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
Stud File,
see
Steward, Samuel M., sex life
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume II: Sexual Inversion
(Ellis)
“Sublimated Sadist, The: The Dentist as Iago” (Sparrow)
Suddenly Last Summer
(Williams)
Summerfield, Arthur
Sunday, Billy
Supreme Court, U.S.
Sutherland, Donald
Sverdlov
Sweet Bird of Youth
(Williams)
Symonds, John Addington
Symposium
(Plato)
syphilis
Tacitus
Tanguy, Yves
Tatouages du “Milieu”, Les
(Delarue and Giraud)
Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art as Practiced among the Natives of the United States
(Parry)
“Tattooed Harpist, The” (Andros)
Tattooed Larry
tattooing, laws on
Tattoo Jungle, The
,
see Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos
Taylor, Jimmy
Tellman, Bill
“Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff” (Housman)
Terry the Tramp
Thayer, John
Theophilus North
(Wilder)
Things As They Are
(
Q.E.D.
; Stein)
Thomas, Biff (pseud. of SMS)
Thomas, “Tatts,”
Thomas, William LeRoy (Nial Kent)
Thompson, Hunter
Thomson, Virgil
Thor Enterprises
Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait
(Goldstone)
1001 Afternoons in Chicago
(Hecht)
Tiberius, Emperor of Rome
Tilbert, “Moldy Marvin,”
“To an Athlete Dying Young” (Housman)
Tobler, Lou
Toklas, Alice B.; Catholicism of; death of; hepatitis of; Rose and; SMS correspondence; on SMS’s
Dental Journal
columns; SMS’s relationship with
Tomlin, Emmet “Tommy,”
Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen)
Tomorrow’s Man
Tool Box
Toumanova, Tamara
Townsend, Larry
“Trap for Tigers, A” (Stames)
Traubel, Horace
Tregoz, Bill
Tripp, C. A.
Triumph Gym
True History of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
(Douglas)
Tsamis, Jean
Tuesday Morning Workout
Tuttle, Lyle
“Two-Bit Whore” (Andros)
“Two on a Party” (Williams)
Tyler, Parker
Ulmanis, Sig
Understanding the Male Hustler
(Steward)
uniforms, SMS’s obsession with
United States, cultural shift toward conservatism in
Ury, Arthur
Ury, Virginia,
see
Harper, Virginia
Valentino, Rudolph, SMS’s sexual encounter with
“Valentino’s Pubic Hair and Me: The Many Lives of Writer Sam Steward” (Maves)
Vanden, Dirk
Van Doren, Mark
Vanguard
van Vechten, Carl
Vector
Vennen
Very Natural Thing, A
Vidal, Gore
Vietnam War
Village Books and Press
Vinal, Harold
Vinalhaven, Maine
“Virginia to Harlotta” (Steward)
Wagstaff, Sam
Walbrook, Anton
Walters, Michael (pseud. of SMS)
Washington
, S.S.
Washington, State College of, at Pullman
Wayne, Clyde
Webb, Randy
Weidmann, Eugene
Welch, Paul
Wescott, Barbara Harrison
Wescott, Glenway
Wescott, Lloyd
Wetherns, George
“What’s New in Sodom?” (Bishop)
Wheeler, Monroe
When in Rome, Do…
(
Roman Conquests
; Andros)
Wherry, Kenneth
White, Dion
White, Max
Whitman, Walt
Wilcox, Esther
Wilcox, Wendell
Wilde, Oscar
Wilder, Isabel
Wilder, Thornton; as closet homosexual; SMS correspondence; SMS’s relationship with; SMS’s sexual relations with; Stein and
Wild One, The
Willers, Jimmy
Williams, Michael; as SMS’s executor
Williams, Tennessee; SMS’s meeting with
Wolfenden report
Womack, H. Lynn
Woman of No Importance, A
(Wilde)
Woodsfield, Ohio
Woolf, Virginia
work for hire, pornography writing as
working class men: homosexuals as attracted to; sexual attitudes among; SMS’s attraction to
World Book Encyclopedia, The
“World Rat #III” (Andros)
World War II; homosexuals and
Wright, Stephen
Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at
Yale University Press
Yeats, William Butler
YMCAs, in San Francisco
Young, Ian
Young, Stanley
Young and Evil, The
(Ford and Tyler)
Zabel, Morton Dauwen
Zeis, Milton
Zenouhin, Mohammed
Zurich, Switzerland
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2010 by Justin Spring
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by D&M Publishers, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spring, Justin, 1962–
Secret historian: the life and times of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artist, and sexual renegade / Justin Spring—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-374-28134-2
1. Steward, Samuel M. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Poets, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. 5. Gay authors—United States—Biography. 6. College teachers—Illinois—Chicago—Biography. 7. Tattoo artists—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 8. Sexology—Research—United States—History—20th century. 9. Pornography—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.
CT275.S6966S676 2010
810.9'005—dc22
[B]
2009043086
*
Steward’s father took the Keeley cure for opium several times, a quack cure invented by Dr. Leslie Keeley in 1879 that relied on the injection of “bichloride of gold” to remedy alcohol and narcotic addiction.
*
With “Pilate’s gesture,” Steward is suggesting that his father had, like Pontius Pilate, “publicly washed his hands” of any responsibility for his son (Matthew 27:24).
*
The autograph book in which Steward collected celebrity signatures during the period 1926 to 1929 remained with him throughout his life. Distributed among the signatures of his fifty high school classmates are autographs by the stage actor Otis Skinner; the bestselling author Will Durant; the silent film star Rudolph Valentino; the pianist and composer Percy Grainger; the
prima donna assoluta
Mary Garden; the silent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle; the Viennese architect and designer Josef Hoffmann; the violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler; the bestselling author-adventurer Richard Halliburton; the coloratura soprano Amelita Galli-Curci; the silent film actress Pauline Lord; Ziegfeld’s “Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips,” Mae Murray; the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Zona Gale; the author and poet Hamlin Garland; the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff; the biographer Emil Ludwig; the jazz orchestra leader Paul Whiteman; the psychologist Alfred Adler; and the playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder, whom he would meet again in 1937.
*
The Stud File notes (in code) that Steward performed oral sex on Valentino. He filed the card under the name “Guglielmi” rather than “Valentino,” and his one comment about the encounter (apart from a coded note on Valentino’s penile dimensions) is “Nuf sed.”
*
Steward’s interviewer never asked how he had attained this prize. In a later, unpublished interview with Jack Fritscher, however, Steward mentioned using a blunt-tipped manicure scissors.
*
The monstrance is now in a private collection in Rome.
*
Traubel (1858–1919), the self-described “spirit child” of Whitman, published a nine-volume biography of the poet and was an active executor of his estate. He was fifteen when the two first met.
*
Doyle (1843–1907) was the confederate army veteran and bus conductor whom Whitman met shortly after the end of the Civil War in Washington, D.C. The two were (in Doyle’s words) “the biggest sort of friends” until Whitman’s death in 1892.
*
London, 1927.
*
Best remembered today as a screenwriter, Hecht (1894–1964) began his professional career as a hard-boiled Chicago newspaperman, and his lifelong love of Chicago found its way into his many story collections and novels, which also included
1001 Afternoons in Chicago
(1922),
Fantazius Mallare
(1922),
Gargoyles
(1922),
The Florentine Dagger
(1923),
Tales of Chicago Streets
(1924),
Broken Necks
(1924),
Humpty Dumpty
(1924), and
The Kingdom of Evil
(1924). Steward loved and collected Hecht’s books throughout his life.
*
Felicien Robs (more commonly, Rops), Belgian symbolist artist and engraver (1833–1898), whose work was often erotic.
*
Steward notes in the Stud File that he first had reciprocal oral sex with Junior Stewart sometime in 1924, and that they continued to have reciprocal oral sex ten more times. The interruption at the OSU frat house, while not specifically mentioned in the Stud File, is recollected in the SMS
Straight to Hell
interview and also is mentioned in the Phil Andros novel
Shuttlecock
(p. 102).
*
Definitions of homosexuality vary from culture to culture and period to period. For an intriguing account of the varying ways in which sexual acts have defined sexual identity in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, see George Chauncey,
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World (1890–1940)
(New York: Basic Books, 1993).
*
These stories by Steward, written in his early teens, are in the collection of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research.
*
Steward’s PhD dissertation explored, tangentially, the probable homosexuality of Cardinal Newman.
*
Musser converted to Catholicism, became a tertiary of the order of St. Francis, and devoted the remainder of his life to religious work as a lay monk.
*
“JAPM” is an acronym for “Just Another Poetry Magazine.” In 1930, the two magazines were merged into his
Bozart: The Bi-Monthly Poetry Review
.
*
Steward is citing a key moment in Huysmans’s
Against the Grain
, in which Des Esseintes is accosted by a boy prostitute and so begins his first homosexual affair: “From this chance encounter there had sprung a mistrustful friendship that somehow lasted several months…never had [Des Esseintes] run such risks, yet never had he known such satisfaction mingled with distress…the recollection of this mutual attachment dominated all the rest.”
*
Parker Tyler (1904–1974), novelist, poet, and film critic who edited the surrealist magazine
View
. Steward, who had been told by Musser of Musser’s sexual involvement with Tyler and Ford, met both of these raucously effeminate young men but never developed a friendship with either, and later wrote disparagingly (but only in passing) of their collaborative novel
The Young and Evil
.