He hosted orgies, allowed himself to be filmed in a vigorous BDSM session for Kinsey’s archives, and carried a prodigious appetite for gay-for-pay hustlers. Under the constant threat of detection and persecution in McCarthy-era America, Steward courted arrest.
In addition to his sexual conquests – submissions – Steward amassed a collection of first edition books by important gay authors, hundreds of objets d’art, magazines, photographs and paintings. Secret Historian’s dramatis personae is a fabulous cross section of gay intelligentsia and cultural giants: his long-time friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, visitations with Thomas Mann and André Gide, interactions with Christopher Isherwood, Jean Cocteau, Tennessee Williams, Robert Mapplethorpe and Tom of Finland.Ĭontained in Steward’s Stud File are entries for Rock Hudson, Thornton Wilder, Lord Alfred Douglas and Rudolph Valentino. With incisive prowess gleaned from years in the academy, Steward dedicated his life to a brave and brazen self-examination without ever allowing the potential mental or emotional dangers inherent in such severe personal excavation to slow him down. It is all filtered through an immensely well-read scholastic tradition.
All of this is delivered with Steward’s mordant wit, razor sharp self-reflexiveness and gently self-deprecating introspection. His unpublished memoir – on which Spring draws heavily – offers insight into Steward’s well-drawn theories on the sexual mores of the day. His Stud File became an indispensable record – spanning most of the 20th century – of the evolving sexuality of one gay man. Throughout his entire adult life, Steward maintained an obsessively annotated Stud File containing hundreds of index cards detailing every one of his 4,647 sexual encounters with 807 men over nearly 50 years.
One of Steward’s most lasting imprints on history is his role as a sexual archivist and researcher for Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research. During the 1950s, Steward’s life was an elaborate double-act: by day, professor Samuel Steward, Phd, popular teacher at DePaul Catholic University by night, Phil Sparrow, one of Chicago’s foremost tattoo artists, friend to gangsters and seducer of naval cadets and back-ally street toughs.
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