![]() ![]() ![]() Having won an Obie Award for her 1999/2000 performance as Gertrude Stein in a previous play, Lola Pashalinski plays Stein on video, photographed by Josef Astor. Three actor/dancers (Hucklefaery, Estado Flotante, and John William Watkins) play all of the other characters (students, sailors, nightmare creatures, and hustlers), as well as two appearances as Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. The multitalented Kelly is credited with the direction, choreography, video design, animations, and set design. Underneath the Skin is a fascinating and engrossing blend of theater, dance, video, erotic art and a gay history of the 20 th century.Īll of the texts are taken from Steward’s own writings. Toklas, Thomas Mann, André Gide, had trysts with Rudolph Valentino and Lord Alfred Douglas, and became the lover of Thornton Wilder. He was also a friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. What becomes of a person who dedicates his entire life to a pursuit of unfettered sex, even after time has stolen his youth and life’s many trials have robbed him of his belief in the redemptive power of beauty? Steward lived long enough to see the AIDS crisis change ideals of youth and beauty and kill many of his friends and former lovers.Famed performance artist John Kelly has brought his latest show, Underneath the Skin, to La MaMa, subtitled “A Penetrative Portrayal of a Queer Giant Based on the life and work of Samuel Steward 1909-1993.” Steward had a remarkable life in the first three-quarters of the 20 th century as a college professor, a tattoo artist, a pornographer, an unofficial collaborator at the Kinsey Institute and a sexual renegade. ![]() In Steward’s elegiac and still unpublished memoir, he speaks often of cultivating an imperious sense of detachment as a shield against the inevitable ravages of old age. Ultimately, Steward’s life of sexual rapacity and abandon left him unfulfilled and, near the poignant and tragic end of Spring’s exhaustively detailed biography, Steward admits to his journal that the only thing he ever truly loved in his entire life was a dachshund named Fritz. He was eventually left isolated in a Berkeley, California, coach-house, nearly drowning in at least three lifetimes’ worth of treasures and at least as much trash. Steward’s later years were plagued by depression, drug addiction and crippling loneliness. Spring reveals Steward as a man who never achieved the recognition he warranted. Conversely, Steward shunned most gay scenes and harboured a lifelong distrust and abhorrence of effeminacy. He loved truck drivers, gang members, bikers and sailors. Steward felt a lifelong attraction to rough trade, subscribing to a hyper-masculine sexual ideal. He hosted orgies, allowed himself to be filmed in a vigorous BDSM session for Kinsey’s archives, and carried a prodigious appetite for gay-for-pay hustlers. ![]() Under the constant threat of detection and persecution in McCarthy-era America, Steward courted arrest. In addition to his sexual conquests – submissions – Steward amassed a collection of first edition books by important gay authors, hundreds of objets d’art, magazines, photographs and paintings. Secret Historian’s dramatis personae is a fabulous cross section of gay intelligentsia and cultural giants: his long-time friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, visitations with Thomas Mann and André Gide, interactions with Christopher Isherwood, Jean Cocteau, Tennessee Williams, Robert Mapplethorpe and Tom of Finland.Ĭontained in Steward’s Stud File are entries for Rock Hudson, Thornton Wilder, Lord Alfred Douglas and Rudolph Valentino. With incisive prowess gleaned from years in the academy, Steward dedicated his life to a brave and brazen self-examination without ever allowing the potential mental or emotional dangers inherent in such severe personal excavation to slow him down. It is all filtered through an immensely well-read scholastic tradition. All of this is delivered with Steward’s mordant wit, razor sharp self-reflexiveness and gently self-deprecating introspection. His unpublished memoir – on which Spring draws heavily – offers insight into Steward’s well-drawn theories on the sexual mores of the day. His Stud File became an indispensable record – spanning most of the 20th century – of the evolving sexuality of one gay man. Throughout his entire adult life, Steward maintained an obsessively annotated Stud File containing hundreds of index cards detailing every one of his 4,647 sexual encounters with 807 men over nearly 50 years. One of Steward’s most lasting imprints on history is his role as a sexual archivist and researcher for Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research. During the 1950s, Steward’s life was an elaborate double-act: by day, professor Samuel Steward, Phd, popular teacher at DePaul Catholic University by night, Phil Sparrow, one of Chicago’s foremost tattoo artists, friend to gangsters and seducer of naval cadets and back-ally street toughs. ![]()
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