Secret Historian by J Spring, reviewed by Stanley Ridge

The subtitle of this monograph, The life and times of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artist, and sexual renegade, seems to say it all. It doesn’t, not by a long shot. To that we must add novelist, poet, essayist, memoirist, translator, and pornographer; collector of autographs and meticulous cataloguer of his sexual encounters (over 4,500 with some 800 different men, including quickies with Rock Hudson and Lord Alfred Douglas); informant for the Kinsey Institute; addicted to alcohol and then barbiturates, but always to sex; a masochist drawn to the sexual underworld; a man both respected by the intellectual élite for his talent and intelligence (his list of friends reads like a literary and artistic Who’s Who) and “adopted” by criminal groups like Hells Angels; who at fifteen sucked off Rudolph Valentino and whose sexual partners would later include such luminaries as Thornton Wilder – although he preferred sailors, ballet dancers, cops, hustlers, and thugs; who rejected the notion that homosexuality and promiscuity were sinful or deviant and “had the presence of mind and the force of character to insist that society was wrong, not he.”

Yet he suffered from low self-esteem because of his orientation. Secret Historian is not a happy, feel-good book, nor is it in the least titillating. It is a scholarly work, and one I found hard to put down.

Justin Spring is right to call Steward a contemporary historian, but he did not consider himself one. He kept his “Stud File” because he was a compulsive fixated on his own sex life, and in making it available to Kinsey he saw himself more as an anthropologist. He aimed to demystify the homosexual and thus render him socially acceptable. Naïvely, because if the public knew of them, his tastes and practices would only have confirmed the negative stereotype it held.

Steward is probably best known today as Phil Andros, the author and fictional hustler hero of sexually graphic novels and short stories, a pioneer in the genre of gay pulp. The books are autobiographical in the sense that, while no Phil Andros himself (Steward was slight of build and mild mannered), he based their events on his own experiences. Unlike run-of-the-mill, “plot, what plot?” pornography, they are carefully written, highly literate, with individualized, three-dimensional characters whose motivations he analyzes. But they stand worlds apart from m2m romance, for Steward wanted to tell the truth about homosexual life as he understood it, and he scorned sentimentality and believed gay men were by nature self-destructive and incapable of committed long-term relationships. Yet these fictions affirm the homosexual lifestyle. His characters are persecuted, but they are not the miserable, mentally ill people inevitably portrayed in the literature, films and psychological writings of his day, in the rare cases they stooped to recognize their existence.

However fascinating Steward’s multiple personae, for me the chief interest of Secret Historian lies not in the life of SS, but in his times and the many other lives it documents, and Justin Spring has made a magnificent job of it. Born nine years into the 20th century and dying seven years before it ended, Steward lived through successive periods of feigned ignorance, abhorrence and the beginning of acceptance of homosexuality, and thanks to his honest and voluminous record-keeping, the book shows us what gay men, closeted and uncloseted, had to go through to survive in a society that anathematized them.

“Samuel Steward began his life in a time and place in which nearly any public discussion of sexuality was discouraged, and in which the topic of homosexuality rarely entered public discourse. As a result, the various strategies by which men who had sex with men were able to function in society were essentially hidden from view. ... [A]s society became more conscious of [its] nature and prevalence within the general population [it became] more violently repressive of it.”

As Spring points out, the Stonewall riots, while a watershed, do not mark the only major divisions in recent gay history. World War II, McCarthyism, and AIDS were at least as important. A teenager in the late fifties and early sixties, I well remember being labeled a “commie pinko queer” (for my political views, the last epithet tagged on for good measure – I used to be straight), and I have since learned that homosexuals could afford to be more open in the twenties.

Spring’s research is impeccable, and his ability to condense a wealth of material into something both readable and informative is impressive. Likewise his determination. He had to argue with librarians before they would grant him access to some of his sources, others remain unavailable to him or anyone (the Kinsey Institute keeps all personal histories confidential), and the richest of all he stumbled on by chance in the attic of Steward’s executor.

Spring also has edited and published two companion volumes to Secret Historian: 1) Steward’s Phil Andros fiction as Notes from the Sexual Underground, 1935-1975: The Selected Writings of Sam Steward (the Renegade Author Also Known as Phil Andros), ISBN 978-1-593-50156-3, which I backordered because it is out of stock, and 2) his erotic drawings in An Obscene Diary: The Visual World of Sam Steward, ISBN 978-1-928-62350-2 which I would love to get my hands on but cannot possibly afford at $150. It has obviously piqued the curiosity of others richer than I, for it, too, is temporarily out of stock.

(This review in the New York Times may also be of interest.)

[Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-28134-2]