Talent, ambition, shadowed by secret sexuality

Steward is largely unknown, primarily because he was homosexual, Spring suggests. Only now that some of his archives have become accessible can Steward’s career, a unique blend of flash and shadow, come to light. Socially fearless, Steward was a polymath and a master of dish; his insights into figures spanning Rudolph Valentino, Manson acolyte Bobby Beausoleil, his sometime lover Thornton Wilder, and his special favorite, author Alice B. Toklas, are juicy and at times moving. What makes his story poignant is that he had to hide his sexuality, compartmentalizing himself throughout his long life; he died in 1993 at 84.

Accounts of his stints at universities in Chicago and attempts at cracking the Paris literary circle that included Jean Genet and Jean Cocteau are painful; accounts of Steward’s success in bonding with such forces as Andre Gide and Thomas Mann speak to his ambition and talent. His career as a tattoo artist trolling for rough trade in Chicago (apparently the nation’s gay epicenter from the ’50s through the ’80s), Milwaukee, and San Francisco speaks to his ability to join work and pleasure, in a weirdly creative, paranoid way. Accounts of the “stud file’’ he compiled for Kinsey, whose 1948 bestseller, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,’’ revolutionized attitudes toward sexuality, speak to Steward’s drive to look within himself — if not live comfortably with what he found. He had thousands of sexual contacts but never lived with anyone; his closest companions were dogs.