http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/books/26secret.html
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: July 25, 2010
When the author Justin Spring finally tracked down the executor of
Samuel Steward's estate, he had no idea what this sexual outlaw and
little-known literary figure had left behind after his death in 1993.
So he was taken unawares by the 80 boxes full of drawings, letters,
photographs, sexual paraphernalia, manuscripts and other items,
including an autograph and reliquary with pubic hair from Rudolph
Valentino, a thousand-page confessional journal Steward created at
the request of the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and a green metal
card catalog labeled "Stud File," which contained a meticulously
documented record on index cards of every sexual experience and
partner Rock Hudson, Thornton Wilder, "One-eyed Sadist" that
Steward said he had had over 50 years.
An attic full of items contained a secret history of a
little-documented strand of gay life in the middle decades of the
20th century. Steward's experience stands in stark contrast to the
familiar story of furtive concealment and persecution in the period
before gay liberation. As new biographies of artists and writers like
E.M. Forster detail the effects of sexual repression on their work,
Steward's history shows what a life of openness, when embraced,
entailed day to day.
Mr. Spring, who has written biographies of the American artists
Fairfield Porter and Paul Cadmus, became intrigued by Steward after
coming across some of his witty and ribald letters. He managed to
find the executor, Michael Williams, who was almost as much of an
obsessive hoarder as Steward and had squirreled away the artifacts in
his San Francisco home after rescuing them from the floor-to-ceiling
squalor that the enfeebled Steward had built up in his final years.
For nearly a decade Mr. Williams doggedly eluded rare manuscript
dealers while he pondered what to do with Steward's legacy.
"It was an Aladdin's cave of gay paraphernalia and record keeping
that was covered with dust and smelled like dog," said Mr. Spring,
whose biography "Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel
Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade" is due out
next month. (At the moment Mr. Spring is storing the collection.)
This unusual cache is significant because source material from this
period is rare, said Martin Duberman, a professor emeritus and
founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. "It's a real treasure
trove he stumbled upon."
Many of Steward's contemporaries and their heirs destroyed or hid
evidence of their homosexuality. Mr. Spring said, for example, that
Donald C. Gallup, a curator at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, bought 24 of Wilder's notes to Steward, but
did not catalog them, and they remained on a back shelf until Mr.
Spring traced them.
Jason Baumann, curator of the lesbian and gay collection for the New
York Public Library, said, "It's exactly the kind of material that I
constantly have historians and the general public wanting to have."
Reconstructing Steward's life was not easy, Mr. Spring recently
explained from his sunny studio apartment in Midtown Manhattan. At
first he didn't realize that some of the odd puzzle pieces he
happened upon even belonged to the same jigsaw because Steward had so
many identities in an era when homosexuality could land a person in jail.
The novelist and professor at a Roman Catholic university who was
born in 1909 into an austere and puritanical Methodist household in
Ohio was Samuel M. Steward. But as the author of gay pulp fiction, he
went by Phil Andros and a half-dozen other pseudonyms; Hells Angels
in Oakland, Calif., who used him as their official tattoo artist,
called him Doc Sparrow; readers of his articles in underground
newspapers and magazines knew him as Ward Stames. To a close circle
of artistic friends like Wilder, Cadmus, Gertrude Stein, Alice B.
Toklas, Christopher Isherwood, the photographer George Platt Lynes
and others, he was simply Sammy.
Steward was able to take a step toward joining these
compartmentalized aspects of his life after reading Kinsey's landmark
report on human sexuality in 1948. The study, which presented
homosexuality as natural and legitimate, inspired Steward to see
himself as a sex researcher and gave his life a new focus and meaning.
A colleague urged Steward to talk to Kinsey and the two met in late
1949. Kinsey quickly enlisted him as what Steward called an
"unofficial collaborator," prompting Steward to become an even more
compulsive chronicler. On each of the 746 cards that ultimately made
up his alphabetized Stud File, Steward listed his sexual partner's
name, his place in the lineup (i.e., the 354th person Steward had sex
with), the dates and locations of every encounter, a coded
description of penis size and of every specific sexual activity, and
a brief comment. Of Valentino, filed under the actor's real name,
Guglielmi, R., he wrote: "Nuf sed."
In Kinsey, Steward found a kindred spirit, a close friend and an
ideal father figure. "I suppose that to a degree I fell in love with
him," he wrote in a published memoir. (The two never had any sexual contact.)
Steward's tales of frequent sexual encounters as a teenager and
undergraduate in Woodsfield and Columbus, Ohio, in the 1920s and '30s
are a counterpoint to the aggressive persecution of homosexuals
during the 1950s McCarthy scare. As Mr. Baumann and other historians
have noted, there was no homosexual panic in those earlier years
because of a reluctance to discuss sex in any detail and the
resulting widespread ignorance.
Mr. Spring said: "It's all about language. If there are no culturally
accepted words to describe an experience, it remains off the radar."
According to Mr. Spring's book, Steward came to understand himself
only when he was a teenager and found a copy of Havelock Ellis's
"Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume II: Sexual Inversion,"
which had been pinched from the restricted section of an Ohio library.
As a student at Ohio State University in Columbus, Steward said he
had many sexual encounters with "straight young men." As quoted in
the biography, he recounts the atmosphere in one of his pulp fiction
stories: "None of us was coy in those days. ... We all liked to
experiment [and] we found the direct approach daring." According to
Mr. Spring, only those who performed oral sex were then considered homosexual.
Ultimately Steward abandoned university life and entered the tattoo
artist's demimonde full time, but his determination to indulge his
sexual identity fully came with enormous physical, professional and
psychological costs. In Mr. Spring's telling, the frustrations of
living in this closeted era combined with his obsession drove Steward
to alcoholism and prevented him from living up to the early promise
he showed as a novelist. He suffered through long periods of dark
depression, loneliness and self-destructive behavior. Dangerously
violent characters and sex fascinated Steward, and his overtures and
adventures frequently landed him in the hospital.
"He paid the price for being himself," Mr. Spring said, "but at least
he got to be himself."
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