Are You in his File?

[tomm2thumbs]

Sexual Outlaw on the Gay Frontier
By PATRICIA COHEN

When the author Justin Spring finally tracked down the executor of Samuel Steward’s estate, he had no idea what this sexual outlaw and little-known literary figure had left behind after his death in 1993. So he was taken unawares by the 80 boxes full of drawings, letters, photographs, sexual paraphernalia, manuscripts and other items, including an autograph and reliquary with pubic hair from Rudolph Valentino, a thousand-page confessional journal Steward created at the request of the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and a green metal card catalog labeled “Stud File,” which contained a meticulously documented record on index cards of every sexual experience and partner — Rock Hudson, Thornton Wilder, “One-eyed Sadist” — that Steward said he had had over 50 years.

An attic full of items contained a secret history of a little-documented strand of gay life in the middle decades of the 20th century. Steward’s experience stands in stark contrast to the familiar story of furtive concealment and persecution in the period before gay liberation. As new biographies of artists and writers like E.M. Forster detail the effects of sexual repression on their work, Steward’s history shows what a life of openness, when embraced, entailed day to day.

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This unusual cache is significant because source material from this period is rare, said Martin Duberman, a professor emeritus and founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “It’s a real treasure trove he stumbled upon.” Many of Steward’s contemporaries — and their heirs — destroyed or hid evidence of their homosexuality. Mr. Spring said, for example, that Donald C. Gallup, a curator at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, bought 24 of Wilder’s notes to Steward, but did not catalog them, and they remained on a back shelf until Mr. Spring traced them.

Jason Baumann, curator of the lesbian and gay collection for the New York Public Library, said, “It’s exactly the kind of material that I constantly have historians and the general public wanting to have.”



from NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/books/26secret.html?_r=1

The video at that NY Times link is very interesting and details the forthcoming book on the story...

[xchrom]

1. fascinating. nt

[BR_Parkway]

2. Incredible

[MadMaddie]

3. Fatastic Find! The book will be interesting!