Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
Authors: justin spring
Tags: #Gay & Lesbian, #Social Science, #College teachers - Illinois - Chicago, #Gay authors, #Literary, #Human Sexuality, #Novelists; American - 20th century, #General, #Sexology - Research - United States - History - 20th century, #Psychology, #Artists; Architects; Photographers, #Body Art & Tattooing, #Authors; American, #College teachers, #Gay authors - United States, #Steward; Samuel M, #Tattoo artists, #Pornography - United States - History - 20th century, #Novelists; American, #Gay Studies, #Authors; American - 20th century, #Education, #Art, #Educators, #Pornography, #20th century, #Tattoo artists - New York (State) - New York, #Sexology, #Poets; American, #Literary Criticism, #Poets; American - 20th century, #Biography & Autobiography, #Teaching Methods & Materials, #Biography
Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art
Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude
The Life and Times of
SAMUEL STEWARD,
Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York
…the question of being important inside in one…
—Gertrude Stein to Samuel Steward, letter of January 12, 1938
Samuel M. Steward—a poet, novelist, and university professor who left the world of higher education to become a sex researcher, skid-row tattoo artist, and pornographer—may seem at first an odd candidate for a biography, for he is practically unknown and nearly all his writing is out of print.
I first ran across Steward’s name in the gay pulp fiction archive and database at the John Hay Special Collections Library at Brown University, where I had gone to research the social and literary challenges that a particular group of artists and writers had faced during the still largely undocumented years before gay liberation. As a biographer and art historian, I knew only a little about pulp fiction before visiting Brown, and was unaware of how many of these cheap paperbacks of the 1950s and ’60s had described the “secret” world of American homosexuals. But pulp fiction writers had been among the first to chronicle the homosexual subculture for the popular reading public, skirting the stringent antiobscenity laws of the time by describing the homosexual “illness” in ways that were melodramatic and grotesque. While I was at first titillated by the lurid cover illustrations and outrageous titles I found in the archive—
Flight into Sodomy
,
Kept Boy
, and
Naked to the Night
all looked like great fun—the books themselves quickly proved just the opposite: they were, for the most part, badly written tales of loneliness, alcohol, and psychic defeat, often concluding in suicide or murder (or both).
While browsing through these depressing paperbacks, I recalled a very different series of novels and stories I had come across a decade earlier at A Different Light bookstore. Erotic comedies, they had chronicled the adventures of a hustler named Phil Andros, an improbably literate Ohio State University graduate turned leather-jacketed hustler. Phil lived a happy-go-lucky life, for his general interest in human nature made each of his paid sexual encounters a sort of learning experience. The tone of the Phil Andros books had been resolutely sex-affirmative, despite the dark, antihomosexual atmosphere of the times they had described; Phil liked sex—and was good at it—and had apparently become a hustler to have as much of it as possible.
The Phil Andros books I had purchased (seven titles all told) had been reissued versions of previously published books. They were published in the early 1980s by a house called Perineum Press, and their cover illustrations featured drawings—presumably of Phil Andros—by Touko Laaksonen/Tom of Finland, an erotic illustrator who had begun his career in the mid-1950s but achieved his greatest popularity nearly twenty years later. The Perineum edition, despite its 1980s publication, held no detailed information about the original printings of the books, nor did it explain what connection Phil Andros had (if any) with Tom of Finland; nor did it give the real name of the author—only the pseudonym Phil Andros. I remained puzzled about these literate, well-written social comedies featuring detailed descriptions of men having sex with men for the better part of a decade; as a result, the novels lingered on my bookshelf, and occasionally I shared them with fellow writers who took an interest in such things. When a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright returned one to me, she observed that it was the happiest, most well-adjusted pornography she had ever read.
Though most of the Phil Andros novels and stories were set in the late 1950s and early ’60s, I soon learned from Brown’s pulp fiction database that they had originally been published as paperbacks starting in 1970. (Only the story collection
$TUD
had been published in hardcover, by a house called Guild Press in 1966.) As for the pseudonymous Phil Andros: he had published under many other names as well—Donald Bishop, Thomas Cave, John McAndrews, Phil Sparrow, Philip Sparrow, Ward Stames, D.O.C., Ted Kramer, and Biff Thomas, among others—but his real name was Samuel M. Steward. I subsequently discovered that Steward had begun his career as a poet, literary novelist, and short story writer. He published three significant nonfiction books in his later years, however:
Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos
, a social history of American tattooing;
Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
, a memoir of his friendship with the two great literary women; and finally
Chapters from an Autobiography
, a modest memoir of his own life and times.
•
Several months later, while writing a book on the artist Paul Cadmus, I found a group of letters from Steward in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale. The letters amazed and delighted me, for they were highly risqué and often very funny. Through them I discovered that Steward had traveled frequently to Paris, that he had worked with Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research, that he had kept a tattoo parlor on Chicago’s South State Street, and that he had been the single most important American contributor to the vanguard European homophile publication
Der Kreis
.
My curiosity aroused, I subsequently read several biographies of Kinsey, from which I learned that Kinsey had been fascinated by Steward’s lifelong project of documenting his sex life in every particular. Upon being interviewed by Kinsey in late 1949, Steward had agreed to share this secret documentation. His later contributions to the Kinsey archive included drawings, photographs, sexual paraphernalia, homemade erotic decorative objects, and—most important—a vast compilation of numerical data and written material, including correspondence, fiction, personal narratives, diaries, and journals.
In his extraordinary openness about his sexuality, Steward was quite the opposite of nearly all the homosexual artists and writers I had been researching. Even Paul Cadmus, who had launched his career through scandalous depictions of homosexuality in his paintings, had been enormously careful about sharing the details of his personal life, and had left behind few written records of it for posterity. Likewise, most of the artists and writers of Steward’s generation had either concealed any references to their homosexuality in their private writings and correspondence, or else rigorously edited it out in the years that followed. As a result, firsthand accounts of homosexual lives during the middle years of the twentieth century have remained underchronicled. As I considered this gap in available information, Steward’s papers began to seem increasingly rare, valuable, and interesting to me.
But what had become of them? Though Steward had died in 1993, few of his papers had entered public collections. Despite his close association with Kinsey, the library at the Kinsey Institute listed only a few books by Steward in its online database, which made no mention whatsoever of his papers, artworks, or data. Yale had a few of his letters, and so, too, did Berkeley, thanks mostly to Steward’s friendships with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. There were also two boxes of his papers at Boston University’s special collections library. But on the basis of what I subsequently found there—most of it dating from the 1980s—I sensed there once had been more. The question, now, was whether it still existed.
After tracking down a manuscripts dealer in Berkeley who owned some artwork by Steward, I came up with two possible addresses for his executor, but no phone number, and was also told he might have either died or moved away. I wrote to him at the addresses I had been given, but received nothing back. Several months later, though, my phone rang in New York. It was the executor; he was in town on a brief visit, was I possibly free to meet in the next hour or so? I was; he came by. After a long and friendly conversation, he invited me to come visit him in San Francisco—for, as he then revealed, he had been keeping Steward’s papers in his attic for nearly a decade.
Only when I turned up on his doorstep a month or so later, however, did the executor let me know the extent of his holdings. Steward’s effects filled nearly the whole of his attic. I spent the days that followed unpacking and photographing this enormous trove of objects, papers, drawings, photographs, manuscripts, home furnishings, and sexual paraphernalia—sensing, as I did so, that among this vast and bewildering collection I had found one of the more sensational secret lives of the twentieth century.
In the years that followed, I have come to know my subject as a complicated man of many identities. Among them are Samuel M. Steward, the mild-mannered poet, literary novelist, and professor of English literature at a Catholic university in Chicago; “Sammy” Steward, adoring young friend and fan of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder; Thomas Cave, spiritual seeker; Sam Steward, unofficial sex researcher for Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research; Phil Sparrow, streetwise Chicago tattoo artist; “Phil” and “Philip von Chicago,” homoerotic illustrator; Ward Stames, homophile journalist; “Doc” Sparrow, official tattoo artist of the Oakland Hells Angels motorcycle gang; and, finally, Phil Andros, the homophile pulp pornographer who described the sexual underground of the American 1950s with passion, good humor, and charm. Steward’s journals, letters, memoirs, diaries, and archive of published materials brought all these various identities together into one man.
While Steward’s various writings were introspective, he was far from solipsistic. In fact, quite the opposite: his writings evoked the world in which he moved more vividly than any anthropologist or social historian I had ever read. Steward was indeed a born observer, and as a result, he described the world around him with extraordinary clarity and empathy. Like most diarists and record keepers, however, his first concern was with himself and his inner life.
Starting with the the vast amount of primary source material I discovered in that San Francisco attic, and then continuing my research at a number of archival collections around the United States, I have worked for nearly a decade to combine Steward’s various unpublished memoirs, fiction, journalism, letters, journals, diaries, artwork, photography, and sexual records into one single, detailed story of a man who literally spent his entire life pondering the nature of his sexual identity even as he devoted the better part of it to sexual activity. My touchstone, throughout, has been his “Stud File,” a whimsically annotated and cross-referenced 746-card card catalog in which Steward documented his sex life in its entirety from the years 1924 through 1974. I have also drawn extensively upon his neatly typed, thousand-page, single-spaced confessional journal, a document that he created at Alfred Kinsey’s specific request. This journal is not only vastly entertaining, but also rich in specific descriptions of people, places, and activities that have otherwise gone largely undocumented in our culture. Perhaps in years to come it will find publication in its own right, for it is both an extraordinary social document and an oddly entertaining intimate personal record.
That Steward could have had the many sexual experiences he described so thoroughly in his Phil Andros fiction, his homophile reportage, his journals, his artwork, and his Stud File seemed to me at the outset of my research hardly possible. But because he kept such complete (and in many instances DNA-verifiable) records of his myriad sexual contacts, my connection of events in his private life to events in his writing is the opposite of speculative. As a result, I consider this biography in many ways a completion of his own life’s work: that is, a full and thoughtful account of one man’s highly sexual life, as carefully documented as possible, from birth to death.
Steward’s many forms of self-documentation now seem to me, in retrospect, a single, lifelong body of work through which he hoped to demystify homosexuality for generations to come. As a young man Steward had hoped to establish himself as a popular novelist, but by his early forties he realized he would not be able to do so without censoring, condemning, and pathologizing his own homosexuality to suit the expectations of his publishers. And so instead, he decided to write a secret history—one that was playfully cross-referenced, illustrated, and footnoted—telling the absolute truth about his sex life in every particular and detail. Doing so would, he hoped, further the cause of Kinsey’s sex research. But the project was primarily undertaken for himself; it was, in fact, his great consolation in a life that was otherwise characterized by constant disappointment, discouragement, isolation, and rejection. Following Steward’s whimsical-serious example, I have attempted to write a biography that is similarly playful in its cross-references, illustrations, and footnotes, and at the same time similarly responsible in its commitment to sexual and emotional truth. Though the story is not without darkness—for it is, in many ways, a story of obsession, isolation, and failure—I have nonetheless attempted to tell it just as Steward might have: with a minumum of moralizing, and the lightest possible touch.
Author’s Note
Steward was careful throughout his life to respect the sexual privacy of others. In writing his biography I have attempted to be similarly respectful by creating pseudonyms for nearly all those living individuals included in the biography whom Steward discussed intimately in his diaries, journals, correspondence, and Stud File. In instances where Steward created his own pseudonyms for real-life intimate acquaintances in order to include them in nonfiction works that he published during his lifetime, I have used Steward’s pseudonyms rather than creating new ones. A small number of Steward’s surviving intimate friends have welcomed my inclusion of their names in this book, and in these instances I have used their real names in preference to pseudonyms. For the most part, however, readers of this biography should assume that all the names given for Steward’s sexual contacts are not the individuals’ real names, but rather pseudonyms, and also that all those acquaintances of Steward’s whose personal lives he discussed in an intimate manner have also been given pseudonyms.