![]() ![]() ![]() P.8- quote from a sociologist studying Chicago gay culture in the 30s who found that in most of his interviews, the people emphasized their discovery of gay culture over their private realization of attraction, and how joining the gay world in Chicago also meant joining a new community of living, working, and socializing in different places/with different people. But I feel this way about any academic talking about their job market experience if that experience happened more than 30 years ago. The idea of doing that now is just laughable. At one point he literally walked into someone’s office and asked if there were openings. The only part that pissed me off is how easily Steward just traipsed around getting academic jobs. This book is a combination of text from the original longer draft, the final shorter published version, and text from his diaries and letters. He wrote an autobiography, but it was published in a highly abridged form. Kinsey was also interested in why people get tattoos, so Steward kept a detailed log of all of his clients and the tattoos he gave them, and passed along the info to Kinsey. They talked often, and Steward agreed to engage in some S&M sessions while being observed, since Kinsey was interested in that. Kinsey couldn’t officially have out gay co-researchers, for fear of being accused of biasing the results, but Steward was an unofficial collaborator. He was also the go-to artist for Hell’s Angels for awhile, and assisted Kinsey in his research. In reading just the introduction of the book, I was left wondering, how can one person literally fit all of that into one life? The partial answer is that professor and tattoo artist were not simultaneous careers, and he happened to live in a variety of different situations that lent themselves to a lot of potential for sex (for example, growing up in a boarding house- he slept with many of the tenants, and many of his classmates in high school, some of his students, many of his tattoo clients, and had a relationship with a porn studio where they would send him hustlers and in return he would give them discounted tattoos). He was an extremely thorough record-keeper, which included keeping a “Stud File” of every sexual encounter he ever had (and there were a lot-more than 2,000 encounters with more than 800 people). He lived alone for most of his life, and was never interested in committed romantic relationships. He went by lots of different pseudonyms in his different professions- he was a columnist, an erotica writer, an English professor, and a tattoo artist. I had never heard of him before until reading this book. Samuel Steward was born in 1909 and was a very unusual man. ![]()
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