As a museum curator, perhaps even more so than in his excellent, National Book Award nominated Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade [[Kindle]], Justin Spring succeeds in bringing to life the vast, loose, and elusive brotherhood of men who had sex with men decades before the modern gay rights movement. In the Museum of Sex's current exhibit, on display until January 2012, Steward is the central lighthouse, at once a beacon and searchlight, his thousands of hookups with 800+ partners illuminating the millions of lives left beyond in the dark. His personal network extended globally. He traveled to France, he corresponded with leading queer intellectuals overseas, and he wrote for emerging gay erotic magazines in Switzerland and Scandinavia, developing a special bond with Tom of Finland. Anyone who thinks Steward was just a sex addict getting off, or doubts that one-time gay hookups can lead to a real feeling of kinship, should study the inscribed book from Alfred Douglas, whom Steward pursued and bedded solely to link himself to Oscar Wilde. Plenty of children have come into the world from briefer couplings of less planning or care.
Overwhelmingly, Steward preferred sex with sailors, toughs, and trade, one of the reasons he became a full-time tattoo artist after academia. (He also tripled his income.) Because in America homosexuality was illegal and exposure was a career ender, today's viewers might lazily think those old encounters were unspoken and anonymous, yet defying it all, here's the white shock of a contract, signed by Professor Steward and one of his college students with no academic gifts but brilliantly endowed, agreeing that he could down on the youth once a month this semester and the first four months of the next year, in exchange for an A. Nearly as detailed are the printed fliers from a San Francisco hustling operation that describe each of the "models" available for private sessions and their rates per hour, with travel surcharges. The exhibit's hundreds of artifacts include photos, Polaroids, slides projected onto a bed's white sheet, tattoo drawings, sketches, journals, diaries, books, newspapers, paddles, whips, and an attempt to recreate the mood of his final cabin. Steward's famous "Stud File" is one degree disappointing, encased in a plastic box and not open to any card, though reproductions of cards cover other walls. The many text explanations throughout are superb.
Even without a contract, the exhibit earns an A. Go see it.
The three other main shows at the Museum of Sex each incorporate LGBT content: exhibits on sex in the animal kingdom, sex in comic books; and sex in movies. Each of these suffers from the immensity of the topic and a brevity of space, yet it's thrilling to see lesbian and gay representations everywhere.
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