" This book is meticulously researched and documented, and the writing itself is great but about a third of the way through it I began to ask myself why. The title and summary lead you to believe it is about a man with ideas ahead of his time who is involved with some of the 20th Century's most notable artists and transgressors (Kinsey, Gertrude Stein, Cocteau...) and that's not exactly true. While there are parts of the book that are about his involvement with these people,especially Stein, Toklas, and Kinsey, it's not the majority of the book. Most of it is a chronicle of his sexual history. While I found it interesting and heartbreaking to learn specifics about the lives of gay men during the early part of the last century, I thought I was going to read the biography of a renegade progressive artists and I actually found Samuel Steward's politics to be offensive ad I found him hard to like which almost made me abandon the book altogether a few times. From fetishizing the patriarchy, his fetishizing of what he considered "the lower classes", to his exploitation of teenagers for sex, class tourism, and toward the end of his life even racism, I found nothing transgressive about these values and that made me question why he is worth reading about. While his contributions to gay erotica and the Kinsey Institute are significant, I didn't come away thinking of him as a gay, political, or artistic hero. After finishing the book, I felt guilty about disliking its subject who was clearly a man who suffered a lot and had a lonely life. "
— Aleix, 2/20/2014