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. III.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. Writings: Sexology, Mysteries, EssaysĤ Samuel Steward’s Autoethnographic Sexologyĥ The Mysteries of Samuel Steward and Gertrude Stein, Private EyesĦ “Foibles and Fripperies, Reminiscences and Tributes”: Reading Samuel Steward’s Lost Chicago Essays Moddelmogġ Sam Steward’s Pornography: Archive, Index, Trace Closing on a personal recollection from one of Steward’s last close friends, the volume will also appeal to readers interested in the personal aspects of this fascinating, idiosyncratic figure’s multifaceted life. With work by prominent scholars in queer, transgender, and sexuality studies, and with topics such as the queer archive, hoarding, masochism, the queer mystery, race and desire, sexology, and gay pornography, Samuel Steward and the Pursuit of the Erotic will appeal to a wide range of readers across a variety of disciplines invested in queer experience. These essays frame Steward not merely as an associate or a lover of more well-known luminaries but as a significant cultural figure in his own right, one whose work anticipated some of the current aims and methods of queer studies. Samuel Steward-writer, literature professor, visual artist, tattoo artist, sexual archivist, unofficial sexologist, and vernacular pornographer-gave voice and vision to some of the central concerns of twentieth-century U.S. Moddelmog and Martin Joseph Ponce, examines the life and work of Samuel Steward at their most daring and controversial. This innovative collection, edited by Debra A. Samuel Steward and the Pursuit of the Erotic: Sexuality, Literature, Archives examines one of the most fascinating sexual renegades of the twentieth century and the social, cultural, pedagogical, and erotic projects with which he was engaged. But the volume also recovers an unjustly neglected figure whose life and work have much to offer queer studies scholars.” -Robert Corber, author of Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema “In addressing issues such as the erotics of racial difference, pornography, BDSM, and sexual fantasy, the essays collected here promise to refocus attention on erotic practice. This is an unusually generative example of interdisciplinary collaboration.” -Colin Johnson, author of Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America “ Samuel Steward and the Pursuit of the Erotic offers a truly innovative and impressively far-reaching assemblage of criticism and commentary that engages some of the most pressing theoretical problems of our time, including the increasingly apparent inadequacy of the concept of ‘sexual identity’ itself.
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