You don’t have to be a skeptic to wonder whether there are elements of exaggeration, if not fantasy, about his claims. Steward also boasted of having had sex with Rock Hudson in a Marshall Field’s elevator and with Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s Bosie, in Hove, England (“head down, my lips where Oscar’s had been”). The only source is Steward himself, in an interview he did with The Advocate more than sixty years after the event. He also entered the encounter in his “Stud File,” a card catalogue recording details of his sexual partners, eventually a few thousand over the course of his lifetime.ĭid all or any of it happen? The monstrance certainly existed, and still does, but short of DNA testing it’s impossible to confirm the hair is Valentino’s. Steward performed oral sex on him and at some point procured a lock of Valentino’s pubic hair-a souvenir that Steward kept in a monstrance at his bedside for the rest of his life. “Yes,” said Steward, “I’d like to have you.” The actor appeared, wearing only a towel, and after signing his autograph asked whether there was anything else the boy wanted. Grabbing his autograph book, he made his way to the hotel and knocked on Valentino’s door.
Samuel steward find a grave full#
Compellingly readable and often unexpectedly funny, this newly discovered story of a gay life full of wildly improbable-but nonetheless true-events is destined to become a landmark queer autobiography from the twentieth century.On July 24, 1926, Samuel Steward, one day past his seventeenth birthday, got word that Rudolph Valentino had just checked in to the best hotel in Columbus, Ohio. The product of a rigorous line-by-line comparison of these two sources and a thoughtful editing of their contents, Mulderig’s thoroughly annotated text is more complete and coherent than either source alone while also remaining faithful to Steward’s style and voice, to his engaging self-deprecation and his droll sense of humor. In The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward, Jeremy Mulderig has integrated Steward’s truncated published text with the text of the original manuscript to create the first extended version of Steward’s autobiography to appear in print-the first sensational, fascinating, and ultimately enlightening story of his many lives told in his own words.
But after finishing a 110,000-word draft in 1979, Steward lost interest in the project and subsequently published only a slim volume of selections from his manuscript. The story of this life would undoubtedly have been a sensation if it had reached publication. And, as a compulsive record keeper, he had maintained a meticulous card-file index throughout his life that documented his 4,500 sexual encounters with more than 800 men. Steward had also moved in the circles of Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, and Alfred Kinsey, among many other notable figures of the twentieth century.
Samuel steward find a grave series#
No one but his closest friends knew the many different identities he had performed during his life: as Samuel Steward, he had been a popular university professor of English as Phil Sparrow, an accomplished tattoo artist as Ward Stames, John McAndrews, and Donald Bishop, a prolific essayist in the first European gay magazines as Phil Andros, the author of a series of popular pornographic gay novels during the 1960s and 1970s. On August 21, 1978, a year before his seventieth birthday, Samuel Steward (1909–93) sat down at his typewriter in Berkeley, California, and began to compose a remarkable autobiography.
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