Museum of Sex offers snapshots of a secret life

Photo caption: A staged Polaroid photograph, shot by Samuel Steward in his apartment in Chicago around 1952, of a scene from Jean Genet’s “Querelle de Brest.”

ArtsBeat reports: During the 1950s, a professor and tattoo artist named Samuel Steward chronicled his sex life in drawings, letters, photographs, sexual paraphernalia and other items, and in so doing created documentary evidence of his experience of gay life and homosexuality in American culture at that time.

Obscene Diary, an exhibition at the Museum of Sex that includes many of Steward’s personal artifacts, drawings and photographs, is a trove of information about how a community of gay men lived in the 50s and 60s. None of the items in the exhibition were seen during Steward’s lifetime except within the confines of his home.

In this multimedia feature, Justin Spring, the author of the biography Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, and a co-curator of the exhibition, with Sarah Forbes, narrates a look at six images in the exhibition.