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Summary
Summary
Drawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on, and documented these experiences in brilliantly vivid (and often very funny) detail.
After leaving the world of academe to become Phil Sparrow, a tattoo artist on Chicago's notorious South State Street, Steward worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark sex research. During the early 1960s, Steward changed his name and identity once again, this time to write exceptionally literate, upbeat pro-homosexual pornography under the name of Phil Andros.
Until today he has been known only as Phil Sparrow--but an extraordinary archive of his papers, lost since his death in 1993, has provided Justin Spring with the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.
Secret Historian is a 2010 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Life in the closet proves boisterous indeed in this biography of an iconic figure of the pre-Stonewall gay demimonde. Steward (1909-1993) was an English professor, a novelist who wrote both well-received literary fiction and gay porn, a confidant of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, a furtive but exuberant erotic adventurer whose taste for sailors, rough trade, and violent sadomasochism endeared him to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey; later in life, he became "Phil Sparrow," official tattoo artist of the Oakland, Calif., Hell's Angels. Spring (Paul Cadmus) fleshes out this colorful story by quoting copiously from his subject's highly literate journals and sex diaries-his "Stud File" contained entries on trysts with everyone from Rudolph Valentino to Rock Hudson-which afford an unabashed account of Steward's erotic picaresque and the yearnings that drove it. (His swerve from academia into tattooing, with its mix of physical pain and proximity to nubile male flesh, was essentially a fetish turned into a business.) 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. Photos. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
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: pioneering sex researcher, collector of celebrity conquests, drug addict, masochist, Catholic (briefly), Navy enlistee (even more briefly), conquistador of vast provinces of America's pre-Stonewall homosexual subculture. Most fortuitously, he was apparently a graphomaniac who documented his long, dark, exuberant, sad, dangerous life in journals, an unpublished memoir, reams of letters, poems, erotica, semifictionalized short stories and even a 746-entry card catalog of his sexual history, scrupulously maintained over five decades and in some cases ornamented - perhaps for future biographers? - with what Spring decorously calls "DNA-verifiable" evidence of his liaisons. Spring, the author of "Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art," speculates that Steward's goal was to create "a single, lifelong body of work through which he hoped to demystify homosexuality for generations to come." Given that Steward lived in an era in which so much of gay history was hidden under mattresses, shoved in the backs of bureau drawers, burnt up in ashtrays and wished away in confessional booths, his desire to document and preserve is in itself as moving as it is rare. Demystification, however, is another matter: his life turns out to have been far too sui generis to exemplify anything except the fact that so much more was going on in gay America than even most gay Americans realized. Born in 1909 in Ohio to a Methodist family (his mother died young, his father fell into opium addiction), Steward realized early on that he liked books and boys and was determined to act on both passions. By his mid-20s he had sexually serviced Rudolph Valentino and become an intimate of Gertrude Stein. Visiting Europe and hoping to feel one step closer (figuratively) to Oscar Wilde, he seduces 67-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas. From London, he hops a boat train over to Paris to meet André Gide, then moves on to Zurich, where he falls under the sway and, at least once, into the bed of Thornton Wilder. Shortly after that, when he strikes up a friendship with Thomas Mann, I found myself fleeing to the Internet, wondering if perhaps this was all an elaborate literary hoax with Steward a kind of priapic Zelig as reimagined by Jean Genet. 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 author's temperate, scrupulously annotated style has an air of sobriety that proves essential, since this is, although a remarkable story, not a particularly happy one. As he warns in his preface, Steward's life is, "in many ways, a story of obsession, isolation and failure," "characterized by constant disappointment, discouragement . . . and rejection." Indeed, by the time Steward is 30, he is an alcoholic trying to balance his increasing appetite for anonymous sex with sadistic men with his day job. (Although for 20 years he taught at several colleges, including Loyola University and DePaul University in Chicago, the "professor" side of his life receives understandably short shrift here.) Steward gets a second wind, then a third and fourth; he determines, as Spring plausibly explains it, to turn his very body into a text of sexual exploration. 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He's discharged just a few weeks later after a violent allergic reaction to military grub lands him in the sick ward, and he never sees action - unless you count the seven fellow trainees who become additions to his card file. A dark moment occurs when he develops testicular cancer and learns that the tumor is a teratoma - a malabsorbed embryonic twin. Shattered, he wonders if the revelation means he has "no more than half a soul," but he won't, or can't, slow down. He quits drinking, starts writing erotic fiction (as well as a monthly column for The Illinois Dental Journal, which may be the single strangest fact in this book), and falls more deeply into masochism. Then, at 40, he tells his story to Alfred Kinsey, who is, to put it mildly, interested, and he's reborn; his sexual life becomes the useful document he always hoped it would be, and his body the primary instrument of research. Literally: When Steward embarks on an obsession with tattooing that lasts decades, one of the first things he does is to ink an accurate ruler onto his forearm - "small red marks, barely visible to the nekkid eye," he wrote - to aid him in verifying or disproving various "fantastic claims." To reveal much about the remaining four decades of Steward's life (spoiler: it involves the Hells Angels!) would be to deprive readers of a journey that is all the more worthwhile for Spring's determination to respect the uniqueness of Steward's trajectory rather than to turn him into a symbol. Although Spring writes that he was first drawn to Steward by the "resolutely sex-affirmative" tone of the gay pulp paperbacks he wrote in later years under the name Phil Andros, it would be inaccurate to cast Steward as a pre-liberation hero of the gayrights movement (his enthusiastic mid-1950s affair with a sadistic former Nazi storm trooper is something of a disqualifier). Nor, certainly, can he be piously memorialized as a victim of the closet or even as a manifestation of the result of straight oppression. Steward forthrightly explores every corner of the sexual universe available to him and is so unconcerned about exposure that when his lives finally collide - he's dropped by DePaul when administrators find out that, in between seminars, he's running Chicago's hottest rough-trade tattoo parlor - he's not especially embarrassed, merely surprised. Steward's only unvanquishable foe proves to be age. From his 40s on, he's furious as his attractiveness and his stamina wane and his diminishing desirability begins to hamper his unslakable thirst for exploration. He never stops writing, though. Even in his last years, when, addicted to barbiturates, he scribbles a note to a doctor trying to wheedle more pills out of him, the letter is in rhymed verse. Words, at least, never fail him. By the time he dies, at the rather miraculous (given his life and times) age of 84, you may feel you've heard enough from him, and about him. But the probity and expansive vision of Spring's work is a reminder that a great, outspread terrain of gay history remains to be mapped. Think of those 746 cards in that catalog of very private lives - soldiers, sailors, cops, bikers, dancers, students - united only by their encounters with one man who decided to turn his own secret history into a time capsule. One suspects there are many more stories of that time worth telling, and too few treasure-packed attics. There are times when Steward seems to be carousing his way through the entire Modern Library. Mark Harris is a journalist and the author of "Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood."
Kirkus Review
Provocative biography of a little-known university professor turned sex researcher and pornographer.Art historian and curator Spring (Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude, 2002, etc.) discovered Samuel Steward's life (19091993) while researching gay pulp novels and was astonished that, unlike more closeted contemporaries in Steward's generation, his subject boasted an "extraordinary openness about his sexuality." The author was given exclusive access to an attic in San Francisco stuffed with a "vast and bewildering collection" of Steward's personal belongings. Raised conservative Methodist in a boardinghouse run by three spinster relatives, Steward was taught that sex was an abhorrent sin, which only fueled his erotic exploration with other men, including a clandestine dalliance with Rudolph Valentino. Though he sported a racy look and engaged in frequent sexual freewheeling, Steward excelled in school and went on to become an English instructor at Carroll College, a small Montana Catholic institution where he enjoyed years of fruitful correspondence with Gertrude Stein. However, Steward was curtly dismissed from his employ after school officials deemed his novel Angels on the Bough "obscene." Through his engagement with Stein, he met and seduced a deeply closeted Thornton Wilder and furtively collaborated with Alfred Kinsey in the late '40s. He eschewed academia to pursue tattooing and pen erotic novels loosely based on his "Stud File," a "whimsically annotated and cross-referenced 746-card catalog in which Steward documented his sex life in its entirety from the years 1924 through 1974." Under the pseudonym Phil Andros, Steward channeled his unquenchable thirst for rough trade, sailors and hustlers into a wildly uninhibited gay-fiction series. 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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
To say that Samuel Steward (d. 1983) lived many lives in one is an understatement. As a young academic, he knew many of the leading literary figures of the day, including Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. He went on to be a tattoo artist and novelist, though most, including Spring, would say he was a pornographer. His classic, STUD, published under the pseudonym Phil Andros, remains one of the essential gay novels of the late 20th century. Spring, author of important books on Fairfield Porter and Paul Cadmus, found a trove of diaries, letters, and scrapbooks left by Steward. Since Steward kept incredibly complete records of his erotic and social lives, he provides his biographer a rare richness of material for a person not generally well known. These materials could have easily led Spring to write a salacious book, but it is quite restrained under the circumstances. In an afterword, Spring recounts the discovery and disposition of these papers and his encounters with the libraries holding them, which will be especially interesting to librarians. VERDICT This sophisticated biography will appeal to both general and academic readers with an interest in LGBT issues.-David S. Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Libs., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 "Wild--Hog Wild" Samuel Morris Steward was born July 23, 1909, in Woodsfield, the seat of Monroe County in southeastern Ohio, a county bordering on Appalachia, and in many ways just as impoverished as that region. His modest, small-town beginnings are important to an understanding of the man he later became, for his plainspoken humor and openness to all things sexual are surely related to his country roots. At the same time, his lifelong preoccupation with the nature of his homosexuality can be seen as a direct response to the "stern and austere Puritanism of my Methodist maiden aunts." Outside accounts of Steward's early life are basically nonexistent, and he himself wrote of it only in passing; those few sentimental memories he retained of his childhood--whether shared in letters to his sister, or else recounted in his journals or unpublished memoirs--seem to have made him too sad to dwell on it for long. And indeed he had a painful early life. His academically brilliant mother had died of an intestinal obstruction when he was only six, and his father, who had both drug and alcohol addictions, was essentially unable to care for either Steward or his baby sister. As a result, Steward grew up in a boardinghouse run by his mother's sister and two stepsisters. These three older spinsters--Elizabeth Rose and Minnie Rose, and their half sister Amy Morris--spent most of their day "cooking and serving, making beds and washing, and hoeing in the garden behind the house when there was time for it." The Morris, Rose, and Steward families had resided in the Woods-field area for generations, and were well established in the professional class; even Steward's father, despite his drinking and drug problems, had served for a time as Monroe County's deputy auditor, and despite his multiple addictions taught a weekly Methodist Bible class for more than twenty years. Steward's paternal grandfather, meanwhile, was a respected country doctor. All of Steward's family on his deceased mother's side were teetotalers as well as devout Methodists, and the church literally loomed large in their lives, for the town's imposing redbrick church stood just across the street from the boardinghouse. The town had no Catholics, and the one black who had attempted to settle there had been run out of town on a rail. As a result, Steward grew up seeing the world as basically divided between those who devoted their lives to Protestant churchgoing and Christian good works (such as his aunts and maternal grandparents), and those who had, for whatever reason, fallen away. Faced both with the death of his mother and the improvidential absence of his father, the six-year-old Steward might well have withdrawn into grief or shocked stupor. But with the resilience of a child, he did just the opposite, dedicating himself energetically to becoming a highly sympathetic companion to the work-worn aunts who had taken him in. By stepping away from his own feelings and concerning himself primarily with the management and care of others, he was insuring he would not once again be discarded, and in so doing he was also setting the pattern for his later life. But as a result he also grew up feeling very much an outsider, and relatively at a distance from his own feelings and impulses, for he naturally had a great deal of grief and sadness about his own life situation. His aunts seemed not to notice, however, for they had any number of problems and concerns of their own, and moreover they themselves were not very happy people. Worn down by endless amounts of domestic work and by constant money worries, they seem to have lavished most of the joy and attention they had on Steward's very beautiful baby sister. Steward was after all a boy, and seemed relatively capable of taking care of himself. None of the three aunts had much understanding of males: after all, none of them had married or had children or even had brothers. As adult women living in a home owned by aged parents, their own lives were, in a very real sense, a surrender to womanly duty: their personal frustrations and domestic claustrophobia were something they accepted as their lot. These were the three adults who populated Steward's childhood--stern, comfortless, deeply religious women who could not quite understand him or his ways, and yet whom he felt an urgent, almost desperate need to comfort, accommodate, and appease. Out of the double loss of his mother and father--one loss permanent and abrupt, the other ongoing and perpetually inconclusive--Steward seems to have accepted from a very early moment that his life's essential condition would be one of loneliness and exclusion. Deprived of parental love and recognition, he would grow up expecting very little love from others. Likewise, having experienced very little touching, warmth, or affection as a child, he would eventually find that prolonged physical intimacy made him extremely uncomfortable, and that those who expected the same from him were destined for disappointment. He would grow up to be a very sociable man, highly skilled at managing and seducing others, but unable to cope with everyday closeness. As a boy, he did his best to fit in, but at the same time he spent a good deal of time by himself. His preference for solitude eventually led this gifted young boy to develop a rich private fantasy life, one in which he thought of himself as someone special, separate, and apart. Steward was very intelligent, like his mother, and he worked very hard in school. His aunts had high expectations for him, for although they were stuck in the boardinghouse, they wanted something better for him, and also for his sister. They saw to it that he earned top grades, kept fastidiously clean, had perfect manners, and in general did everything right. Wanting so much to please and amuse his aunts, Steward not only worked hard at his studies but also quickly mastered the piano, and soon specialized in "showy little pieces" that he picked out specifically to delight them. They, in turn, made a great fuss about his looks, which were delicate and refined. In an early set of photographs, he is beautifully turned out in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit featuring velvet breeches, a matching jacket, and a delicate round white collar. In many ways, he seemed like a perfect little doll. Whatever ambivalence Steward may have felt about his childhood in later life, he never denied the goodness of his aunts, or their love of him, or the many great sacrifices they made on his behalf. And, in fact, he would portray them quite tenderly in his first literary novel. But he was also exhausted by them--for the perfect, doll-like, self-contained little man they so much wanted him to be was very far from the complicated, fallible, and emotionally deprived young boy that he was, or the troubled teen he eventually became. Because of his extraordinary academic achievements, Steward seems to have felt from a very early moment that the great awareness of "difference" he had from the people around him was primarily due to his intelligence. And indeed he was very intelligent: brilliant not only at all his school subjects, but also at music, amateur dramatics, and drawing. Among these many activities, though, he found his greatest pleasure in reading and writing, for through them he began to imagine himself in the outside world. From his earliest days Steward read everything he could lay his hands on: popular fiction, poetry, and the great classics of Western literature. He borrowed vast numbers of books from the local library, and also purchased books and magazines by mail. Because silent films were shown weekly in town, Steward became a great fan of film and stage celebrities--men and women whose lives and careers seemed so real to him in the pages of Photoplay that he began to write them letters. Much to his amazement, several wrote back. In this way, reading and writing served from earliest childhood to create for Steward an intimate conduit to the world of his dreams and fantasies--a world full of glamorous and fascinating people so very different from the simple folk of Woodsfield. Before long Steward was writing to nearly every celebrity he could think of--authors, musicians, and film stars--and assiduously collecting and cataloging their autographs and letters. He cherished their responses to him as proof positive of his own special ness. Through his collection of celebrity letters and autographs, he had created a world in which he stood at the absolute center. In his unpublished memoirs, Steward makes clear that while he spent many of his leisure hours reading and writing and chasing down autographs, he also spent a good deal of time playing with other boys and girls. He may have been thought of by his contemporaries as "different" because of his bookishness, but he was always treated with respect. The facility with which he handled nearly everyone around him--from his aunts to his teachers to his fellow high school students--suggests that Steward had a talent for communication. He was by no means a leader, but by the time he reached high school (and the emotional and physical changes that come with the onset of puberty), he was well known for playing any number of sly pranks and practical jokes. Duplicity was something in which, for whatever reason, he took an enormous and childlike delight: being bad, misbehaving, and "crossing the line" between acceptable and unacceptable behavior were in many ways central to his character from boyhood onward. This love of duplicity became even stronger when Steward discovered sex. Growing up under the watchful eyes of spinsters, Steward had known that sex was "wrong" long before he knew what it was. He later remembered, only half jokingly, that "in my sheltered little-boy Methodist way, the talk [of sex] caused me much agony. The slightest brushing of my hand against my penis was not only a religious sin, but would lead to blindness and pimples, kidney disease, bed-wetting, stooped shoulders, insomnia, weight loss, fatigue, stomach trouble, impotence, genital cancer, and ulcers." In fact, he so deeply internalized his aunts' great fear of sexual "filth" that the unintentional discovery that his foreskin could retract (and the sudden sight of his filth-encrusted glans) shocked him so deeply that he passed out cold. Not surprisingly, then, Steward experienced a series of significant physical and emotional upsets as his body entered puberty. Sexual thoughts and desires began to surface within him despite his best efforts to exclude them from consciousness. It was at roughly this time that he began to engage in various forms of aggression and bad behavior, including pranks and practical jokes. As a result, he wrote, "The meek mild little mama's boy, the potential sissy, may have remained that on the outside, but inside there was a curious change to a twelve-year-old devil." He began to do a lot of spying and eavesdropping. Steward's growing curiosity about other people's private lives and personal habits presumably led him first to peep through the many keyholes available to him in his aunts' boardinghouse. There he could watch and listen to whatever the various male lodgers might be getting up to in their rooms. He also began to spy on various other people throughout Woodsfield, including a girl who lived next door. In one of his earliest surviving short stories, written while still a preadolescent, Steward describes spying on a teenage boy and girl who have gone skinny-dipping together; while he senses something momentous is about to happen between them, he does not yet know what it is. Steward's first introduction to sexual self-pleasure came about through instruction by another boy in the practice of masturbation. He achieved orgasm some time later, in private. Some time after this first orgasm, Steward began to realize that he was sexually excited by other boys. While he found the realization troubling, he also seems to have realized in short order that he could do nothing about it--just as, indeed, he could do nothing to control his interest in sex. As he later observed, "'Choice' had no part in [my sexual identity.] When I discovered what I wanted [sexually], every corpuscle, every instinct I had, drove me unerringly in that direction." Steward later wrote that he could recall no real concern among the adult population of Woodsfield about the sex games he and the other boys in town sometimes played, at least insofar as these games might potentially cause them to develop into homosexuals. He credited this lack of concern to a simple, widespread disinclination to discuss sexuality in general, and on top of that, an almost complete, culture-wide ignorance about the existence of homosexuality: Midwest American views on homosexuality in the 1920s were very quaint, and were based on the assumption that all people raised in civilized Christian countries knew better than to fall in love with, or bed, persons of the same sex. Knowing better, then, the Fundamentalist mind made two breathtaking leaps of illogic: people did not do such things, and therefore such things must be nonexistent. This kind of thinking protected us all during the 1920s and 30s. Though one might be teased for being a sissy, no one could believe that any person actually engaged in the "abominable sin." We lived under the shadow and cover of such naiveté. Thus while Steward recalled many injunctions against "sin" in his religious upbringing--both in church and at home--he recalled no specific early injunctions against homosexuality. Through his own investigations, however, Steward soon ascertained that sexual acts between men were not only strictly illegal in Ohio, but also punishable by incarceration. In his unpublished memoirs, he concludes the story of his first non masturbatory sexual experience with another boy--"a big guy" football player who had convinced him to engage in an act of oral sex that was "over in less than two minutes"--by going on to note that the punishment for such activities in Ohio at that moment so far exceeded the "crime" as to make the whole situation absurd: "So began my criminal life, then punishable by the laws of the state of Ohio--at that time--by about twenty years of imprisonment, I guess. Each time. Total incarceration in Ohio: between five and six thousand years." Steward had enjoyed the encounter with the football player, and as a result, he subsequently provoked similar encounters with other (usually older, better developed) boys in locations all over Woodsfield: in the town graveyard, in a neighbor's attic, in the courthouse bell tower, and even in the same room at the Methodist church where his father taught his Sunday Bible class. Since Steward usually proposed and intiated these activities, he felt no sense of coercion by the older boys. Rather, he considered himself unique: I figgered I was put in that town just to bring pleasure to the guys I admired . . . In that small (about 350 students) high school, the word got around quickly enough, and (I think) they all came to look on me as . . . a dandy substitute for their girls . . . I felt different from those boys--superior in a way, because I could give them something they wanted (and needed?) . . . I thought I was the only one, and grew somewhat proud that I could satisfy these boys, most of whom I looked up to and admired because they were my adolescent "heroes." [And] they [in turn] treated me with a funny kind of respect, as if they knew that if they made me mad, they wouldn't get any more . . . I was not patronized or made fun of. In those far-gone days, everything seemed "natural." Even so, these new activities made Steward ever more clearly an outsider. To his teachers and his aunts he may well have seemed a handsome young man of great academic promise, but to himself--and among the boys with whom he was active--he was not only a rebel (a boy who stole from the cash register in his uncle's store, got drunk on stolen wine, and once even threw a pumpkin through the window of the high school principal's house), but also an oddity (because he was a boy who enjoyed pleasuring other boys sexually, and seemed to have no shame about doing so). To Steward, who had basically already accepted that he would never quite "fit in," his sexual activities were just another aspect of his teenage rebellion. With puberty, he later observed, "the birth of desire had taken place in me, and the patterns that I needed to survive were firmly imprinted by the time I left the town [of Woodsfield]: concealment and pretense, duplicity, a guise of wide-eyed innocence--and a kind of 'passive aggression' [unusual] in such a shy-seeming young man." Of course, Steward was hardly alone in adopting such a strategy; most homosexual young men of his generation found themselves facing a similar crisis of disconnection from the society around them as they became sexually active. Just as the orphaned and rejected Jean Genet (Steward's exact contemporary) would note that through homosexuality, violent crime, and thievery he had "resolutely rejected a world which had rejected me," Steward took a similar view of his departure from the upstanding life into which he had been born, and toward which his aunts had so earnestly propelled him: The personality which has been kept repressed, as mine had been by the strict Methodist upbringing my aunts had given me, and kept within the strictest lines and boundaries, really goes wild--hog wild--when it finally breaks away. And although I was still living within the family walls, the rebellious spirit was growing daily stronger . . . I had to be free. Steward's ability to think clearly and without too much anxiety or self-blame about his sexual activities (or at least to view them with a certain degree of humorous detachment, and to recognize them not as aberrant behaviors, but rather as aspects of an essential self that absolutely had to find expression) is something he later credited to an extraordinary boyhood find: a copy of Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume II: Sexual Inversion. Steward had serendipitiously discovered the book under a bed in the boardinghouse, where a traveling salesman, after stealing it from the "restricted" section of an Ohio library, had subsequently left it behind. A voracious reader even in his early teens, Steward had already special-ordered Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Interpretation of Dreams through the Woodsfield confectioner by the time he found the Ellis volume. But the latter book was a unique godsend, for this landmark of early-twentieth-century sex research was particularly sympathetic toward "sexual inverts" and "sexual inversion"--that is, to homosexuals and to homosexuality. The book immediately set Steward's mind at ease about just who and what he was, and proved a welcome alternative to the vague but terrifying sermons he had heard all through childhood about "sexual sin." Thanks to Ellis, "not only did I discover that I was not insane or alone in a world of heteros--but I [also] learned many new things to do. I made a secret hiding place for the book under the attic stairs, and read and read and read. Thus I became an expert in the field of [sex] theory (by the time I finished the book I probably knew more about sex than anyone else in the county) and then began to make practical applications of this vast storehouse of material." Steward affects nonchalance about his sexual identity in his memoirs, and doubtless he was nonchalant about it for much of the time. But he also faced a very difficult moment of self-recognition in mid-adolescence, as he realized that what he was getting up to with other boys was simply not acceptable. The realization became manifest in an incident involving, of all people, his father. Steward's father had been largely absent throughout his childhood; during that time, Samuel Vernon Steward's brief, rare visits to the boardinghouse were almost always painful ones, for his inability (or unwillingness) to provide for his children had complicated the lives of Steward's aunts considerably, and they resented him. They also resented his involvement with other women, since they felt he ought to have remained faithful to the memory of their sister. His ongoing dependence on drugs and alcohol, meanwhile, had led him to ignore both the emotional and the financial needs of his children. The son of a country doctor, he had dabbled with drugs since boyhood. He had obtained virtually unlimited access to drugs as a young adult by securing a pharmacist's license through the study of pharmacy in college. His subsequent experiments had led him to become a frequently relapsing opium addict* who also "dabbled largely in [other] drugs, especially laudanum and morphine." Though in many ways a weak man, he was capable of unexpected violence; one of Steward's few early childhood memories was of watching his father hit his mother hard across the face, merely for having dropped and broken his bottle of ketchup. In later life, Steward kept no photographs of his father, only a couple of inconsequential letters and a small book of occasional speeches. The contents of these documents suggest he was a man inclined to sanctimony. The fact that he went on to spend twenty years teaching a Sunday Bible class at the church across the street from the boardinghouse where his children were growing up without his financial support suggests that there was much about him that Steward might justifiably have disliked. According to Steward, his relationship with his father worsened after the two were tested for their IQ: The propagandizing of my aunts against whomever [my father] looked upon as a possible new bride had affected me; they somehow felt that he should remain true all his life to the memory of my mother [and so did I]. An additional strain was that I had earned my own way during the high school years, since with his meager salary he could not support either myself or my sister. And finally, the superintendent of schools had given both my father and myself the same IQ test--which had just then been invented. When the weighting of the scores was adjusted for our ages, it was discovered that my result topped his. I do not believe he ever forgave me, and was jealous of that small detail the rest of his life; he often referred to it, but never in my hearing. The final break between father and son came after. Steward wrote a sexually suggestive note to a handsome young traveling salesman at the boardinghouse, and the salesman, outraged, subsequently gave the note to the proprietor of the town's only restaurant, thereby making the proposition--and the proof of it--town-wide public knowledge. Publicly shamed by his son, Samuel Vernon Steward drove the boy out to the countryside to discuss the matter in the privacy of his car. There, as Steward later recalled, his father had bawled him out: "I want to know what the hell a son of mine is doing writing love letters to another man." "I think," I said, drawing on my new vocabulary from Have-lock Ellis, "that I am homosexual." ". . . Don't give me any of your smart aleck high school rhetoric!" He bellowed . . . [And] that was the way the conversation went on for about a half hour. When I saw that he wanted to believe that I had not actually sinned, the game became fairly easy . . . I pretended to be chastened, to be horror-struck at the enormity of [what I had proposed to the salesman] . . . I worked it to the hilt, falling in easily with his suggestion that perhaps I should go to see a professional whore--that such an experience might start me on a heterosexual (he said "normal") path. Excerpted from Secret Historian by Justin Spring. Copyright (c) 2010 by Justin Spring. Published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher. Excerpted from Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Preface | p. ix |
1 "Wild-Hog Wild" | p. 3 |
2 Teres Atque Rotundus | p. 32 |
3 The Chicago Novel | p. 56 |
4 "The navy has always had an attraction for me" | p. 76 |
5 Sobriety and After | p. 98 |
6 Kinsey and Company | p. 111 |
7 Living in Dreams | p. 128 |
8 Writing Lynes | p. 159 |
9 "A kind of obscene diary, actually" | p. 180 |
10 "Mr. Chips of the Tattoo World" | p. 200 |
11 The Kothmann Affair | p. 216 |
12 The Parting | p. 230 |
13 "Pleasure doesn't really make one happy" | p. 246 |
14 Kris and Kreis | p. 263 |
15 "Payments to hustlers" | p. 282 |
16 Masters and Slaves | p. 295 |
17 Phil Andros, $TUD | p. 305 |
18 A New Life in Oakland | p. 319 |
19 "From the brow of Zeus" | p. 344 |
20 Dear Sammy | p. 356 |
21 "Porte after stormie seas" | p. 385 |
Afterword: The Steward Papers | p. 407 |
Notes | p. 415 |
Selected Bibliography | p. 441 |
Acknowledgments | p. 457 |
Index | p. 459 |