August 2010 ·
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Can a secret sex diary furnish an artistic legacy as meaningful as Emily Dickinson’s sewn-up bundles of poems, or the piles of paintings Theo van Gogh inherited after his brother’s premature demise? Samuel Steward may never have imagined it, but his erotic history raises the question. A talented writer who early attracted the attention of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, he found his career blocked by a determination (so different from hers and his) to write candidly about his homosexuality. In Justin Spring’s biography, secret historian: the life and times of samuel steward, professor, tattoo artist, and sexual renegade (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30), Steward meets, on page after page, the rejection that was the lot of the openly gay artist: the rejection of works already written and the works that, anticipating such rejection, never got written in the first place: “Such a novel would of course have been unpublishable, and Steward knew it.”
Similar phrases become, over the course of his life, depressingly recurrent. Yet Steward was an obsessive record keeper, and his journals and his “Stud File” of thousands of encounters allow his biographer to create a remarkably full portrait of a man whose life was what Edmund White’s might have been had White been born three decades earlier. In the great sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, Steward found a “father-confessor” as fascinated as he was by sexuality in all its forms—Steward even participated in a gay S&M film at Kinsey’s home in Indiana—and particularly by an obsession of Steward’s, tattooing, for which he eventually left a dead-end academic job in Chicago.
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