![]() ![]() 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. In doing so, it takes a major step toward documenting his important place in twentieth-century gay literature and history.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. The first collection of any of Samuel Steward's writings to be republished since his death in 1993, Philip Sparrow Tells All makes these lost essays available to a broad readership that Steward imagined but never actually enjoyed when he wrote them. ![]() Throughout, Mulderig's entertaining annotations explain the essays' wide-ranging allusions and also highlight their gay subtext, which constituted a kind of private game that Steward played with his mostly oblivious audience of Midwestern dentists. We go along with him to a bodybuilding competition and a pet cemetery, and together we wander the boulevards of Paris and the alleys of Algiers. We hear of his stint as a holiday sales clerk at Marshall Field's (where he met and seduced fellow employee Rock Hudson), of his roles as an opera and ballet extra in hilariously shoddy costumes, of his hoarding tendencies, his disappointment with the drabness of men's fashions, and his dread of turning forty. In these essays we encounter such famous friends of Steward as Gertrude Stein, André Gide, and Thornton Wilder. In Philip Sparrow Tells All, Jeremy Mulderig has collected thirty of these engaging but forgotten columns, prefacing them with revealing introductions that relate the essays to people and events in Steward's life and to the intellectual and cultural contexts in which he wrote during the 1940s. Perhaps his oddest authorial role was as a monthly contributor between 19 to the Illinois Dental Journal, an obscure trade publication for dentists, where writing as Philip Sparrow he produced a series of charming, richly allusive, and often quirky essays on a wildly eclectic assortment of topics. Samuel Steward (1909-93) was an English professor, a tattoo artist for the Hells Angels, a sexual adventurer who shared the considerable scope of his experiences with Alfred Kinsey, and a prolific writer whose publications ranged from scholarly articles to gay erotica (the latter appearing under the pen name Phil Andros). ![]()
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