Secret Historian: The Life And Times Of #SamuelSteward, Professor, Tattoo Artist And Sexual Renegade by #JustinSpring. Samuel Steward is undoubtably one of the most fascinating people you have never heard of, and this remarkable biography is a more than capable chronicling of his unbelievable life. Born to a conservative Ohio family, he discovered both an aptitude for writing and his homosexuality at an early age, and dove headlong into an uncompromising exploration of pre-Stonewall gay life; beginning in the 1920s he beds, Rudolph Valentino, a young Rock Hudson, playwright Thornton Wilder, and literally thousands of other men, meticulously documenting each encounter in his "stud files" of index cards. These records would serve as an invaluable resource for Alfred Kinsey, who drew on them heavily, in collaboration with Steward, for his landmark report on human sexuality which revolutionized the medical and scientific establishment's views of homosexuality, and sexuality in general. Steward also attained middling success as a writer and professor, becoming close friends and confidants with Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet and Jean Cocteau, to name but a few, and published a few well-reviewed novels. While teaching in Chicago in the late 1940s, he took up tattooing under the name Phil Sparrow, which he became fascinated with vis-à-vis his uniform fetish and a predilection for rough trade, and he became one of the most sought after artists in the Midwest before decamping to Oakland in the 1960s, where he was the preferred tattooist of the Hell's Angels. There are obviously many corollaries to be drawn between society's changing views of tattooing and homosexuality during his lifetime, and Steward's life is a roadmap of the quotidian experience of the marginalized, underground societies which drove those cultural shifts. He also found time to write a popular series of gay pulp fiction/erotica novels under the pen-name Phil Andros (with cover art by Tom Of Finland) that are considered influential classics of the genre. Spring is thoroughly engaged with his subject without being blithely celebratory - we get a thorough and complex portrait of a rich, sometimes brutally obsessive, but never timid life lived to its fullest - one which has had an influential, and heretofore nearly anonymous impact on contemporary sexuality and culture. #princelibrary #biography #lgbt #gayhistory #tattooing #PhilSparrow #PhilAndros #lit #plpick
