SECRET HISTORIAN

The Life and Times of Samuel Steward,
Professor, Tattoo Artist, and
Sexual Renegade

by Justin Spring
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ©2010

Justin Spring’s Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Rather than write a conventional review, Jack Fritscher offered a personal endorsement grounded in his own decades-long friendship with Steward, whom he met in 1969 and interviewed in 1972 at Steward’s Berkeley cottage — making Fritscher one of the first post-Stonewall scholars to sit down with the reclusive writer, years before younger gay historians sought him out. Spring’s biography, drawn from Steward’s own diaries and papers, traces his parallel lives as a university professor, as “Phil Sparrow” the Chicago tattoo artist, as a research subject and collaborator of Alfred Kinsey, and — writing as Phil Andros — as one of the first authors of literate, openly gay pornography.

 Profiles in Gay Courage
“The Talented Mr. Steward“

The Bay Area Reporter
“The Talented Mr. Steward”