Read Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade for Free Online

homosexuality would, in fact, be the central question of his writing life; not only would it preoccupy Steward during his early literary and academic career, but it would also be central to his later work as a diarist, sex researcher, and erotic author.
    None of Steward’s academic writings on homosexuality ever achieved mainstream publication, * but his poems and short stories from the same period have survived, and in both the stories and the poems, sexuality is often the subject. He began publishing his romantic verses in the Columbus Dispatch starting at age eighteen, and by March 1930, his junior year, he had published a poem in the magazine Contemporary Verse . Benjamin Musser, the editor of that magazine, took a special interest in Steward, and eventually obtained a small yearly college stipend for him from the philanthropist Cora Smith Gould.
    Musser (1889–1951) was a very minor poet, and he would eventually leave literary publishing for a religious vocation, * but at the time Steward met him in 1928, he was best known as the publisher of two small magazines, Contemporary Verse and JAPM: The Poetry Weekly . * Though closeted, Musser had written and privately published the anonymous homoerotic novel The Strange Confession of Monsieur Montcairn . Through marriage, meanwhile, he had become wealthy enough to set himself up as a publisher of new and emerging (young male) poets.
    Steward met Musser at a poetry reading at Columbus’s Chittenden Hotel and later noted, “From that chance meeting (as Huysmans wrote in A Rebours * ) sprang a mistrustful friendship that endured for several years.” Musser, then in his forties, promptly became infatuated with Steward, and forthwith introduced him to a wider circle of poets and literary figures, including Harold Vinal, secretary of the Poetry Society of America.
    Steward was himself an able poet. His Italian sonnet “Virginia to Harlotta,” written at age nineteen, presciently describes a consciousness divided between virtuous chastity and thankless promiscuity:
    This is yours: to lie beside him all the night
And feel the steady heat come out from him;
The coolness of his hands, each slender limb
Made restless by the absence of the light…
To know the graceless touch, the never-quite-
Sufficient kiss of lip on lip, or breast,
And when the day comes, grey unwanted guest
To see love’s death, each in each other’s sight.
     
    And this is mine: a solitary bed,
And I so still…unwarmed, untouched, unkissed,
With moonlight fingering flowers on my spread,
And moaning trees and crying winds and mist…
Weave me a spell, O bow-boy, so that he
Embracing her sends his caress to me!
     
    In a sense, the poem serves as an emblem of Steward’s sexuality during his early years in academe, as he pined for fine young men who would never love him, while at the same time he had any number of vigorous, semianonymous encounters with others about whom he had few illusions, and who in return had few illusions about him. The form of the poem, meanwhile, shows Steward’s interest in the sonnets of Petrarch, on whom he would later publish an essay in the Sewanee Review .
    Musser invited Steward to visit him in New York, and subsequently to a number of romantic getaways at his beach house in Margate, near Atlantic City. In his Bozart gossip column of March 1930, Musser gleefully noted, “Sam Steward made his very first visit to New York [this past month] and the greater thrill was mine in showing him around…we made New Year whoopee at Parker Tyler’s * apartment; Idella Purnell lunched with us one day and Harold Vinal the next.”
    Apart from meeting these two poet-publishers * (the latter best remembered in E. E. Cummings’s verse indictment of bad poetry, “poem, or beauty hurts mr. vinal”), Steward had a number of other New York adventures, only one of which has survived in print: he traveled up to Harlem with an unnamed lesbian friend to visit the postal clerk Alexander Gumby in his