The rats’ health suffered and they eventually died from lack of food or water. I was reminded of those old experiments conducted on rats in the 1950s where the rodents preferred to continually stimulate the limbic area of their brains rather than engage in any other activity. Beyond the history, however, it's the story of a man with potential for literary brilliance, or at least achievement, who instead frivoled away his life first on alcohol, then on sex and then with barbiturates. His first-hand accounts of same sex interactions in the markedly diverse socio-economic worlds in which he moved, all of which were pre-Stonewall, were intriguing to read. Steward was a compulsive record keeper and diarist. He left academia in his late forties to pursue a second career as a tattoo artist.
Steward spent 20 years as a professor at Loyola, then De Paul, universities. Interesting for its historical perspective on the life of a gay man in America from the 1920s through the 1980s. It is a compulsively readable and possibly important American biography. Secret Historian is consistently entertaining but does not shy away from the sadder and darker aspects of Steward's life. His friends came from the arts and from the street, and his life story, at times unbelievable, was carefully documented by himself and Alfred Kinsey. As the author points out in his afterwards, Steward lived through every major change in American gay life except for the internet. He died of heart failure in 1993 and was quickly more or less forgotten.įor this biography Justin Spring worked with Steward's extensive private papers that had been stored in a Berkeley attic since his death, letters held by the Yale and University of California, Berkeley, libraries, and whatever material the Kinsey Institute was willing to open to researchers. His published memoir of Stein and Toklas did not sell well, but it was the event that eventually brought all his identities together as he became the subject, late in his life, of interviews and articles in gay publications. He was a significant contributor to Alfred Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research, sending them updates on his sex life and once performing in a film depicting an master/slave training session.
Throughout his life he pursued sexual encounters with hustlers, sailors, and working class men, sometimes staging group sex parties in his apartment and venturing further and further into the world of bondage and S/M. Toklas, wrote one light-weight novel, spent two decades teaching English at de Paul University in Chicago, finally left that position to become a full-time tattoo artists, and in the 1970's wrote gay porno novels under the name Phil Andros. Steward was an academic and young man of promise who became close friends of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Not many people could have that kind of story nor the DNA evidence to back it up - nor the carefully maintained "Stud File" that chronicled some sixty years of sexual encounters. That object now resides in a private collection in Rome. He kept the hair all his life in a monstrance bought at an antique store. Already an avid autograph hound, Steward went to Valentino's hotel room, knocked on the door, got the autograph, gave the silent film star a blow job, and took home a snippet of his pubic hair. In 1926, when he was 17 years old, Samuel Steward learned that Rudolph Valentino was checked into a downtown Columbus, Ohio, hotel under his real name, Rudolph Guglielmi. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, The Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.
Chicago reader samuel steward archive#
Until today he has been known only as Phil Sparrow-but an extraordinary archive of his papers, lost since his death in 1983, has provided Justin Spring with the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. 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. 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.Īfter 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. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Steward, The Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. Drawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M.
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