Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring (review)

Justin Spring's Secret Historian is a writer's wet dream. A biography of Samuel Steward (mild-mannered English professor), a.k.a. Phil Sparrow (skid row tattoo artist), a.k.a. Phil Andros (S/M porn writer), Secret Historian has received glowing reviews in publications from the Economist to the New York Times and Details magazine. A National Book Award finalist, it has been showered with honors, including a Lambda Literary Award and the American Library Association's Stonewall Honor Book. Artifacts from Steward's archive—erotic drawings and photographs, whips and billy clubs, and, of course, the now-famous Stud File (Steward's card catalog of all his sexual encounters between 1924 and 1974)—have been displayed in Obscene Diary, an exhibition curated by Spring for New York's Museum of Sex, and in Out in Chicago, a recent LGBT exhibit at the Chicago History Museum. The book has been featured on the television series In the Life, while the Internet is crawling with podcast interviews with the indefatigable Spring. In May 2012 the sexuality studies program at Ohio State University hosted "Queer Places, Practices, and Lives," a symposium in honor of Steward and keynoted by Spring.¹ It's hard not to be impressed and just a little envious. I want to suggest, however, that the orgy of publicity surrounding Secret Historian is both its strength and its weakness.

Historians of sexuality who specialize in twentieth-century North America are unlikely to learn much new in these pages. This is not to say Spring hasn't done his homework. He has read the pertinent historiography and contextualizes Steward's story in ways that confirm other historians' findings about queer life before Stonewall. Sure, there are places in Spring's book where the existing historical literature might have been better incorporated. But this is to miss the point, for the strength of Spring's book is not its historiography but its popularization of that literature in the counterexample it provides to the self-enclosed daisy chain that is so much queer academic work these days. Yes, Spring addresses academic forums, but he's more often found speaking to the Barnes and Noble crowd or to the International Mr. Leather Convention, where bootblacks learn about Steward's own love for leather boots and the sailors, hustlers, and other rough trade who wore them. Indeed, Spring's hour-long illustrated lecture is reminiscent of the slideshows pioneered by early gay and lesbian historians as a tool to communicate with and root their research in the communities they documented. We can agree that Secret Historian's impressive public profile owes something to the publicity machine of a major trade publisher. Nonetheless, Secret Historian has likely exposed more nonacademic readers to queer research and writing than all of the books in Duke's now-defunct Series Q combined. Put another way, the book speaks to the long-standing divide between queer knowledge production and queer publics, and Spring may be pointing a way forward by reminding us of a more community-focused historical practice.

But there is a downside to all the attention, for we need to ask, where does it originate? It comes, I think, from the way Spring has set himself up in the position, always a powerful one in our culture, to divulge sexual secrets. As the dust jacket puts it, Spring's book is "a sensational reconstruction of . . . a secret sex life," or, as another blurb has it, "more dirty stories than I ever imagined one life could hold." The back cover further tantalizes: "Samuel Steward, secret sexual historian, is a secret no longer." Setting aside whether Steward regarded his life as a secret—in many ways he lived an open, forthright, if often dangerous existence—the sensational revelation of sexual secrets is a tired ploy. Yet Spring milks it...