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Philip Sparrow Tells All: Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist

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Samuel Steward (1909–93) was an English professor, a tattoo artist for the Hells Angels, a sexual adventurer who shared the considerable scope of his experiences with Alfred Kinsey, and a prolific writer whose publications ranged from scholarly articles to gay erotica (the latter appearing under the pen name Phil Andros). Perhaps his oddest authorial role was as a monthly contributor between 1944 and 1949 to the Illinois Dental Journal , an obscure trade publication for dentists, where writing as Philip Sparrow he produced a series of charming, richly allusive, and often quirky essays on a wildly eclectic assortment of topics.

In Philip Sparrow Tells All , Jeremy Mulderig has collected thirty of these engaging but forgotten columns, prefacing them with revealing introductions that relate the essays to people and events in Steward’s life and to the intellectual and cultural contexts in which he wrote during the 1940s. In these essays we encounter such famous friends of Steward as Gertrude Stein, André Gide, and Thornton Wilder. We hear of his stint as a holiday sales clerk at Marshall Field’s (where he met and seduced fellow employee Rock Hudson), of his roles as an opera and ballet extra in hilariously shoddy costumes, of his hoarding tendencies, his disappointment with the drabness of men’s fashions, and his dread of turning forty. We go along with him to a bodybuilding competition and a pet cemetery, and together we wander the boulevards of Paris and the alleys of Algiers. Throughout, Mulderig’s entertaining annotations explain the essays’ wide-ranging allusions and also highlight their gay subtext, which constituted a kind of private game that Steward played with his mostly oblivious audience of Midwestern dentists.

The first collection of any of Samuel Steward’s writings to be republished since his death in 1993, Philip Sparrow Tells All makes these lost essays available to a broad readership that Steward imagined but never actually enjoyed when he wrote them. In doing so, it takes a major step toward documenting his important place in twentieth-century gay literature and history.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 29, 2015

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Jeremy Mulderig

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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Profile Image for Richard Derus.
3,953 reviews2,245 followers
June 26, 2021
Real Rating: 4.75* of five, rounded up because good lawsy me!

I REQUESTED AND RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review
: First, read this:
There is a quality to the City of the Big Shoulders that grows on a person, like the taste of a martini, like learning to like pineapple and cottage cheese. There are so many things against it that have to be forgotten. When we first arrived we hated it—the dirty papers flying loosely on the streets, the sprawling quality it had, the "maryann" backs of the apartment houses that you see from the elevated tracks as the train groans and screeches on its way to the Loop. We loathed the dirty clothes hanging on the little wooden back porches, we suffered over the unbelievable squalor and filth of the south-side tenements, the naked babies playing in the mud of the backyards—and the incredible hypocrisy of the bright shops on Michigan Boulevard, and the white lights on the whiter Wrigley Tower.
    from "On Chicago"

Now, go read his Wikipedia page to get a sense of why this basic little twink was a Very, Very Big Deal; it explains a lot when you know he was a literary writer of merit while young, an esteemed literary scholar during middle age, and a pornographer of godlike renown in his later years. Throughout his life he was the proverbial "good time had by all," racking up over eight hundred (800!) sex partners in a Satyr-esque lifetime of over four thousand five hundred (4,500!!) sexual encounters.

He even impressed Alfred Kinsey. (You know, the one Liam Neeson played in that movie, the one you're referencing when you say someone's a "Kinsey 6" or whatever.) His journals and other related materials went to the Kinsey Institute...I'm sure they're still popping students' eyes.

Knowing what we know now of Steward's life and lifestyle, one can't but help wondering rather bemusèdly what the hell the Illinois Dentistry Journal was thinking when they asked Professor Steward to write a column for them. Reading these pieces with modern eyes, it's damned incredible what he was able to get away with saying. But in 1944, when he began this work, he was an outwardly respectable scholar...how far social media has dragged (!) us into the private lives of all the people we know! A simple Googling, had it existed in 1944, would've made the staid, stolid dentists of Illinois aware that they wouldn't want Steward's hands anywhere near their instruments.

So to speak.

Probably the most fun thing about reading this collection, for me as a gay kid who loved Phil Andros's first-person hustling tales, is the astonishing freedom to camp it up that came from invisibility! There is no single-edged sword, is there. It delighted me to spend time with Uncle Philip (Auntie Philip?) as we went behind the scenes at the Opera...a thing one should really never do with the performing arts, go look behind the curtain, it utterly ruins the illusions and one can not ever recover them.
I showed up at seven, trembling a little. I heard my name called, and within moments was being whisked up the elevator to the fifth floor...where the men dressed. ... The costume master handed me a mustard-colored costume: a pair of breeches, a short bolero jacket, a string of red cheesecloth for a necktie, and a salmon-colored cummerbund to wrap around my manly form. ... Within a short while I discovered that the breeches were size 46, which is a little large for my svelte thirty-inch waist. I was soon madly fumbling at my rear, trying to pull in the straps and pin myself together. ... At last a kind old gentleman saw my troubles. "Come here," he said. He applied two safety pins, took an extra-long cummerbund, and twirled me into it. Then he took two three-inch folds in my rear, and warned me not to turn my backside to the audience. And we went down to the stage, where a little man rubbed our cheeks briefly with bright rouge, and with a black eyebrow pencil gave us romantic sideburns, and let us go.
    from "On Operas and Operating"


It's like being backstage again...the bit about the cummerbund, for the uninitiated, is precisely accurate. One cannot put on a real cummerbund solo. One needs a deft companion to hold the long cloth at precise and varying angles while one (gracelessly, in my case) twirls and the cummer does its bunding of your trousers. Excellent practice for diapering a toddler, I note for those who might benefit from this knowledge.

One of my mother's cultural touchstones, and thus mine by osmosis, was the inimitable food writer M.F.K. Fisher. She introduced the concept of Dining to many an aspiring flyover-country lassie like Mama. If you have never encountered her lapidary prose, and her conoisseur's eye for what makes a meal A Feast, please do not read the rest of this review until you've procured and at least sampled The Measure of Her Powers or The Art of Eating, which last title is free to read for Amazon Prime members! Oh, don't just take my word for it; read Philip Sparrow's "On How to Cook a Wolf" to get the arch, exquisite Friend-of-Dorothy look at the medieval table's, ermmm, pleasures. There is a recipe to cook a wolf! Fisher quotes it, so does Auntie; and then, in the dropping-of-hairpins to end them all, says this:
For my part, I cannot rest until I find a wolf to try it. Unfortunately, there is in these parts a scarcity of the four-legged kind, so I have a notion to call up "Esquire Escorts" [Bonded Male and Female Escorts for All Occasions] and ask them to send me out an unbonded one, a tall, husky, grey-eyed blond of the two-legged variety. Then, clutching my trusty cudgel, I'll lay him flat as he enters the door, and set to work.
    from "On How to Cook a Wolf"


Whoa, Nelly! (or nelly, I suppose) That's pretty darned Out for that day and time...and his audience wouldn't've known that a "wolf" in the time's gay argot was a studly muffin who did boys on the side, like the current term "trade" covers. Sam Steward was a twink, thin and blond and very much a bottom in today's parlance. He was also a genuine masochist, he liked the leathers and the games of dominance and submission too...but mostly, in his own time, he was invisible as a gay man because there wasn't a large group of people aware of such beings existing among them...and it shows, as we say now.

What I think you might wonder, you poor benighted straight person who happened across my blog, is how the hell you're supposed to be in on the joke when I might as well be speaking Croatian to you right now. Editor Mulderig to the rescue! Everything I've just told you is on the page with the article I'm quoting. It's not called out in a footnote...it's just printed at the bottom of the page and references to the place in the text are in italics to call your attention, eg:
a wolf to try it. In the urban parlance of the early twentieth century, ...

This is, after all, an academic press; one must expect academicians have worked their magic on the obscure points in the text. It's hugely helpful; it's unobtrusive; and in the end it added immeasurably to my pleasure in the read.

That said, the pleasure was one I felt inclined to prolong. One, sometimes two, pieces back-to-back; selected on whim, or mood, not in chronological order; thus it took about four times as long to read the whole text as it would have had it been a novel or other form of narrative. The articles, their subjects, the gestalt of the pieces being written for dentists who almost certainly were innocent of any knowledge of what Auntie Philip was really saying, the biographical detail that the author had serious hotness for the editor he was working for; all of it makes this 256-page slenderness of a treat so much more delicious than most summer reads you can buy.

Just spread the pleasure out over more time and savor the spicy scent of cakes long since baked and tea long since served.
Profile Image for Kathleen.
Author 35 books1,347 followers
December 18, 2015
"Of course, the best teachers are accomplished actors, and I will admit that it is very pleasant to have an audience."

Here's the review I wrote for the Chicago Tribune:

Talent plus obscurity in a research subject mix to make an irresistible cocktail for almost any scholar. Samuel Steward (1909-1993), also known by his pen name and alter ego "Philip Sparrow," possesses both in intoxicating quantities, making it easy to see why editor Jeremy Mulderig has worked so hard to bring this figure further into the light in "Philip Sparrow Tells All: Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist."

Steward lived in Chicago for almost 30 years, during which he worked as an extra in ballet and opera productions, was employed as a holiday-season salesperson in Marshall Field's, and taught at both Loyola and DePaul universities — at the latter until he was fired in 1956 when it was discovered that he was also running a tattoo parlor on Chicago's Skid Row. He touches on such experiences and more with remarkable style, wit and humor in these 30 erudite yet conversational pieces with such simple titles as "On Alcoholics Anonymous," "On Operas and Operating," and "On Men and Their Feathers."

The collection is well worth reading, both for the quality of writing in the essays themselves and for the importance of Steward as a figure who stands as a key rediscovery for Chicago's history in particular and for LGBTQ history in general.

In his foreword, Justin Spring — whose biography of Steward appeared in 2010 — declares how wonderful it is to have this selection of essays "rescued from oblivion." He is undeniably correct. Any time anything is framed as a rescue, it comes with the suggestion of a plot and a motive and a certain degree of effortful derring-do. Emphasizing that something had been lost but is newly found layers that much more interest atop its inherent appeal, and Steward as a subject is already quite appealing.

Steward was a novelist whose debut, "Angels on the Bough," was published in 1936 to positive reviews, and he maintained friendships with Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder. But he also had a seamier side, "having sex in bathhouses, collecting dirty limericks (…), writing amateur pornography, hiring hustlers, picking up sailors in bars, and sometimes being beaten up or robbed by his tricks — experiences he came to savor even as they humiliated him." In addition to his more above-the-board literary pursuits, Steward kept a collection of toilet graffiti, and was an extensive sexual record-keeper, maintaining a "Stud File card catalog" and what Spring calls "the remarkable journal — now in the Kinsey Library."

Mulderig notes in his informative and admiring introduction that as "a gay man who had discovered his sexuality as a boy in rural Ohio, (Steward) would have more than 4,500 sexual encounters during his life with eight hundred men, including all the members of his high school basketball team, Rudolph Valentino, Lord Alfred Douglas, Roy Fitzgerald (later known to the world as Rock Hudson), a number of DePaul students, and very many sailors from the Great Lakes Naval Training station north of Chicago."

Here, Mulderig has edited and annotated a heretofore lesser known branch of Steward's eclectic oeuvre, his essays for the professional magazine the Illinois Dental Journal, which Steward wrote for from 1944-1949, mostly to endear himself to its editor, William P. Schoen, "whom Steward found dashingly handsome."

At first, the plan was to have Steward write under the heading "The Victim's Viewpoint" as a dental patient. Luckily, this premise was abandoned after the first few essays, letting Steward unleash his mind on such wide-ranging topics as cryptography and the city of Chicago. The latter, he is able to describe in what seem today like explicitly homoerotic terms — "a man-city, healthy, sweaty, and sensual (…) The trees of Lincoln Park are the curling man-hair of his chest" — because of the audience of the era's "lovely protective umbrella of ignorance," as he puts it.

Steward has an essay called "On the Importance of Dying Young," but reading this book gives the reader an immense sense of gratitude that he didn't actually do so — as well as for the fact that this weird little magazine published his essays in the mid-20th century and that Mulderig has rounded up those pieces here for the delectation of readers in the early 21st.
Profile Image for George Ilsley.
Author 12 books313 followers
June 26, 2021
There's no better place to write tongue-in-cheek essays than in a dentists' journal!

This collection of strange essays is not as fascinating as the biography of Samuel Steward, or the Dear Sammy letters from Gertrude Stein. I ended up not reading a number of these articles, but did read the ones on topics that interested me more. You have to wonder what readers of the time made of them. There were many letters complaining about the supposedly humorous article on "baby-eating"; but then, that very topic was just in the news again in 2019 (a provocateur at a political rally in U.S. asked a question on such a proposal).

These "lost essays" will be of most interest to Samuel Steward completists, and researchers into historical / coded gay writing.
Profile Image for Jesse.
347 reviews5 followers
August 18, 2023
A lot of the material in here was reused and can be found in Steward's recently published autobiography, but these essays are still full of wit, erudition, and poetry. As well as a surprising dollop of homoeroticism for those who know how to look for it. 😉
Profile Image for Paul.
983 reviews
May 20, 2019
Okay, these were some fascinating essays - that appeared in the Indiana Dentistry Journal - written by Samuel Steward (I had read a fascinating biography of him a few years ago). Great to read Steward's actual work, and the backstory that went with each was very helpful. Now I want to read more of his work.
Profile Image for Kevin.
752 reviews33 followers
April 10, 2016
A great book to buy and read at your leisure if you loved the bio on Sam Steward from a few years ago. Fills in a nice gap in gay essay writing mid-century.
Profile Image for Erica Char.
485 reviews2 followers
September 2, 2023
When I found this, it was in the bargain bin, missing its book jacket, and priced $6. All I knew is that it was a series of essays and nothing about the authors. I figured at worst, it’d be no different than a bad cup of coffee.

Having just finished it, I have fallen completely in love with Samuel Steward. He has a very romantic and light way of exploring such a breadth of topics. I am eager to read more about him and hopefully find more of his writing.
Profile Image for Lesley.
Author 16 books34 followers
July 4, 2018
Bit hard to give this one a rating: it really encourages one to seek out the biography of Steward, who sounds a fascinating character, of which these essays give one glimpse.
Profile Image for Julene.
358 reviews4 followers
April 19, 2016
I can only hope further volumes of Steward's work will be released -- for now I'm stopping at page 81 and waiting for my copy to arrive from Amazon. (They hate when you highlight, underline and otherwise make awesome notes in the library copy...)
Profile Image for Frank Hoppe.
195 reviews3 followers
February 20, 2016
I enjoyed this slight and erudite exercises in the form known as the familiar essay. These essays were buried in an obscure dental journal of the time. Not all of them are included here, but all those included are worth reading.
Profile Image for Jim.
496 reviews6 followers
November 3, 2016
Well-known as a gay novelist, the author wrote the series of essays in this book for a mid-West dentist journal! They are well-written, eccentric, and fun. The editor has an excellent introduction as well as thorough notes. Enjoyable.
Profile Image for John.
497 reviews3 followers
June 2, 2016
prolific writer, interesting life--Samuel Steward~~
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews

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