Autobiography of a Professor, Tattoo Artist, Gay Pornographer, and Sexual Record Keeper

Courtesy of the estate of Samuel M. Steward.

When I pick up a biography, I have certain expectations about how the book I am holding came to be. I assume, for example, that the biographer has a broad and deep knowledge of his or her subject’s life and has approached the task of representing that life in narrative form with professional objectivity. My expectations for an autobiography, however, are quite different. Knowing from experience that all lives are shaped by a subjectivity that filters and orders our perceptions of ourselves, I can’t demand objectivity from the autobiographer. Nor do I wish to, for it is the very subjectivity of autobiography—that inevitably self-conscious construction of the self for an imagined reader—that draws me to autobiographies in the first place.

But when an autobiographer writes two versions of his or her life—two narratives in which elements are selected and arranged and considered differently—how is the reader to regard the disparate selves encountered in the texts? Which account of a given incident should one accept, and on what basis? These are the questions that I faced in editing and blending the published and unpublished autobiographies of Samuel Steward (1909–1993), the English professor, tattoo artist, pornographer, and sexual record keeper whose important place in twentieth-century gay history and literature was established in 2010 by Justin.