Editorial Reviews
“Somewhere in the United States, there may be an attic containing the written remnants of a previously unchronicled 20th-century life that was even more astonishing than the one the writer Justin Spring discovered in San Francisco a few years ago. But even the most skeptical reader of his new book, Secret Historian, will have to admit that the bar is now set high. Samuel Steward, the subject of this absorbing act of biographical excavation, had many identities, including several that the subtitle of the book omits . . . Be assured that it’s all for real, and that Spring, even when neck-deep in sensational material, is not a sensationalist. As a biographer, he’s humble but firm—he lets Steward’s vivid, energetic prose do much of the talking but keeps his own hand on the tiller and never gets giddy, even when Steward seems to be carousing his way through the entire Modern Library . . . The probity and expansive vision of Spring’s work is a reminder that a great, outspread terrain of gay history remains to be mapped . . . One suspects there are many more stories of that time worth telling, and too few treasure-packed attics.” —Mark Harris, The New York Times Book Review
“Can a secret sex diary furnish an artistic legacy as meaningful as Emily Dickinson’s sewn-up bundles of poems, or the piles of paintings Theo van Gogh inherited after his brother’s premature demise? Samuel Steward may never have imagined it, but his erotic history raises the question. A talented writer who early attracted the attention of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, he found his career blocked by a determination (so different from hers and his) to write candidly about his homosexuality . . . Steward was an obsessive record keeper, and his journals and his ‘Stud File’ of thousands of encounters allow [Justin Spring] to create a remarkably full portrait of a man whose life was what Edmund White’s might have been had White been born three decades earlier . . . [This] extensive documentation—and the miraculous rescue of that documentation, recounted in the book’s preface—left his biographer material to reconstruct an emblematic homosexual life.” —Benjamin Moser, Harper’s
“Justin Spring’s jaw-dropping Secret Historian reads like a novel probing a lifelong rebel’s courage, creativity and ultimate sadness . . . Spring has reconstituted Steward, as Phil Andros might say, in flesh and blood and all sorts of bodily fluids.” —David D’Arcy, San Francisco Chronicle
“This is a rich and exuberant biography of a man who deserves to be better known” —The Economist
“A fascinating biography . . . [Steward] tackled life with awe-inspiring abandon” —Details
“Life in the closet proves boisterous indeed in this biography of an iconic figure of the pre-Stonewall gay demimonde . . . Spring’s sympathetic and entertaining story of a life registers the limitations imposed on homosexuals by a repressive society, but also celebrates the creativity and daring with which Steward tested them.” —Publishers Weekly
“[A] provocative biography . . . Generous excerpts from Steward’s journals and unpublished memoirs fortify an already comprehensive examination of a life lived with unabashed independence and homoerotic expression during the sexual rebellion of the pre-Stonewall era . . . A vivid, candid portrait.” —Kirkus Reviews
Review
Samuel Steward lived from 1909 until 1993. He as a professor of English, a novelist who wrote gay porn and literary fiction, a friend and confidant of Thornton Wilder, Alfred Kinsey and Gertrude Stein, a man with a taste for what was known as “rough trade”, and was into the sado/masochistic scene. He was known as Phil Sparrow and as the official tattoo artist of Oakland, California. He had quite a life and Justin Spring recounts it for us. Spring rebuilds the man and he does so from Steward’s journals and sex diaries or his “Stud File” which had notes about sexual liaisons with the who was who and included Valentino and Rock Hudson. Spring’s biography is both entertaining and sympathetic and shows the marginalization of homosexuals during periods of Steward’s life. On the other hand he celebrates the daring and creativity of the man who although closeted to a degree, dared to be who he was. He tested society to see how far he could go.
Steward was born into a puritanical Methodist family in Ohio and was named Samuel M. Steward but as he began to write he had at least six pseudonyms. He became the tattoo artist for the Hell’s Angels and they called him Doc Sparrow, his pornography was often written under the name of Phil Andros, in the underground press he was Ward Stames and to his artistic friends (Isherwood, Stein, Toklas, Wilder, Cadmus, etc) he was just Sammy.
After reading the Kinsey Report on Human Sexuality, he saw himself as a sex researcher and this gave his life a new focus and meaning. He met Kinsey in 1949 and became what he called an “unofficial collaborator” and this made him take more copious notes for his Stud File which when found was composed of 746 cards and on each was noted his sexual partner’s name, how he ranked in the line-up, dates and locations of each encounter, penis size (detailed) and each specific sexual activity.
Steward and Kinsey became fast friends and Steward looked at him as a father figure and even though they never had sexual contact, there was love between them. As a teen Steward was sexually active but we must remember that at that time in our history there was no toleration or acceptance of homosexuality. In fact, there was aggressive persecution.
Spring tells us that Steward began to understand himself only when he found a copy of Havelock Ellis’s “Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume II: Sexual Inversion,” which he stole had been pinched from an Ohio library.
As a college student at Ohio State University in Columbus, Steward had sexual encounters with straight men. Steward says this is because people liked to experiment. He went on to teach at the college level but he left because he wanted to see the world but as he did, he discovered alcohol which is one of the reasons that he never really became a novelist of note. At times depression overtook him and because of his loneliness he became somewhat self-destructive. He became fascinated by violent men and he was often in the hospital because of this.
What Justin Spring gives us in a documented look at the life of one of Kinsey’s crucial gay witnesses who was a cultivated and shy professor of English literature. In the middle of his life Steward changed course and became an eminent tattooist and writer of S&M porn. Steward was a sex-obsessed recovering alcoholic who later became addicted to barbiturates and to masochistic thrills which could have led him to lead a life of failure but he became iconic in the annals of gay history as a man who lived his life the way he wanted to. This is one of those books that you cannot stop reading and Spring has given us a wonderful work of research and writing. Many have never heard of Steward but I have a feeling that could change with the publication of Spring’s biography. We get an in-depth look at gay life before Stonewall and before liberation. Few of us have any idea that gay life was ever like this. Steward’s life shows us what is was like to be an outsider in a world where he was not allowed to exist and yet managed to do so. Steward’s life is the story of the struggle for personal freedom of identity. Justin Spring has done an incredibly amazing job of researching the man and giving him to us. – Amos Lassen
Portrait of a taboo artist
The Washington Post Book Review – December 5, 2010 (Excerpt)
Samuel Steward, as even Justin Spring admits, is an “odd candidate” for a biography. Author of a series of novels narrated by the gay hustler Phil Andros, Steward was friends with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, slept with Rock Hudson, Rudolph Valentino and Thornton Wilder, and worked with Alfred Kinsey on his study of American sex lives. But he was also a rather sad wannabe: a man who wanted to move to Paris but never did, a writer whose dream of a great novel devolved into porn, a college professor who ended up a tattoo artist in the Oakland slums – which, of course, is why this book, which was nominated for a 2010 National Book Award, is so engrossing: Steward’s reality was more interesting than his dreams.
Steward wanted to write about homosexuality at a time when gay subject matter was considered pornography, and it’s hard to say who treated him more brutally: the hustlers who beat him up or his publishers. The main thing is that Steward kept a record. He and Kinsey bonded not only because both were interested in sex, but because they were equally obsessive recorders of data. These include a massive sex journal that Steward kept at Kinsey’s request and the so-called Stud File, in which everyone Steward had sex with from 1924 to 1974 was recorded on an annotated card. [Read the full article...]
