Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (35 page)

A few days after his meeting with this handsome but unattainable sailor, Steward received a letter from Rudolf Burckhardt of
Der Kreis
announcing that he would soon be coming to Chicago. “Since there was no way to get out of it gracefully, I wrote and asked him to stay the night with me if he hadn’t already made his arrangements,” Steward noted. And in fact, Steward was already working on some fiction. Recently while visiting his erotica collection (which was now in storage) to search for his 1954 sex calendar,
^*
Steward had found a copy of his old motorcycle story, as well as the equally S/M-themed episode that had followed it, and he found himself thinking there was something in it that might yet be developed. “I read it over…it holds up well, as do the beginning pages of episode number three,” he observed. “I guess I can find it in my heart to finish them, now that the season is so slack.”

As he returned to writing erotic fiction, Steward noted repeatedly in his journal how the world around him was changing, for he kept meeting younger men who seemed much more open and demonstrative in their attraction to other males than any he had known in earlier times. Two young men had, in fact, recently come into the shop for matching love tattoos featuring each other’s name. “The whole episode left me rather shook up,” Steward wrote after applying them. “When we were all done (I dint let my hair down—much), [one] said, ‘Well, I may see you again.’ And [the other] said, ‘Not I!’ Whereupon I said slyly, ‘Not even to get it covered up?’ and embarrassed them both.” The experience marked the first time two outwardly masculine men had come to Steward to be thus tattooed, and Steward’s response—partly jealous and partly cynical (for he thought he recognized one of them as a hustler)—was basically one of amazement: he had never imagined such expressions of loving commitment to be possible between two masculine males.

Steward had a visit a week later from his sister that proved to be unexpectedly difficult. In getting married, she had converted to her husband’s religion, Catholicism, and she now pressed Steward hard to do the same. She remembered his earlier conversion, during the 1930s, and moreover she felt that, given the circumstances of his present life, he would greatly benefit from a return to the Church. “She kept after me to make a general confession; I kept telling her not to browbeat me, that I had no faith, that I couldn’t, etc.” Though Steward managed to give his sister the brush-off, he had an even greater surprise and shock when, a little more than a week later, Alice Toklas wrote to tell him that she, too, had been received back into the Catholic Church. The news left Steward more amazed and disturbed than he cared to admit, for, as he wrote in his journal, “She was the last person in the world except one (myself) whom I ever expected to go back to the Church—and indeed, I had always thought of her as Jewish.”
^*
He went on to note that “on top of Jinny’s urging of me to return when she was here, comes now this—and I am both annoyed and pressured a great deal.” Steward nonetheless responded to Toklas’s news by cheerily writing that it had left him “flabber and ghasted,” and then adding, “I scarcely know what to say, for my own problem gets in the way.” Along with the joy he felt on her behalf, he admitted he was “wondering why I seem not able to believe any more, when once I could.”

Steward was nowhere close to returning to Catholicism, however. In fact his experience of Holy Week 1958 was entirely caught up in worldly concerns. In his journal for Good Friday, he noted, “The [new light] over the john now illuminates the cocks exceedingly well, as the boys stand there to take a leak, and whenever possible, I sneak back…to watch them through the fruit hole.” In the same entry he described how his friend Adam Norman had been entrapped by police that week at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, and how it was now going to cost Norman a thousand dollars to take care of the judge and the two cops. “More proof that you never ought to do it outside your apartment—or [your] shop, where doors can be locked.” Of his own life, he concluded, “Things seem to be going fairly well at present, but I live under dread, always expecting a calamity…this life is full of crises.”

Steward’s chief concern that spring was not so much about robbery or other threats to his business, but rather with Alice Toklas, for she seemed to him so feeble as to be nearing death. With that death, Steward knew he faced yet another serious loss, for he had few significant friends left in his life, and among them Toklas was the dearest and most important. She had not only seen him gently through his drinking, but had also followed his transition from academe to tattooing without judging or condemning him. More important, she was his last living connection to that higher, better, literary life to which he had once aspired—a life once so close that now seemed entirely lost to him.

A few days after Easter, Steward wrote a friend in New York that Toklas seemed “much enfeebled…[and with her conversion to Catholicism] I see her getting ready [for death], for when Gertrude’s last volume
^*
appears, her work will be done.” Wanting to do something truly kind and generous on her behalf, Steward forced himself to pack up all the letters that Gertrude Stein had sent to him during the 1930s and ’40s, and to donate them, at long last, to the Beinecke Library at Yale. He then wrote Toklas to tell her he had done so. “The letters from Gertrude [to me] are finally now [donated to] the Yale collection,” he wrote. “While they were in my house, they were a radiant center; now the hearth seems cold.”

In sending the treasured letters off to Yale, Steward felt more lost than ever. Having already said goodbye to the two great mentors in his life—first Stein, then Kinsey—he was now apparently on the brink of losing Toklas, too. But the impending loss of this significant friend was just one aspect of the much greater crisis in which Steward now found himself—a crisis of self-esteem. What Stein had once termed “the question of being important inside in one” had continued to trouble Steward in the year after losing Kinsey. He was now no longer a working teacher, and could hardly even claim to be a scholar, poet, or novelist—for apart from his journals, he had written nothing of substance for nearly twenty years. Living alone without the daily support or encouragement of family or friends or even a casual lover, he was unattached to any institution or belief system that might otherwise have sustained him in his isolation. And much as Steward might have liked to think of himself as a man given over entirely to sensual debauchery, he was not entirely so. Even in dedicating his life to the exploration of his sexual nature, he was at heart too purposeful and creative a man, and moreover one with too active a mind, simply to sink into the mind-numbing repetition of sexual self-indulgence. But where was he going these days, and what was he doing with his life? Tattooing, sex, and writing were the three main activities that gave his days purpose and meaning; but how these activities might ultimately resolve Steward’s “question of being important inside in one” was something he had yet to work out.

During the spring of 1958 Steward contracted a powerful, lingering intestinal ailment, and so he recorded only a few noteworthy sexual experiences in his journal. He did, however, describe a significant emotional drama: a friend and former sex partner named Brian McKibben
^*
came into the shop,

Steward had his own professional worries as well: the
Chicago Daily News
had recently run a column suggesting that parents file lawsuits against any tattoo artist who tattooed a minor. “That’s the worst possible thing that could have happened,” he wrote. “[It] may be the end.”

In the midst of these personal and professional dramas, the literary editor of
Der Kreis
turned up on Steward’s doorstep. Steward had been dreading the visit, but to his surprise he found Rudolf Burckhardt entirely charming, for the fiftyish German had both a courtly manner and a salty sense of humor. Moreover, he professed to be deeply interested in Steward, both as an essayist and novelist. Steward was happy enough to give Burckhardt a copy of
A Hunting We Will Go!
, the novel Greenberg had declined in 1954. He also promised to write an essay for Burckhardt on the need for the older homosexual to cultivate a sense of detachment as a way of surviving the disappointments of later life. Burckhardt would publish that essay as “Detachment: A Way of Life” in August 1958, and it would be Steward’s first written contribution to the magazine. Two excerpts from the novel would follow soon after. Over the next nine years, Burckhardt would establish himself as Steward’s closest friend and staunchest literary ally; through his constant encouragement, Steward would publish his writings regularly in
Der Kreis
, and in the end become its strongest American voice.

•

Der Kreis
was primarily a news and culture magazine for homosexual males, and the fiction in its pages tended to describe homosexual relationships largely as affairs of the heart—for, at a moment in history when homosexuality was widely feared and reviled, its editors hoped to present sexual relationships between men in the most positive (and least controversial) way possible. The extreme caution with which
Der Kreis
approached any fiction with erotic content is probably best understood in the context of European and American legal history—for while homosexuality was allowed under Swiss law during the 1950s, it remained illegal in France until 1981; and in Britain, despite the 1957 Wolfenden report (which recommended its decriminalization), it remained illegal until 1967. Homosexuality remained illegal across the United States until 1962, when Illinois became the only state in which it was legal until 1967. The editors of
Der Kreis
therefore took a cautiously “assimilationist” approach to the movement for homosexual rights—just as, in the early days of the movement for black rights, black assimilationists had taken up a similarly cautious approach to demanding racial equality. As a result,
Der Kreis
^*
insisted that all references to sexual activity between men be kept to an absolute minimum.

Of the English and American writers who contributed to
Der Kreis
during the period 1952–67 (either with articles written specifically for the magazine or else pieces excerpted from their books), few are remembered today.
^*
Steward was by far the most frequent American contributor, ultimately making fifty-five original contributions to the magazine, among them fifteen short stories and fifteen drawings.
^*
In his unpublished memoirs he noted:

While the editors of
Der Kreis
may have been stodgy, the magazine as a whole was not, largely because of “
das kleine blatt
” (“the little leaf”), an insert of personal ads in which (mostly Swiss) readers discreetly sought out pen pals, loving friendships, and sexual assignations. Moreover, gently provocative illustrations had begun to appear in the magazine starting in 1944. As the 1950s progressed, ever more outré physique photography appeared in its pages as well. During his 1958 trip to America, Burckhardt had been actively soliciting “beefcake” contributions from various American studios, including Chuck Renslow’s Kris Studio, a physique-photography mail order house that was just then operating out of Irv Johnson’s gym at 22 Van Buren Street, just two and a half blocks north of Phil Sparrow’s Tattoo Joynt. It was thus through Burckhardt that Steward first met Renslow, a man who would ultimately become one of the most successful erotic-business entrepreneurs in the history of Chicago.

On Burckhardt’s first visit to Kris Studio, Renslow had given him sixty bodybuilding photos to use in the magazine; Burckhardt had, in turn, brought Renslow and Dom Orejudos (whom Steward initially described in his journal as “the small sissy Italian [
sic
] who draws the sexy men”
^*
) down to the Tattoo Joynt to observe Steward at work. “They seemed a bit out of place,” Steward noted of that first visit, “but were quiet, and goggle eyed too, at the youngsters who flocked in while they were here.”

A born entrepreneur, Renslow would eventually preside over a highly profitable business empire that catered to the many needs, interests, and appetites of Chicago’s various homosexual communities. He had been publishing his physique-photography magazine,
Tomorrow’s Man
, since the age of twenty-two;
^*
now, at twenty-eight, he was in the process of buying Irv Johnson’s gym, renaming it the Triumph Gym, and moving it to a larger space on Monroe Street. He had simultaneously founded Kris Studio (with a fellow photographer named Harry Mickelson) specifically to shoot “beefcake” photography, an art then most visibly practiced in Chicago by the photographer Cliff Oettinger. Renslow had sensed early on that he might make good money through beefcake, the suggestive display of the well-muscled, scantily clad male physique. Starting in 1952, Renslow had also helped organize AAU bodybuilding competitions throughout the greater Chicago area, and with Cliff Oettinger he soon (in his own words) “ran all [the Chicago] physique contests, [including] the Mr. Chicago [and] the Mr. Illinois.”

By approaching bodybuilders not only as director of Physique Contest Programs for the Illinois chapter of the AAU but also as the editor and publisher of
Tomorrow’s Man
, Renslow impressed bodybuilders with his credentials, and simultaneously presented them with a cost-free opportunity to be “officially” photographed by an accomplished professional. As a result, most of them gladly signed release forms giving Renslow full rights to all images. With ready access to well-muscled models willing to be photographed for free, Renslow soon built up a steady and highly profitable mail order business in soft-core homosexual pornography.
^*
He gave the most attractive and sexually accommodating models free gym memberships, and then brought in their (bisexual and homosexual) admirers as paying gym customers. In doing so, he created a gym that was not only a home of bodybuilding champions, but also, more discreetly, a locus of male-male sexual opportunity—some of it spontaneous, some of it discreetly arranged (through Renslow) as sex-for-pay.

Sometime around 1953, Renslow had met a short, handsome twenty-year-old ballet dancer named Domingo Stephan Orejudos. Half Filipino and half Italian, Orejudos would never succeed as a dancer, in part because of his stocky build and short legs, but he would nonetheless work throughout the 1950s as a Chicago-based dance teacher and choreographer. At the same time he would channel his significant creative and erotic energies into the creation of wildly kinky murals, posters, illustrations, and comic books that he published through Renslow under the various names of “Domingo,” “Stephen,” and “Étienne.”
^*

When Steward first met this unlikely younger couple, they were living in a sparsely furnished back room of their gym. As Orejudos later noted, “It was
the
gym in Chicago…mostly all free weights…Sometimes after closing hours we would entertain, and have little orgies up there, it was very adaptive. And then you had the showers right there…It was something like having a playroom…since we lived there it was [easy] entertaining that way.”

Through his close daily association with the gym’s many bodybuilders, Renslow knew which of them would hustle. While he would always maintain “I’m not a whoremaster, I’m a photographer,” he never denied his role in connecting hustlers to clients, or for that matter his enjoyment of using the same hustlers for his own pleasure. Steward soon referred in his Stud File to any hustlers who came to him through Renslow (and there would be many) as “courtesy of KPS” or “Kris Pimping Service.”

Steward’s next meeting with Renslow began when Renslow invited him to the gym to draw tattoo designs on two bodybuilders he was going to photograph. Upon arrival, Steward was overwhelmed by the eroticism of the scene:

In mid-June, Steward met another young man through Renslow, one who would eventually become his tattooing apprentice—and after that, one of the most celebrated tattoo artists in the United States. Steward initially described Cliff Ingram—later Cliff Raven—in his journals as “a nice clean-cut kid in his twenties, a friend of Bill Tregoz, about whom he inquired”—for Ingram and Tregoz, both of whom were fascinated by leather, tattoos, and motorcycles, had already had a significant sexual involvement, Tregoz having picked Ingram up on his motorcycle one night in Bughouse Square, the well-known homosexual cruising spot on the Near North Side.

Ingram, who had studied art at Indiana University in Bloomington, immediately wanted to get tattooed by Steward, for Steward was by then well-known as Chicago’s most accomplished tattoo artist. “I had fantasies that I would do some dirty pictures for [Phil Sparrow] and he would give me tattoos in exchange,” he later told an interviewer. “I was just a poor little working stiff, you know. I hadn’t done anything about it and at that point I became more acquainted with Chuck and Dom, [and] learned that [Sparrow] was friends of theirs…[and] suddenly life [became] very interesting because I saw the possibility [of becoming a tattoo artist].” Ingram was at that point sexually involved with Renslow even though Renslow maintained a primary sexual relationship with Orejudos; according to Orejudos, “Cliff became part of our family; he and Chuck shared a bedroom, it was like a…it is hard to say like what because it was such an unusual arrangement.”

Steward was glad to be making new friends, for in his isolated life at the tattoo parlor, he had begun to feel increasingly vulnerable. He noted in an early July journal entry that Charlie Costello, a former circus roustabout and hustler, had recently started stealing things out of his shop. After considering the options, Steward decided to give Costello bus fare back to his hometown of New York before Costello simply robbed the cash register outright. Several days after Costello’s departure, however, the Tattoo Joynt was robbed by someone else—and Steward responded by buying his first gun. “I have come more and more to believe that the culprit was Roy Robinson,” Steward wrote. “Whoever did it…knew the set-up well…[luckily he] didn’t wreck my machines nor throw my colors on the floor.”