![]() A few months later I had a fellowship at the Beinecke and looked up Steward’s letters to Stein and Toklas, and they were delightful. I subsequently looked up Sam Steward’s publications and was surprised to find he’d written a social history of tattooing, a memoir of his friendship with Stein and Toklas, and his own memoir, Chapters from an Autobiography. Since I’d never known Phil Andros’ real name I plugged it in to the database and out popped Samuel Steward. I had gone to that library to research beefcake publications I knew Paul Cadmus to have looked at and enjoyed. Can you tell us more about that?Ī: I was at Brown on an American Studies fellowship when I came across the pulp fiction archive and database at the John Hay Library. Q: I’ve read that in researching your book on Paul Cadmus you came across Steward’s name and while doing research at Brown University you found that he was also the pornographer Phil Andros. Many folks I interviewed knew him as Phil and many letters in library archives are mislabeled as being from “Phil Sparrow.” That’s one of the things I had to contend with as I was doing my research. Oddly enough, though, Steward enjoyed being known socially as Phil Sparrow. Q: Do you think Steward saw himself as all those different people, Sparrow, Andros etc.? Or did he use the names for convenience/secrecy?Ī: They are pseudonyms, taken for reasons relating to privacy. Q: How long did Secret Historian take to research and write?Ī: I read my first Phil Andros book around 1987 and had been wondering about him for years, but the idea of writing about him only began in 2001 while working on my Paul Cadmus book.Ĭover of My Brother, My Self by Phil Andros. He agreed to my suggestion of an interview by email. I still had a number of unanswered questions. I wrote to Justin Spring after I finished reading his biography of Samuel Steward and the art book of Steward’s drawings and photographs. Justin Spring’s Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
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