![]() ![]() So, what’s the “work”? Seward is a poignant, even tragic figure towards the end of his life: an alcoholic hoarder living in squalor, he felt his writing had never been fully appreciated. And he was a self-archivist-qua-sex researcher whose “Stud File” held scrupulous notes on all 750-odd of his sexual partners. He was a tattoo artist - Phil Sparrow - who for a time was the Hells’ Angels’ primary tattooist in the Bay Area. He was a well-liked English professor who became close friend and correspondent with Gertrude Stein and other literary luminaries. ![]() ![]() He was a literary novelist, and later an author of gay erotica and porn under the name Phil Andros. The book seems especially fascinating as a reflection on the category of the “biographical subject.” Steward has so many identities and aliases, most of them involving one form or another of writing, recording, archiving. I’d just been talking about Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” with students and so was thinking about Steward through that lens. 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he was apparently a graphomaniac who documented his long, dark, exuberant, sad, dangerous life in journals, an unpublished memoir, reams of letters, poems, erotica, semifictionalized short stories and even a 746-entry card catalog of his sexual history, scrupulously maintained over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. 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. But even the most skeptical reader of his new book, “Secret Historian,” will have to admit that the bar is now set high. 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. The presentation, basically a powerpoint slide show narrated by Spring, was completely fascinating. I had the pleasure yesterday of participating in a small seminar-style conversation/presentation at the Kinsey Institute by Justin Spring about his new book SECRET HISTORIAN: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (named a National Book Award finalist last week). ![]()
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