“An absorbing, funny, and astonishing memoir of a man with many talents and many identities: Samuel Steward, university professor; Phil Sparrow, tattoo artist; Ward Stames, John McAndrews, and Donald Bishop, writing ground-breaking essays in the first European gay magazines; Phil Andros, explicit novelist; and a man who lived life to its fullest.”

2019 Over the Rainbow Recommended Book List | American Library Association

“Mulderig has set himself the task of reconstructing Steward’s autobiography from a vastly truncated earlier work (Chapters from an Autobiography) and from his unpublished, 110,000-word, shapeless manuscript. . .The result is a reconstructed and expanded version of 85,000 words that has never been published in this form before. It is a thoroughly engaging work . . .One of the most remarkably daring and unusual accounts by an unapologetically renegade gay man of the 20th century.”

The Gay and Lesbian Review

“The material is intrinsically interesting; Steward is an engaging prose stylist; and Mulderig is a meticulous and reliable editor who lays out sound editorial principles and accompanies each chapter with judicious notes, glossing the various personae and cultural references with which some contemporary readers may need assistance. Certainly the book will be taught in college classrooms, but it will find an extensive audience outside the university too because it is compulsively readable. A remarkable work.”

Tim Dean, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

“Exceedingly enjoyable, well-paced, and fascinating.  The English major in Steward gives him a sly but delectable way with words that surfaces in delicious turns of phrase every now and then, adding literary quality to what is, hands down, already a fascinating life story.  The sheer number of important literary figures that Steward, in his young life, seeks out and befriends and (more often than not) beds makes this a page-turner.”

Joseph Allen Boone, University of Southern California

"[Steward] didn’t seem to want writing about himself to lead to self-knowledge and he didn’t want it to recover lost time. That, he realised, was the true purpose of the Stud File. Full of cards and names and ‘snippets of crinkly hair taken from my favourite persons’, it provided the ‘tangibles to which the imagination and memory could be tied, devices to stimulate nostalgia and the remembrance of things past’."

Kevin Brazil | London Review of Books