Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (16 page)

Steward was again binge-drinking heavily; while doing so in June, he met a blue-collar former marine who subsequently became a long-term sex partner. Steward’s first account of him went to Baron:

He later gave a more detailed account of the man, whose name was Bob Berbich, in his memoirs:

Over the summer, Steward traveled to New York. He wrote Thornton Wilder to say he was planning a visit to New Haven while on the East Coast, to arrange the donation of Stein’s letters to the Yale library
^*
(for he hoped to visit Wilder, who lived close by); but Wilder seems to have carefully set aside the letter until after Steward had come and gone, later writing him:

The final break with Wilder took place later that fall. During the early 1940s, Steward’s friend Wendell Wilcox (whose fiction was by then being published in
The New Yorker
) developed an idea for a novel based on a story from Catullus. In Steward’s recollection, “Wendell made the mistake of detailing his carefully researched plot to Thornton, and some time later [in 1948] Thornton’s [novel]
The Ides of March
appeared. Therein, alas! Wendell found his plot. After that Thornton found that many of his friends in Chicago disappeared or grew cool.”

•

Steward’s September was difficult in other ways as well. As he later wrote, “In autumn of 1948 my father died, sitting at a stool, from taking amphetamines too soon after a [drinking] binge…I did not go back for his funeral, money was low.” Unemployed but unwilling to return to Loyola, he instead found himself wandering “casually and a bit uncertainly into the Dean’s office at DePaul University, [where I] told him of my background and asked if there were any openings.”

DePaul University was much less distinguished than Loyola: its students came largely from blue-collar backgrounds, and most had received only basic secondary educations. The school had only a small liberal arts faculty, and an even smaller English department. Worse yet, Steward soon made an appalling discovery about the pay scale: “Laymen at this college were salaried not so much on their educational accomplishments and qualifications as on their marital status and the number of children produced for Mother Church—a highly immoral view, it seemed to me, but nonetheless rigidly followed.”

Steward was equally dismayed by his students: “Many entering freshmen could barely read…[And as a recovering alcoholic] I no longer had [my] boozy tolerance [of stupidity]…instead, I found myself more and more being forced to take a half-tablet of some amphetamine to be able to face the classes that I came more and more to dislike.”

Since he had no potential for material advancement at DePaul (and no possibility of tenure), and since so much of what went on within the school simply disgusted him, Steward could hardly take his new job seriously. Instead, he later wrote, he chose to

•

In July 1949, Steward turned forty. With no great interest in his work at DePaul, he instead spent more and more time in his apartment—reading, writing, drawing, or else simply puttering among his various erotic materials. In his correspondence with Hal Baron he noted that he was now searching as far as New York for particular rare erotic titles;
^*
but he was also collecting contemporary literary fiction relating to or describing various forms of homosexual experience. Photographs of the apartment at the Kinsey Institute show bookcases full of hardcover first editions of contemporary novels such as James Barr’s
Quatrefoil
, Charles Jackson’s
The Fall of Valor
, and other literary novels and short-story collections that were addressing the topic of homosexuality much more capably than anything that had appeared from American publishers in the previous decade.

The increasingly dire social circumstances homosexuals faced in 1950 were best described at the time by
The Homosexual in America
, written by the sociologist Edward Sagarin and published under his pseudo nym Donald Webster Cory.
^*
Steward owned a first edition of the book, which described the legal, social, and economic discrimination then being routinely leveled against American homosexuals, and at the same time described something much more insidious. As Sagarin noted:

The homosexual of his generation, he went on to note, “is not quite sure that it is wrong to practice discrimination against him…the worst effect of discrimination has been to make the homosexuals doubt themselves and share in the general contempt for sexual inverts.” Moreover, Sagarin noted, the situation would not get better any time soon, due to the growing public condemnation of homosexuality: “The homosexual’s chief concern is neither with civil rights nor with legal rights, important as these are. His is the problem of condemnation, which involves the necessity for concealment, imposes a burden of self-doubt and self-guilt, and creates a condition which inhibits the struggle for amelioration.”

•

Along with Sagarin’s book, Steward had been especially impressed by James Barr’s literary novel
Quatrefoil
, which had described the new set of circumstances faced by two post–World War II homosexual men as they struggled to remain invisible to outsiders and yet true to their sexual and emotional orientation. Steward had a particular liking for the book because it described a passion between two navy men; but he also thought it beautifully articulate in its vision of two “sane and well-balanced” lovers who, in his words, “with subterfuge and skill waged an eternal battle to remain closeted…successfully conceal[ing] their love for each other, living by a deceit which was forced upon them, dangerously skirting discovery and escaping it only by clever fabrications and skillfully invented fictions, compelled to stand guard over every gesture.” In later life Steward observed, “In some ways
Quatrefoil
was a wonderful treatise on how to live happily in the closet in 1950…[For here was] a graphic and accurate picture of the secrecy and concealment that was necessary in those days…[including a] firm determination—common to so many homosexuals in the past—to be an individual, standing alone, finding all answers within [one]self, and never identifying with any group.” Steward had long since defined himself as just this sort of loner—a man who found scant consolation among other homosexuals, and who maintained not just one, but a number of secret and highly compartmentalized identities. The isolation mandated by such circumstances was profound; but there was no option—and Steward, who had lived in this isolated way from earliest childhood, therefore saw in the novel a powerful evocation of the way in which he himself actually lived.

•

Disliking his new job, Steward continued to daydream about moving to France, and also made plans to take a summer vacation in Paris as soon as he could possibly afford one. He knew that once he was there, Alice B. Toklas would happily introduce him into a number of important intellectual and artistic circles, including that of Jean Cocteau. In a recent letter she had pressed him once again to visit her, then added,

Toklas was now working on a book project of her own, for in her bereavement she had decided to realize a long-held ambition of writing a cookbook. Writing, she found, had a tonic and stabilizing effect; she therefore encouraged Steward to do likewise, even as she encouraged him to persist in his sobriety, noting, “Gertrude always said that liquor only improved the
deséquilibres
and my dear we hope you are not that…I’m all for [Alcoholics Anonymous] since it has done so handsomely for you. The program is sensible and generous and for God’s sake take it as yours and
doucement allez doucement
as they used to say in Bilignin.”

She also expressed real enthusiasm for his newfound passion for painting and drawing, which he had described to her in an earlier letter—for through Stein and her paintings collection, Toklas had established a long and loving relationship with the world of visual art. In one instance she even wrote him that “painting as a diversion for you is perfect—the trouble with Picasso was that he allowed himself to be flattered into believing that he was a poet too…It will be the deepest satisfaction to me if you pull off something of your real quality—you know Gertrude expected it of you.”

Steward quickly made plans for a trip overseas. Now forty and decidedly unaccomplished, he was eager to reacquaint himself with this peculiar, famous old lady who could so easily mention his efforts at painting in the same sentence that mentioned Picasso. He needed her. She in turn wanted to help him, and so kept his “reform” strongly in mind:

But there would be no wife for Steward. The “salvation” that would knock on his door in late 1949 would instead be his new mentor, Alfred C. Kinsey.

By the time Alfred Kinsey first visited Steward’s apartment, his
Sexual Response in the Human Male
had been causing a sensation across the United States for more than a year. Based on data that had taken over a decade to amass, the first volume of the Kinsey studies (along with its companion volume,
Sexual Response in the Human Female
, published five years later, in 1953) was a landmark statistical study of American sexual behavior. Kinsey’s study of human sexual response was in fact related, in its approach, to his previous great project as a zoologist, a twenty-year taxonomic study of gall wasps. Since publishing the
Male
volume, Kinsey had undertaken a yearlong speaking tour to raise public awareness about the usefulness of statistical studies in understanding human sexual activity.

Steward’s meeting with Kinsey took place at the suggestion of a fellow DePaul professor named Theodore Kundrat. In his memoirs, Steward recalled, “The interview would last an hour, Theodore said, although sometimes they ran longer if the interviewee had a lot to say.”

Sexual Response in the Human Male
had been a work of the utmost importance to Steward, for its 804 pages of tables, charts, and statistics based on interviews with 5,940 men about their sexual histories and activities had documented the widespread occurrence of sex between men across the American population. According to the data, 37 percent of the total male population of the United States had had at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age; 50 percent of the males who remained single until age thirty-five had had overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm since the onset of adolescence; 13 percent of males (approximately) had reacted erotically to other males without having had overt homosexual contacts after the onset of adolescence; 18 percent of males had had at least as much of the homosexual as the heterosexual in their histories for at least three years between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five; 8 percent of males were exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five; and, finally, 4 percent of white males were exclusively homosexual throughout their lives after the onset of adolescence.

Since the Kinsey data on homosexuality was by far the most sensational revelation made in
Sexual Response in the Human Male
, cultural and media attention became fixed on male homosexuality in the years immediately following its publication—often to the detriment of the many closeted and semicloseted homosexuals who had, up until that moment, gone largely unnoticed in American society. Kinsey’s associate C. A. Tripp later noted that while homosexuality “was only one of the six basic forms of sex considered [in the study]…nothing so disturbed the critics nor brought them to such a fever pitch of hate as did the homosexual findings. Preachers, pundits and prudes found much to lament, and a variety of ways to do the lamenting: some questioned the scientific accuracy of the work—‘homosexuality just can’t be that prevalent.’ Others feared the sociological effects of even discussing such matters—‘by talking about it you encourage it.’ But the most virulent resentments arose from the fact that sex, particularly homosexual sex, was dealt with [in the Kinsey study] without a word of moralizing. Emotional reactions to the homosexual findings dominated every level of criticism, though they were frequently disguised as purely technical concerns.”

•

In the weeks and months following their first meeting, Kinsey and Steward developed a substantial friendship.
^*
Kinsey’s fascination with Steward was based, at least at first, on Steward’s lifelong habit of sexual record keeping and his vast collection of sexual paraphernalia and memorabilia—for Kinsey, too, was a passionate collector and record keeper. As a zoology professor, Kinsey had collected gall wasps by the thousand; now, as a sex researcher, he was actively collecting not only thousands of sexual histories, but also what would eventually become the world’s largest collection of sex-related materials.
^*

Kinsey was impressed by Steward’s intellectual commitment to establishing the legitimacy of homosexual experience, which at that time was not only rare among academics or public intellectuals, but also quite dangerous for anyone pursuing a university career. Kinsey was himself well outside the mainstream of academia in this regard; in fact,
Sexual Response in the Human Male
was widely read at the time of its publication as an indictment of American society, specifically its obsession with controlling and restricting sexual freedom. Moreover, since his statistical studies demonstrated that Americans were engaging in a wide variety of sexual activities (of which only a few were then lawful), academic conservatives had quickly accused Kinsey of using his research to promote both indiscriminate and deviant sexual activity.

Kinsey soon discovered that he and Steward had very similar backgrounds and early life experiences. Both had grown up in strict Methodist households with fathers involved in the church. Both had been raised without sexual instruction in an atmosphere of deep sexual inhibition. Both had had rejecting fathers, and both had fought, despite a lack of parental encouragement, to achieve academic prominence. Both had eventually developed into strong-willed and charismatic educators. Both had strong sex drives and both were sexually conflicted, and both had chosen to devote their lives (in very different ways) to reconciling these strong sex drives with the sexually intolerant belief systems and institutions into which they had been born. Both were also extremely enterprising men who coped with their considerable psychic anguish over their sexuality by immersing themselves in work that sought to address sex via the intellect.

Kinsey tended to perceive those who had rejected or discarded injunctions against sex at an early age as impressively self-possessed, and so he seems to have had a special admiration for Steward. The fact that Steward had been repeatedly rejected as a writer, had succumbed to alcoholism, and had reached a point of utter frustration as both a scholar and a teacher may have seemed tragically wasteful to Kinsey; but it probably also made Steward seem oddly heroic to him as well—for Steward was, if nothing else, a man who had dared to live his beliefs.

Kinsey, of course, had made very different choices in his life. At the time of his first meeting with Steward, he was a happily married family man, a highly admired professor, and a justly acclaimed researcher who had spent his entire professional life successfully engaged in statistical scientific studies. He was also just then at the height of his critical and popular success. Perhaps the greatest difference between Kinsey and Steward, though, was one of faith. Where Steward had resolved the early dilemma of paternal and religious rejection by in turn rejecting both his father and his father’s religion, Kinsey had simply distanced himself from both, and at the same time embraced Darwinian evolutionary theory. Kinsey’s core faith was in science, and he found it entirely sustaining: his belief in it gave his life purpose, direction, and hope.

Kinsey’s belief in the naturalness of variations in human sexual behavior flowed directly from Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which was based not only on the variation of species, but also on variations (sexual and otherwise) within species. By creating a broad-based statistical analysis of human sexual response, he had been able to demonstrate the existence of widespread variations throughout the American population at all levels of society. His findings suggested that variations in sexual behavior were not based on acts of will and individual choice, as religious teachings had always insisted. Rather they were based on widespread biological variations existing within the human population: in other words, on genetic variation. The discovery of widespread sexual deviation and the revelation of the full extent of this deviation would at first shock America, but, ultimately, help to shift American perceptions of sexuality quite substantially. In so doing, Kinsey’s research would help make the case for increased sexual tolerance—a tolerance that today is taken so much for granted in some quarters that the great storm of controversy created by the Kinsey findings in the early 1950s is very nearly forgotten.

From the moment they were published, Kinsey’s statistical discoveries had an immediately beneficial effect upon the many individuals suffering undue guilt and anxiety about their sexual desires, habits, and practices. Through statistics, Kinsey had presented these individuals with a whole new way of understanding the sexual self. Among those with a homosexual orientation, feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety, and depression could be particularly intense, and so Kinsey’s findings were profoundly enlightening—and, by extension, healing—to these people. Certainly they were enormously healing for Steward.

In compiling his statistics on sexual activity, Kinsey had conducted thousands of anonymous interviews about sexuality with the help of three charismatic associates, all of whom Steward would come to know well in the coming decade: Wardell Pomeroy, Paul Gebhard, and Clyde Martin. Starting in 1938 (and continuing until 1956), Kinsey, Pomeroy, Gebhard, and Martin had crisscrossed America by car, interviewing people from all social levels and ethnic backgrounds in cities, towns, and villages across the country. The confidential interview they conducted had been carefully devised to obtain a complete sexual history from each participant within two hours; the results of the interviews were then recorded in code and kept entirely private. The team obtained eighteen thousand such interviews, after which Kinsey subjected the results to a complete statistical analysis. Despite being subjected to heavy scrutiny and revision, the findings remain fundamentally unchallenged and unaltered to this day.
^*

Kinsey’s findings about homosexual activity suggested that the word
homosexual
ought not be used as a noun, but only as an adjective, for clearly many men who self-identified as heterosexual engaged in homo-sexual activity. The idea that the population was not divided up between homosexuals and heterosexuals was not new to twentieth-century thought—Havelock Ellis had already hypothesized a sexual continuum (ranging from entirely heterosexual in activity to entirely homosexual in activity); so, too, had Freud. But Kinsey’s data supported the hypothesis by offering statistical proof.

•

Steward later noted of his first meeting with Kinsey:

In Steward’s first letter to Kinsey, written in February of 1950, just a short time after their first meeting, he wrote,