![]() ![]() Much of Steward’s life in the Bay Area took place only a few miles from where I grew up and where I now live. I bought Justin Spring’s Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade and couldn’t put it down. There were a surprising number of book reviews about this tale of an eccentric gay man who lived most of his underground adult life in Chicago and the East Bay. Then his name came back when a biography was published this summer. After I read the book, I loaned it out and never saw it again.ĭear Sammy Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. And whatever tenuous connection I had to Steward disappeared. I heard that Steward was a retired professor living in the East Bay, and then somebody said he also wrote pornography and had been a tattoo artist. Portrait of Gertrude Stein in her garden at Bilignin by Sam Steward. Truth be told, I wanted the life around the literature more than the literature itself. In college, I read everything about Gertrude and Alice, although very little of Gertrude’s own work. I first heard of Sam Steward in the late 1970s when I bought Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Several years after his own death, Steward was lucky that a brilliant biographer, Justin Spring, found his collection of materials and was able to share the tale of his entire courageous life. Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher, gave legitimacy to Steward’s record keeping. He kept meticulous records of his various activities, as if he hoped that one day they might be found. ![]() And yet he pushed the boundary of secrecy as far as the time allowed. If he were young today, he might not need to be so secretive about his sexuality and his passions, and then some of the pathos in his life might be missing. Toklas-is the role secrecy played in his life. For me, one of the many interesting things about Samuel Steward-novelist, professor, tattoo artist, pornographic writer, and friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. ![]()
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