Free Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by justin spring Page B

wearing a shabby old unbuttoned brown cardigan that sagged from somewhat narrow shoulders. The face was sensitive and thin-lipped, and he was nearly bald…his cheekbones were high and hollowed underneath.” Steward later felt that “Gide’s troublesome puritan-Protestantism” was reflected in these gaunt features; roughly the same age as Lord Alfred Douglas, he seemed equally unappetizing to Steward as a potential sex partner.
    While Steward had always found Gide’s writing rather dry, he nonetheless thought Gide a heroic figure whose “brave and brilliant stand for homosexuality was like a lighthouse in those dark and stormy days of the 1930s…To me in my twenties, he was one of the first knights of Camelot.” After all, Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt had been the first book in which a respected public intellectual had openly described his homosexual history. * Steward admired both that book and Corydon , Gide’s dialogue on homosexuality; but he loved The Immoralist best, thinking it the greatest novel of homosexual experience yet written. At the same time, he found Gide’s metaphysical dualism—which distinguished sharply between body and spirit, and confined homosexuality to a purely physical realm from which all emotion (most notably love) was forever banished—much too rigid and confining for his own tastes. As a result, he respected Gide’s work, but felt no immediate connection to it or to him. Gide himself seemed only an ancient, dried-up intellectual—one whose puritan upbringing had clearly left him unable to reconcile “base” homosexual desire with the realm of higher emotion. Steward (who at that moment in his life wanted strongly to reconcile emotion with desire) later observed in an interview, “[While] I think that The Immoralist [is a perfect homosexual novel], Gide has failed and fallen because of that thin-lipped fingernail-biting puritan Protestantism of his, which goes all through everything he has written; it doesn’t essentially damage his creative work, but you always sense it behind his writing, so that he seems to be a closed spirit rather than a flowering one.”
    Steward was nonetheless delighted to be in the presence of a writer who had successfully presented his own homosexuality to the public without shame, fear, or embarrassment—and had moreover done so first, and to acclaim. Steward had come to France in search of the legendary Gallic sophistication about all things sexual, and in Gide he found it personified. The experience of meeting him was all the more fascinating since their interview took place in Gide’s own bedroom, which to Steward’s amazement “had a huge circular bed draped with a pink satin coverlet, and a frilly canopy at one end.” After discussing the Paris Exposition with Gide, and then moving on to discuss various authors, Steward revealed he had just visited Lord Alfred Douglas in Hove. Gide was appalled, for he had met Douglas in Oscar Wilde’s company many years earlier in Algeria, and he still considered him “a dreadful man…a shocking man.” Their interview concluded, Gide invited Steward to return in ten days’ time for a signed copy of Les Caves du Vatican .
    When Steward did so, he was led once again to the room with the circular bed—but not to visit with Gide. The handsome Arab houseboy had mentioned to Gide that he had taken a fancy to Steward during his first visit; as a result, and with Gide’s blessing, the two were given the use of Gide’s bedroom for the afternoon.
    In the days that followed, Steward visited Sylvia Beach’s bookshop on Rue de l’Odeon, toured Notre Dame de Paris, and took a day trip to Versailles. Finally, after visiting the grave of Oscar Wilde at Père Lachaise, he boarded the train for the small town of Culoz in the Rhône-Alpes, not far from where Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas had the annual rental of an eighteenth-century château. There he was finally to meet the world-famous author who had taken such