In Chicago he shared stories-and African American Johnny Leapheart-with photographer George Platt Lynes, and later after moving to Oakland, California, became the official tattoo artist of the Hells Angels. His conquests-Steward seduced Lord Alfred Douglass in order to “be connected” to Oscar Wilde, and had a quickie with a young actor soon to be known in Hollywood as Rock Hudson-were equally wide-ranging and included a pronounced weakness for sailors. The range of Steward’s contacts over his long life (he died on New Years Eve 1993) is astounding: from Stein and Toklas and Christopher Isherwood, to International Mister Leather founder Chuck Renslow and tattoo artist Don Hardy. Toklas to writing “one-handed fiction.”īut finding out how this had happened and why, or much more about him, remained a mystery-Justin Spring’s Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward solves that mystery.ĭrawing on the voluminous material left after Steward’s death-thanks to his habit of compulsively recording many aspects of his life, especially his sexual encounters-Spring has delivered the fullest account of this enthralling writer, professor, tattoo artists, and pornographer we are ever likely to have, and written one of the best books of the year.īorn in southeastern Ohio in 1909 and raised by his aunt and her stepsisters, Sam Steward seemed well on his way to a career as a writer and instructor, publishing a short story collection and a novel by the mid-1930s, and teaching at Washington State University, and both Loyola and DePaul in Chicago.Īlthough successful, it was his other life-his sexual life and his stubborn insistence on “his right to be free” at a time when homosexuality was illegal that lead him to abandon the academy to pursue tattooing and writing explicitly about sex. By the mid-1980s, it was known that ‘Phil Andros’ was the pen name for Samuel Steward, a man who improbably had gone from knowing Gertrude Stein and Alice B.
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