Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by justin spring Read Free Book Online
Authors: justin spring
Tags: Literary, General, Gay Studies, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, Psychology, Literary Criticism, Gay & Lesbian, 20th Century, Biography, Education, Authors; American, Art, Artists; Architects; Photographers, Pornography, Teaching Methods & Materials, Human Sexuality, Educators, College teachers, College teachers - Illinois - Chicago, Gay authors, Novelists; American - 20th century, Sexology - Research - United States - History - 20th century, Body Art & Tattooing, Gay authors - United States, Steward; Samuel M, Tattoo artists, Pornography - United States - History - 20th century, Novelists; American, Authors; American - 20th century, Tattoo artists - New York (State) - New York, Sexology, Poets; American, Poets; American - 20th century
an Ohio State history professor had also roused his curiosity: he later wrote that this professor’s “innuendoes and crafty indictments of the Catholic Church [in his course on the Protestant Reformation] made me stubbornly determined to find out more about Catholicism.”
But there was another aspect of Catholicism that appealed most strongly to Steward: namely, the concept that through confession one could seek (and obtain) absolution. For Steward, who felt so strongly rejected, condemned, and shamed by his own church, the idea of sexual absolution through confession was entirely appealing. Steward’s PhD dissertation on the Oxford Movement reflected his new embrace of Catholicism, for in it he discussed a movement that had sought (specifically through the work of John Henry Newman) to bring the Church of England back to its Catholic roots—but had ultimately resulted in a number of its participants, including Newman (whom Steward sensed was homosexual), instead converting to Catholicism.
Steward would not, however, remain a Catholic long, for in confessing the sin of his homosexual activities, he found that he was routinely asked by his confessor to promise he would cease to engage in them. Though Steward did so, as time passed he realized he could not make such promises in good faith, and his own rigorous truthfulness suddenly came into complete conflict with what he was doing:
My allegiance to Catholicism lasted a year and a half, and then the boyhood indoctrination against the Whore of Babylon * won out. I had been attracted to the Catholic liturgy, and by Huysmans…I thought I had found a creed elastic enough to allow for my pagan love of life—but the basic honesty infused into me by my early training [as a Methodist] made me realize that I could never again make a perfect act of contrition…And celibacy was not for me…[My ultimate feeling was that] no one with honesty can be both a Catholic and a homosexual.
Steward’s explorations of both Catholicism and homosexuality found their way into his dissertation. By detailing the probable homosexuality of the Oxford Movement’s leader, the philosopher, writer, and (later) Catholic convert John Henry (later, Cardinal) Newman, Steward noted that he had created “almost as much of a bombshell [in the English Department] as [had] my early essay on Whitman.” Nonetheless, the dissertation passed. He had earned his PhD.
Steward completed the dissertation at twenty-four, ten years after his first sexual experience, and just before beginning his first lonely winter of teaching English at a small Catholic college in Helena, Montana. He seems to have written an essay around this time, never published, in which he described the challenge of adjusting to his sexual nature. He signed it using an alias, and altered enough of the specifics of his own life story in it that he could not be concretely identified as its author. Entitled “The Homosexual’s Adjustment,” it features none of the humorous detachment of Steward’s later writing; in fact, it is deadly earnest, and so remarkable a document of his state of mind during these early years that it merits reproduction in its entirety: * ]
I am twenty-two years old. I was graduated from college last June and am at present an instructor in English at a western college. I have reason to believe that with hard work on my part, I shall be able to go a little further in my profession than does the average instructor. But for the past three years I have known that I am a homosexual [and] it is something that I must take into account in any plans I make for the future. I will not say that it is the fact of first importance in my life…But it is a fact that I can certainly not ignore—or only at a price that I should not care to pay. The acceptance of the fact does not come at such a cheap price either.
This knowledge of my homosexuality did not, of course, come as a sudden burst of intelligence. If at the age of
But there was another aspect of Catholicism that appealed most strongly to Steward: namely, the concept that through confession one could seek (and obtain) absolution. For Steward, who felt so strongly rejected, condemned, and shamed by his own church, the idea of sexual absolution through confession was entirely appealing. Steward’s PhD dissertation on the Oxford Movement reflected his new embrace of Catholicism, for in it he discussed a movement that had sought (specifically through the work of John Henry Newman) to bring the Church of England back to its Catholic roots—but had ultimately resulted in a number of its participants, including Newman (whom Steward sensed was homosexual), instead converting to Catholicism.
Steward would not, however, remain a Catholic long, for in confessing the sin of his homosexual activities, he found that he was routinely asked by his confessor to promise he would cease to engage in them. Though Steward did so, as time passed he realized he could not make such promises in good faith, and his own rigorous truthfulness suddenly came into complete conflict with what he was doing:
My allegiance to Catholicism lasted a year and a half, and then the boyhood indoctrination against the Whore of Babylon * won out. I had been attracted to the Catholic liturgy, and by Huysmans…I thought I had found a creed elastic enough to allow for my pagan love of life—but the basic honesty infused into me by my early training [as a Methodist] made me realize that I could never again make a perfect act of contrition…And celibacy was not for me…[My ultimate feeling was that] no one with honesty can be both a Catholic and a homosexual.
Steward’s explorations of both Catholicism and homosexuality found their way into his dissertation. By detailing the probable homosexuality of the Oxford Movement’s leader, the philosopher, writer, and (later) Catholic convert John Henry (later, Cardinal) Newman, Steward noted that he had created “almost as much of a bombshell [in the English Department] as [had] my early essay on Whitman.” Nonetheless, the dissertation passed. He had earned his PhD.
Steward completed the dissertation at twenty-four, ten years after his first sexual experience, and just before beginning his first lonely winter of teaching English at a small Catholic college in Helena, Montana. He seems to have written an essay around this time, never published, in which he described the challenge of adjusting to his sexual nature. He signed it using an alias, and altered enough of the specifics of his own life story in it that he could not be concretely identified as its author. Entitled “The Homosexual’s Adjustment,” it features none of the humorous detachment of Steward’s later writing; in fact, it is deadly earnest, and so remarkable a document of his state of mind during these early years that it merits reproduction in its entirety: * ]
I am twenty-two years old. I was graduated from college last June and am at present an instructor in English at a western college. I have reason to believe that with hard work on my part, I shall be able to go a little further in my profession than does the average instructor. But for the past three years I have known that I am a homosexual [and] it is something that I must take into account in any plans I make for the future. I will not say that it is the fact of first importance in my life…But it is a fact that I can certainly not ignore—or only at a price that I should not care to pay. The acceptance of the fact does not come at such a cheap price either.
This knowledge of my homosexuality did not, of course, come as a sudden burst of intelligence. If at the age of
Similar Books
Dying to Write
Judith Cutler
To Perish in Penzance
Jeanne M. Dams
The Lazarus Rumba
Ernesto Mestre
The Effacing (Book 1.5): Valley's End
T. Anwar Clark
Body Surfing
Anita Shreve
The Ascendant: A Thriller
Drew Chapman
Pendragon's Heir
Suzannah Rowntree
Inflame (Explosive)
Tessa Teevan
Night Runner
Max Turner
Her Viking Wolf
Theodora Taylor