Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Good writing of dirty stories?

I think I'll pass.
    Samuel Steward [OSU alum] became a tattoo artist, a gay porn writer, a researcher with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark sex project, a friend of Gertrude Stein and other modernist writers, and the lover of Rudolph Valentino, Thornton Wilder, and Rock Hudson, to name just a few."
No, considering the amount of disease and grief that promiscuous gay sex has brought to modern life, I don't think I'll attend Justin Spring's lecture.

Wexner Center for the Arts: Public Programs - Writer's Reading / Justin Spring on / In Search of Samuel Steward: Rediscovering an OSU Professor Turned Sexual Revolutionary

From PW publicity at Amazon.com: "Life in the closet proves boisterous indeed in this biography of an iconic figure of the pre-Stonewall gay demimonde. Steward (1909–1993) was an English professor, a novelist who wrote both well-received literary fiction and gay porn, a confidant of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, a furtive but exuberant erotic adventurer whose taste for sailors, rough trade, and violent sadomasochism endeared him to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey; later in life, he became Phil Sparrow, official tattoo artist of the Oakland, Calif., Hell's Angels. Spring (Paul Cadmus) fleshes out this colorful story by quoting copiously from his subject's highly literate journals and sex diaries—his Stud File contained entries on trysts with everyone from Rudolph Valentino to Rock Hudson—which afford an unabashed account of Steward's erotic picaresque and the yearnings that drove it. (His swerve from academia into tattooing, with its mix of physical pain and proximity to nubile male flesh, was essentially a fetish turned into a business.) Spring's sympathetic and entertaining story of a life registers the limitations imposed on homosexuals by a repressive society, but also celebrates the creativity and daring with which Steward tested them."

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