Event: Justin Spring allies with Borders on World AIDS Day

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Date: Wednesday, December 1
Time: at 7 PM
Place: Lincoln Park Borders, 2817 N. Clark Street, Chicago

Secret Historian Signing Benefits Lifebeat—Music Fights HIV

Justin Spring will be signing copies of his biography, Secret Historian (FSG) on Wednesday, December 1, at 7 PM at the Lincoln Park Borders in Chicago (2817 N. Clark Street).

The signing is part of December One at Borders, a series of special events at stores nationwide to commemorate World AIDS Day. His appearance was coordinated through the Lambda Literary Foundation.

Borders will donate 25% of the proceeds from the sale of the book that day to Lifebeat – Music Fights HIV. Lifebeat is a nonprofit that uses the power of music and the music industry to help educate young people about HIV/AIDS prevention.

http://www.lambdaliterary.org/memo/11/23/spring-borders-world-aids-day/

Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring
Hardcover: 496 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (August 17, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374281343
ISBN-13: 978-0374281342
Amazon: Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade

Drawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on, and documented these experiences in brilliantly vivid (and often very funny) detail. After leaving the world of academe to become Phil Sparrow, a tattoo artist on Chicago’s notorious South State Street, Steward worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark sex research. During the early 1960s, Steward changed his name and identity once again, this time to write exceptionally literate, upbeat pro-homosexual pornography under the name of Phil Andros. Until today he has been known only as Phil Sparrow—but an extraordinary archive of his papers, lost since his death in 1993, has provided Justin Spring with the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.