But as the author of gay pulp fiction, he went by Phil Andros and a half-dozen other pseudonyms Hells Angels in Oakland, Calif., who used him as their official tattoo artist, called him Doc Sparrow readers of his articles in underground newspapers and magazines knew him as Ward Stames. The novelist and professor at a Roman Catholic university who was born in 1909 into an austere and puritanical Methodist household in Ohio was Samuel M. At first he didn’t realize that some of the odd puzzle pieces he happened upon even belonged to the same jigsaw because Steward had so many identities in an era when homosexuality could land a person in jail. Spring recently explained from his sunny studio apartment in Midtown Manhattan. Reconstructing Steward’s life was not easy, Mr. Jason Baumann, curator of the lesbian and gay collection for the New York Public Library, said, “It’s exactly the kind of material that I constantly have historians and the general public wanting to have.” Forster detail the effects of sexual repression on their work, Steward’s history shows what a life of openness, when embraced, entailed day to day. As new biographies of artists and writers like E.M. Steward’s experience stands in stark contrast to the familiar story of furtive concealment and persecution in the period before gay liberation.
THORNTON WILDER AND SAMUEL STEWARD FULL
So he was taken unawares by the 80 boxes full of drawings, letters, photographs, sexual paraphernalia, manuscripts and other items, including an autograph and reliquary with pubic hair from Rudolph Valentino, a thousand-page confessional journal Steward created at the request of the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and a green metal card catalog labeled “Stud File,” which contained a meticulously documented record on index cards of every sexual experience and partner Rock Hudson, Thornton Wilder, “One-eyed Sadist” that Steward said he had had over 50 years.Īn attic full of items contained a secret history of a little-documented strand of gay life in the middle decades of the 20th century. When the author Justin Spring finally tracked down the executor of Samuel Steward’s estate, he had no idea what this sexual outlaw and little-known literary figure had left behind after his death in 1993.
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