It is a remarkable sexual biography of a remarkable man whose life spanned the history of homosexuality almost from the time that it was named: friend of the genteel Gertrude Stein and Alice B. But it is a missed opportunity presumably the publisher had reservations (Spring refers to his difficulties in getting his book placed commercially). The (literally) graphic nature of his subject’s visual art presumably explains its minimal presence in the Secret Historian apart from some representation in a cluster of black-and-white images part way through the book, including Kinsey-organized photographs of Steward’s apartment wall-drawings, Polaroids of sailors (naked apart from the hat), tattooed roughs, and male group sex. The author, whose previous work has included an elegant study of the drawings of the artist Paul Cadmus, has published a separate volume of Steward’s art and photography, for, as a tattooist, his subject was an accomplished draftsman. Spring has found the “Stud File,” a boxed card-index (remember those!) of Steward’s many sexual contacts. Most intriguingly, he has accessed Steward’s own archive, literally moldering away when he died in 1993 (the jacket flap erroneously says 1983), and then moved to his executor’s attic. Justin Spring, the author of this amazing work of historical detection, has assembled a dizzying range of material generated by Steward, only some of which is in the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana. One of these informants was Samuel Steward, the university academic, tattooist, artist, and, as Phil Andros, pioneering 1970s homosexual pornographic writer. However, Kinsey also cultivated some long-term suppliers of voluminous, qualitative, sex-related material in the form of letters, journals, mementos, artwork, and photography. ![]() The work of Alfred Kinsey is usually associated with the famous 1940s and 1950s reports on male and female sexuality and with the quantification (the counting of orgasms) at the core of his questionnaires of tens of thousands of subjects. ![]() New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010. Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade.
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