Considered objectively, the bed is a lonely battleground for attack and siege, assault and penetration. Of the two in combat, one is the victor, another the conquered. And once you are engaged on this battlefield, locked in mortal struggle until the miracle of the orgasm separates you from your opponent—you are absolutely alone.
phil andros, h2
Oh, he was apple-cheeked and black-haired and heterosexual, and I hated his gah-damned guts!
phil andros, the poison tree
Last year, after reading Justin Spring’s Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, I was so captivated by the unusual life of its subject that I began to hunt for his fiction: the hustler-centric gay erotica he’d written as Phil Andros and two mystery novels published as Samuel Steward that featured his friends Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas as sleuths (the irresistible title of one: Murder Is Murder Is Murder).
When, after weeks of waiting, a cheap copy of STUD appeared online, I pounced. I expected to receive a 1980s paperback collection of short stories originally published in magazines in the early ’60s. What arrived instead was a hardcover of an earlier vintage, dust jacket still intact. The spine said “Guild Press.”
Steward’s unhappy experience with Guild Press and H. Lynn Womack, the interesting man who oversaw it, was still fresh in my mind from Secret Historian. Womack, described by Spring as “a heavyset Caucasian albino from a tenant-farming family in Hazelhurst, Mississippi,” had extensive business interests in the legally dicey publication and distribution of gay pornographic books and homoerotic physique magazines. Of his business entanglement with Steward, Spring wrote:
The situation with Womack and Guild Press was indeed about as bad as a book-publishing experience can be. Steward had expected $TUD would be published and available just a few months after his arrival in Berkeley, but Womack’s legal troubles were so severe that he had retreated into a psychiatric ward at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., in order to avoid his creditors. From his improvised office in the hospital Womack could continue to run his business without restriction, but he had no money, and so $TUD was stuck in the warehouse without a binding. For the next three years Womack would evade all communication with Steward, leaving Steward unable to buy back the rights to his manuscript and incapable of publishing it elsewhere. Had the book been published in a timely manner, it might well have been recognized as a breakthrough in erotic publishing. But it had not been, and it would not be.
justin spring, secret historian: the life and times of samuel steward, professor, tattoo artist, and sexual renegade
Almost 50 years later, here was this doomed volume right in front of me. The surprises continued when I opened the book only to find that Steward himself had written inside of it.
The inscription reads:
For Felice — a success, but the worst thing about that is you have to keep on being it.
Phil Andros
phil andros
Remember that hot night on top of the Empire State?
Is there a better way for an author to sign a book than “Remember that hot night on top of the Empire State?” I’m going to do it one day just for kicks, bewildering a stranger in the process, as a way of honoring Sam, who died in 1993. It’s either that or start throwing gay sex parties at my house (a Steward specialty), and I don’t really have the physical equipment or social stamina for that—or a stylish enough slipcover to preserve the integrity of my couch.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.