1/16/2024 0 Comments Samuel steward valentinoSteward died on New Year’s Eve in 1993, leaving behind in a West Coast attic, with 80 boxes of “secret history” for Spring to track down, comb through, and curate. Read Reginald Harris' review of ‘Secret Historian’ They were so strange and so unresolved in my mind.” “I’m not a book collector but there are certain books I would never part with. “I read all the books and loved them and thought they were kooky, sexy, but well-written social comedies with characters,” he recalled. Spring came across the gay pulp classics of Phil Andros in 1987, when he was just coming out. The way that Spring talks about Samuel Morris Steward, also known throughout his life as Phil Andros, Donald Bishop, Thomas Cave, John McAndrews, Philip “Phil” Sparrow, Ward Stames, D.O.C., Ted Kramer, and Biff Thomas, among others, is an awful lot like the way some speak of a deceased companion yet, the two never met face to face. I had the privilege to meet with art historian and author Justin Spring between his appearances in San Francisco, New York City, and at the campus of Northwestern University-which, strangely, was the closest place to Steward’s old stomping grounds of Chicago that could or would host an event for the book. (It’s also not very common for a Big Gay Book to come with its own even bigger, luscious, limited-edition visual addendum, but then Samuel Steward is no common subject.) But that’s what makes this tale of a man, previously a footnote in the lives of his famous friends, so satisfying. It’s not often that a tome this scholarly contains so much sex and sadness. Justin Spring’s Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward is shaping up to be The Big Gay Book of 2010. OctoToo controversial for Vanity Fair? Secret Historian may be the Big Gay Book of 2010.
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