Secret Historian: The Life And Times Of Samuel Steward: Professor Tattoo Artist and Sexual Renegade

Shortlisted for the National Book Award 2010.

Life in the closet proves boisterous indeed in this biography of an iconic figure of the pre-Stonewall gay demimonde. Steward (19091993) was an English professor, a novelist who wrote both well-received literary fiction and gay porn, a confidant of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, a furtive but exuberant erotic adventurer whose taste for sailors, rough trade, and violent sadomasochism endeared him to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey; later in life, he became Phil Sparrow, official tattoo artist of the Oakland, Calif., Hells Angels. Spring ("Paul Cadmus") fleshes out this colorful story by quoting copiously from his subjects highly literate journals and sex diarieshis Stud File contained entries on trysts with everyone from Rudolph Valentino to Rock Hudsonwhich afford an unabashed account of Stewards erotic picaresque and the yearnings that drove it. (His swerve from academia into tattooing, with its mix of physical pain and proximity to nubile male flesh, was essentially a fetish turned into a business.) Springs sympathetic and entertaining story of a life registers the limitations imposed on homosexuals by a repressive society, but also celebrates the creativity and daring with which Steward tested them.