personae and cultural references with which some contemporary readers may need assistance. The sheer number of important literary figures that Steward, in his young life, seeks out and befriends and (more often than not) beds makes this a page-turner., An absorbing, funny, and astonishing memoir of a man with many talents and many identities: Samuel Steward, university professor Phil Sparrow, tattoo artist Ward Stames, John McAndrews, and Donald Bishop, writing ground-breaking essays in the first European gay magazines Phil Andros, explicit novelist and a man who lived life to its fullest., Mulderig has set himself the task of reconstructing Steward's autobiography from a vastly truncated earlier work ( Chapters from an Autobiography ) and from his unpublished, 110,000-word, shapeless manuscript.The result is a reconstructed and expanded version of 85,000 words that has never been published in this form before. ![]() The English major in Steward gives him a sly but delectable way with words that surfaces in delicious turns of phrase every now and then, adding literary quality to what is, hands down, already a fascinating life story. Exceedingly enjoyable, well-paced, and fascinating. ![]()
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