8/31/2023 0 Comments Chicago reader samuel steward![]() He also met the poet Ben Musser, who got his own card in the Stud File and subsidised the publication of Steward’s first collection of short stories, Pan and the Firebird (1930). Given Steward’s three hundred sexual encounters in Ohio, one wonders whether these generations of rural gay émigrés were trying hard enough.Ĭolumbus provided boys and bohemia, and Steward went on to study for a PhD at Ohio State in which he ‘uncovered’ the homosexuality of Cardinal Newman. Steward visited Greenwich Village, the self-appointed centre of American gay life in the 1930s, but he felt little need to move there, the much mythologised rite recorded in most queer autobiographies then and now. This he put down to Midwestern ignorance of homosexuality: ‘The fundamentalist mind made two breathtaking leaps of illogic: people did not do such things, and therefore such things must be non-existent.’ Only when ‘the audience grew more sophisticated did our danger (the knowledge of our actual existence) and our long ordeal begin once more’. (His forthrightness seems not to have caused him much trouble, except for the occasion when he was discovered by his father to have left a note inviting a boarding house guest to come and ‘meat’ him sometime.) When his aunts moved their business to Columbus, Ohio in 1927, so that Steward and his sister could attend Ohio State University, the city offered experiences he recorded in Housmanesque poetry: ‘’Tis only right you look to wed/Now you are grown and gone/And I may comfort me to think/The lads come on and on.’ The sexual availability of ostensibly heterosexual young men was as remarkable as Steward’s appetite – he doesn’t record being attacked, or even that his targets recoiled from his advances. ![]() Direct propositions to members of the basketball and track teams, or to local toughs, were mostly successful, and the clock tower, graveyard and Methodist church provided convenient venues. Woodsfield provided plenty of opportunities. ![]() Ellis’s book reassured him that he was not alone in a world full of heterosexuals, and functioned as a rich ‘manual of the erotic’ throughout his teenage years. His tripartite sexual awakening was provided by sex education films shown in school by Bill Shafer, a friend Steward memorialised by coining ‘shafering’ as a word for masturbation and by a copy of Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion left behind in the boarding house by a travelling salesman. The women were strict Methodists, devoted to Steward’s education and intolerant of any discussion of sex. ![]() His mother died when he was six his father was addicted to alcohol and prescription drugs, and left Steward and his sister, Virginia, to be raised by their grandmother and two maiden aunts, who ran a boarding house. Cross burnings and Klan conclaves were common. As a boy he witnessed the Ku Klux Klan kidnap in broad daylight the father of Woodsfield’s only black family, a chiropractor the man’s wife and children disappeared the next day. Steward was born in 1909 in Woodsfield, Ohio, a small town close to the foothills of the Appalachians. His manuscript was culled to produce a series of disjointed episodes published as Chapters from an Autobiography in 1981, and Jeremy Mulderig has now put Steward’s unpublished manuscript together with the published episodes to produce The Lost Autobiography. Toklas as amateur detectives in Paris, but never got round to finishing his autobiography before his death in 1993. He wrote more than twenty books in all, ranging from a social history of tattooing to murder mysteries featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. It also provided material for the pornographic stories Steward published under the pseudonym Phil Andros. The Stud File was valuable evidence for Alfred Kinsey, for whom Steward performed a sadomasochistic encounter that was recorded on film. There were records for the entire basketball team at Steward’s high school, some of the university students he’d taught, many of the sailors stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in the 1940s and 1950s, and clients of the tattoo parlours he set up in the 1960s. The record for Rudolph Valentino included a swatch of his pubic hair. There were records for Lord Alfred Douglas, Steward’s lips landing ‘where Oscar’s had been’ for Thornton Wilder, who lasted ‘ninety seconds and a dozen strokes’ and the 18-year-old companion of the ageing André Gide, offered up in a bedroom lit only by a ‘frilly little pink tulip lamp’. Each encounter was carefully recorded in his ‘Stud File’, an alphabetical card index which occasionally included physical mementos. B y the time Samuel Steward began to write his autobiography in 1978, at the age of 69, he’d had sex more than four thousand times with more than eight hundred men.
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