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Secret Historian
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Secret Historian (2010) (edit title/settings)

The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade

by Justin Spring (Author) (edit contributors)

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Drawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward,  Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of... read more

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  • “P.xiii: While Steward's various writings were introspective, he was far from solipsistic. In fact, quite the opposite: his writings evoked the world in which he moved more vividly than any anthropologist or social historian I had ever read. Steward was indeed a born observer, and as a result, he described the world around him with extraordinary clarity and empathy. Like most diarists and record keepers, however, his first concern was with himself and his inner life.”
  • “P.19: The question of how to discuss homosexuality would, in fact, be the central question of his writing life; not only would it preoccupy Steward during his early literary and academic career, but it would also be central to his later work as a diarist, sex researcher, and erotic author.”
  • “P.57: Like many of his generation, Steward found in the ballet not only an admirable art form in itself, but also an opportunity to admire male physical beauty in a public setting, and at the same time to mix with others who shared his taste for art, music, theatre, and dance.”
  • “P.82: Young, vital, socially unencumbered, and forced into celibacy during long months at sea, the sailor on shore leave has long been considered an archetype of sexual availability, and Steward, like many homosexuals of his generation, had an abiding interest in picking them up, for they were well known as easy "trade."”
  • “P.126-127: The way in which language described and defined not only a sexual experience, but also the inner life and motivations of the person engaging in it — and, in doing so, the opposing sexual mores of the society in which that person lived — would become ever more central to Steward's own artistic project in the coming decade, even as his dream of establishing himself as a Paris-based literary novelist became increasingly remote.”
  • “P.152: "Rome!" Steward wrote two days later. "Even the air smells thick and rich — of melons, hay, fountains, lights, people...<It's> lovely to look at...<I> walked until late, taking in everything...It's fantastic — coloured ochre and red...And the grandeur of its dimensions!"”
  • “P.230: Steward never wrote directly about the sorrow he felt at Lynes's death, but he kept an index card with him on his desk until the end of his own life, some thirty-eight years later, on which he had typed, "George was an atheist, and so am I. But how I long now for an afterlife — a world of light or of deep dazzling darkness, where he and the others we've lost reside, unscathed, forever accessible — to have tea with, to talk nonsense with, to reinvent the world with."”
  • “P.262: Tattooing, sex, and writing were the three main activities that gave his days purpose and meaning; but how these activities might ultimately resolve Steward's "question of being important inside in one" was something he had yet to work out.”
  • “P.295: Since his fantasizing about sex remained a constant, he seemed to have reached, like Casanova in the library at the Castle of Dux, that moment in life when creative reminiscence becomes the happiest possible way of engaging in the activity one has always most enjoyed. And indeed, in the coming years writing about sex would give his life new meaning, direction, and focus.”
  • “P.306: Steward had once shared his passion for hard-boiled detective fiction with Gertrude Stein; now, like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Sam Steward's Phil Andros would describe his erotic adventures in the American underworld with a mixture of humour and cynicism, employing his own very particular use of street vernacular for comic effect.”
  • “P.344: After closing the tattoo parlour in the spring of 1970 Steward felt particularly disconnected from the world around him, for he despised the druggy, self-satisfied dropout culture of the university city in which he lived. "If you wanted to see the scruffy, barrel-bottom scrapings of the 1960s," he wrote in his memoirs, "you <needed look no further than> the Land That Time Forgot — Berkeley."”
  • “P.346: In writing his Phil Andros novels, Steward was, in essence, attempting to create the sort of good-natured accounts of homosexual activity he wished had been available to him as a younger man. His writings described a wide range of sexual interests and practices with warmth, enthusiasm, and little in the way of moral judgment. By approaching the subject of homosexual activity with openness and quiet good humour, he hoped to provide not only erotic entertainment, but also a basic enlightenment about the everyday nature of the non-relationship-oriented sexual encounters that had taken up so much of his life. Doing so was relatively easy for him, since he could base his fiction on his own extensive and in-depth documentation.”
  • “P.352: <Richard> Amory's 1966 bestseller "Song of the Loon" and its two sequels ("Song of Aaron" and "Listen, the Loon Sings") were the most widely read gay novels of the 1960s and '70s; it has been estimated that during this period, 30 percent of all gay men in the United States had purchased a paperback copy of "Song of the Loon."Like Steward, Amory had taken up the writing of gay pulp fiction not as a way of making a living, but rather as a way of putting his own sexual experiences with other men into perspective, hoping that in doing so he might raise public consciousness about the true, loving nature of homosexual experience.”
  • “P.369: The dumbing-down of pornography necessarily led Steward to wonder what else he might now write, for in the loneliness of retirement he found he felt happiest and most alive when seated before his typewriter.”
  • “P.373-374: To be fair, Steward's overuse of medication — for he was now supplementing his street purchases of Seconal with a substantial prescription for it from his doctor, ostensibly to help him combat his chronic insomnia — was not altogether different from similar dependencies that many older people develop after retirement, particularly when living alone and struggling with depression.”
  • “P.410: Steward's lifelong documentation of his sexual activity before, during, and after that shift into both consciousness and repression tells the intimate story of one highly intelligent, exceptionally honest, and significantly troubled man whose life was decisively changed by his unwillingness to submit to a form of social oppression he knew to be unjust.”
  • “P.413: He never expected his Phil Andros novels to be read as literature, and they probably never will be. Even so, their presentation of the nature of male homosexuality is remarkably well thought out, and today these pornographic novels can easily be seen as precursors to post-Stonewall gay literary writing, in which the worlds of homoerotic experience and everyday living are one and the same.”
  • “P.414: Steward rejected both the decadent and the mystical in his understanding of his sexual nature, and also discarded the notion of sin. The clarity, honesty, and plainspoken good humour of his sexual confessions, even at their bleakest moments, connect him instead to Kinsey's systematic, scientific study of sexuality — and through that study to an abiding belief in the healing power of truth.”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • “George was an atheist, and so am I. But how I long now for an afterlife—a world of light or of deep dazzling darkness, where he and the others we’ve lost reside, unscathed, forever accessible—to have tea with, to talk nonsense with, to reinvent the world with.”
    Highlighted by 30 Kindle customers
  • Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume II: Sexual Inversion.
    Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers
  • The action against homosexuals gained further credibility when, on April 23, 1953, President Eisenhower officially prohibited the employment of homosexuals in any branch of the civil service.
    Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
  • me…[My ultimate feeling was that] no one with honesty can be both a Catholic and a homosexual.
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • As he later wrote in an editorial piece for Der Kreis, “the invert, it seem[s] to me, should live alone and learn to like it, and to be self-sufficing.”
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • In 1951 a brilliant coming-of-age novel about a love affair between a teenager and a young man, Finistère,
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • Richard Amory, at that moment the best-known author of gay erotic fiction in America. Amory’s 1966 bestseller Song of the Loon and its two sequels (Song of Aaron and Listen, the Loon Sings) were the most widely read gay novels of the 1960s and ’70s; it has been estimated that during this period, 30 percent of all gay men in the United States had purchased a paperback copy of Song of the Loon.
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • “‘Choice’ had no part in [my sexual identity.] When I discovered what I wanted [sexually], every corpuscle, every instinct I had, drove me unerringly in that direction.”
    Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers
  • After a lifetime of sexual adventure, Steward was now faced, through Renslow’s categorical rejection, with something entirely nonnegotiable and new, and something for which, despite every precaution, he was nonetheless entirely unprepared: his transformation, at age fifty, into a sexually undesirable older man.
    Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers
  • “NYC is fun,” he observed to a friend at the end of his life, “but it drains you quickly (or it always did me) and the entanglements and cross-purposes and switchings and turnarounds make it seem like an emotional railroad yard, with everything working well but not much actually getting done.”
    Highlighted by 8 Kindle customers
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First Sentence edit see section history

Samuel M. Steward - a poet, novelist, and university professor who left the world of higher education to become a sex researcher, skid-row tatoo artist, and pornographer - may seem at first an odd candidate for a biography, for he is practically unknown and nearly all his writing is out of print.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Justin Spring (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Country: USA
Publication Date: 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-28134-2
Page Count: 478

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Classification edit see section history

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