Justin Spring’s new book, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), has just been nominated for the National Book Award. The announcement was made today. It is a deserving work – groundbreaking, thoroughly researched, well written, and truly fascinating.
However, the author got one thing wrong.
Drawn from the never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of a novelist, poet, and university professor named Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary “hidden lives” of the twentieth century.
An intimate of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on - and documented these experiences in vivid detail.
After leaving academia to become Phil Sparrow, a tattoo artist on Chicago’s notorious South State Street, Steward worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark research into human sexuality. During the early 1960s, Steward changed his name and identity once again, this time to write literate, upbeat, homosexual pornography under the name of Phil Andros.
For the last few decades of his life, Steward / Sparrow / Andros lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. An extraordinary archive of his papers, lost since Steward’s death in 1993 and found in a San Francisco attic, provided the now National Book Award-nominated author with the material for his biography.
In the book, Spring repeats Steward’s claim that as a 16 year old he had a sexual encounter with the silent film star Rudolph Valentino. That encounter supposedly took place in 1926, just months before the heart-throb actor died in a New York hospital at the age of 31.
The encounter is spelled out in much greater detail in Spring’s book. It’s based on the fact that Steward kept a “Stud File,” a set of more than 800 index cards which recorded his various sexual encounters over the years. There is also an image of a Valentino autograph owned by Steward, as well as a reliquary with pubic hair supposedly from the film star. In the book, Spring also writes, "Although Steward never mentioned the encounter in his published memoirs, he detailed its specifics in an interview he granted to a friend just four years before his death."
Spring accepts, without questioning, Steward’s claim to have sexually serviced the silent film actor. And, almost as importantly, it has been repeated in publications across the country – twice in the New York Times as well as in local gay newspapers here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Spring also repeated the claim during his September event at the San Francisco Public Library.
The bits of evidence gathered by Spring might seem to support Steward’s claim – but not in the eyes of Valentino scholars. The claim that Valentino was gay, or bi, or open to sexual encounters with young men is nothing new. Critics and those hoping to claim the handsome actor as one of their own have been making claims for decades – ever since 1926 actually.
In 1926, Valentino travelled to Chicago to challenge the author of a "pink powder puff" editorial which had questioned his masculinity. Men of the time – at least some of them - did not approve of Valentino’s dapper appearance and use of what today would be termed personal grooming products. Then, it seemed effeminate.
Two of the world’s leading excerpts on Valentino live in San Francisco. They are Donna Hill, a Valentino collector and the author of the just published Rudolph Valentino: The Silent Idol His Life in Photographs (Blurb Books, 2010), and Emily Leider, the author of what is considered the definitive biography, Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). Neither accepts Steward’s claims, as detailed in Spring’s book.
Nor does Jeanine Villalobos, Ph.D., Valentino's great-grandniece and a scholar writing a biography of the silent film star for the University of Texas Press.
Via email, Villalobos deconstructed Steward’s claims by noting that Valentino was elsewhere at the time Steward claimed his sexual encounter took place. Villalobos stated, "I know that Valentino's sexuality is a hotly contested matter, and I could be accused of bias," while adding. "So let me be clear that I was utterly agnostic when I first approached this issue, but there has been nothing in my subsequent research to support that he was gay, and much to support that he was straight."
A further examination of the evidence against Steward’s claim was spelled out in much greater detail in an August 31st article on the Huffington Post.
For more info: Justin Spring’s National Book Award nominated Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade is available through online retailers as well as select independent bookstores.
Thomas Gladysz is an arts journalist and author. Recently, he wrote the introduction to the new “Louise Brooks edition” of Margarete Böhme's classic book, The Diary of a Lost Girl (PandorasBox Press). Gladysz lives in San Francisco, and loves watching and reading about old movies. More at www.thomasgladysz.com.
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