Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (69 page)

^*
Von Papen (1879–1969) had briefly served as chancellor of Germany in 1932.

^*
Though Röhm had been named as a homosexual by the German press as early as 1925, Rose staunchly denies the fact in his memoirs (which are rife with contradiction, most particularly where homosexuality is concerned). “Ernst was not the debauched degenerate that the pitiful Hitler tried to make him out to be…Rohm loved men and youths with a Platonic ideal—it was a kind of Nietzschean cult, although Ernst disliked Nietzsche and the philosophy of the superman. He was not a homosexual…[but] I loved Ernst Röhm and he loved me.” (Rose,
Saying Life
, pp. 195, 234–35.)

^*
Marie (Madame Paul) Cuttoli (1873–1973), artist and art dealer.

^*
June 29–30, 1934.

^*
Beaton also believed (incorrectly) that Stein’s motto “Rose is a Rose is a Rose” had somehow been based upon Francis Rose, a misattribution that later featured prominently in Rose’s various obituaries. (“A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” is a line from a short piece called “Sacred Emily,” which Stein had written twenty years before her first meeting with Francis Rose.)

^*
Hemingway described Stein’s comments to him about male homosexuals in
A Moveable Feast
(1964), in a chapter that also features an unsavory portrayal of Stein’s relationship with Toklas.

^*
Stein’s novel
Q.E.D.
(1903), published in 1950 as
Things as They Are
, is the story of a lesbian love triangle.

^*
The S.S.
Athenia
, a passenger ship carrying 1,103 civilians (including 300 Americans) bound from Liverpool to Montreal, had been torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat on September 3, 1939, just twelve days before Steward wrote his letter.

^*
A small town near Bilignin. While at the fair, Steward took photos of Stein, Toklas, and Daniel-Rops trying their luck at a shooting gallery.

^*
Information about this encounter is listed in the Stud File under the subject heading “South Side,” with the additional information “Chicago 1942 100 Seven hours!” “100” being Steward’s code word for “jackpot,” or “sex in all forms.”

^*
When Stein’s poodle, Basket, had died, she bought another, giving the new poodle puppy the same name.

^*
Wilder had taken the role of the Narrator in his play
Our Town
.

^*
This never-published untitled manuscript has been lost.

^*
“To vomit.”

^*
Esther Wilcox, Wendell’s wife.

^*
“Trade” describes a man who, though self-identifying as heterosexual, will allow another man to perform nonreciprocal oral sex on him.

^*
For more on the phenomenon of homosexual desire and American sailor imagery, see the exhibition catalog “The Sailor: 1930–1945,” from an exhibition by the same name curated by Tom Sokolowski at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1983.

^*
Steward later donated a copy of
Bell-Bottom Trousers
to the Institute for Sex Research, which for years listed its author as “Guy de Mereille.” But this is clearly a pseudonym chosen by Steward (Guy de Mereille was the name of a 1937 Paris pickup about whom Steward had observed in his diary, “Desire to give the whole French nation a collective bath. Personally filthy”). The cover of the work, which features an illustration by Steward, also features a note reading, “Of this story twenty-five copies have been hectographed, five of which have been reserved for the author. It is particularly intended for the enjoyment of members of the armed services, and permission to reprint it is freely given.” (KISR Library.)

^*
Steward’s notebook of neatly transcribed erotic limericks remains within his papers; other “latriniana” was donated to the Institute for Sex Research.

^*
Steward privately referred to Dr. Schoen as “Dr. Pretty” (
Schöne
being German for “pretty”). Elsewhere he described Schoen as looking like the film star Gregory Peck.

^*
Malignant teratoma: a type of cancer that involves cysts that contain one or more of the three main types of cells found in a developing fetus (embryo).

^*
Autosite: The usually larger component of abnormal, unequally conjoined twins that is able to live independently and nourish the other parasitic component.

^*
Steward would later donate that correspondence to the Kinsey Institute, apparently to demonstrate the nature of loving, erotic friendships between men.

^*
Art Craine appears as himself in
Greek Ways
; the novel ends at his home in a small town just outside Pittsburgh.

^*
Scottish dialect for “a drop,” as in “A Wee Drappie Mair,” an old Scottish drinking song.

^*
To “start the weekend early” is a euphemism for getting drunk.

^*
Steward’s account is supported by a letter from Loyola (now in the Steward papers) documenting his leave of absence, and also by a sympathetic letter on the situation from Morton Zabel (now in the Zabel papers at the Newberry Library, Chicago).

^*
Steward’s Stud File, meanwhile, notes a number of sexual encounters backstage, including one with a man named Charles Silver “in the opera donjon” in 1947.

^*
The card in the Stud File notes: “Tall ex-sailor. Ami de John Scheele [manager of the bookstore at Field’s]. Worked in gift wrap dept. Black curly hair. V gd-lking.” The encounter took place in December 1946; Steward later shared other particulars of the encounter (namely the use of the elevator) with his friend and former pupil Douglas Martin. Hudson’s work in the gift-wrap department is briefly mentioned in Hudson’s memoirs. (Rock Hudson and Sara Davidson,
Rock Hudson: His Story
[New York: William Morrow, 1986], p. 156.)

^*
Steward later noted in his memoirs that “though [I] assiduously courted Dode in the hope that [I] might be introduced to her handsome son, she was evidently wise to the world’s ways…[I] never did meet Marlon.”

^*
The month of Stein’s death.

^*
Steward gave the entire correspondence to Kinsey in 1950 and a year later at Kinsey’s specific request wrote explanatory notes on the correspondence.

^*
The number seven corresponds exactly to the number of men Steward records in his Stud File as having had encounters with at the Great Lakes Training Station.

^*
“Party” is period slang for “sexual encounter.”

^*
A photograph taken by Bill Dellenback of Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research in approximately 1950 clearly shows this mural over Steward’s Murphy bed.

^*
Several of these small paintings survive in private collections, featuring the nature of the medium and the name of the portrayed individual inscribed on the verso.

^*
Like Steward, Stevens was engaging in pleasurable, consensual sex play in which he had willingly arranged to take the role of “victim.” Though Steward may have used the word in his Stud File entry, Stevens was not “raped.”

^*
During a blackout drunk he had unwittingly broken Emmy Curtis’s finger.

^*
Steward visited New Haven that summer, but his actual donation of the Stein letters to Yale did not take place until spring of 1958. (Steward to Toklas [April 19, 1958].)

^*
Steward particularly asked Baron to keep an eye out for Apollinaire’s 1909
L’Oeuvre du Marquis de Sade
, with its “wonderful” analysis of
Les 120 Journées de Sodome
.

^*
New York: Greenberg, 1951.

^*
It was in no way sexual, however: “There was never any physical contact between us except a handshake.” (Steward, “Early Chapters,” p. 266.) There is no “Kinsey” card in the Stud File.

^*
The Kinsey erotica collection in Bloomington is now easily the largest conglomeration of erotica in the world, worth an estimated $20 to $40 million. (Jones,
Kinsey
, p. 519.)

^*
Various conservative groups opposed to studies in human sexuality have repeatedly attempted to vilify Kinsey and discredit his findings, but their arguments and ad hominem attacks on Kinsey have done nothing to discredit the data, which have been tested and reviewed repeatedly (
The Modernization of Sex
, pp. 43–44). Subsequent analyses have revealed that the data, while enduringly solid, are only “incomplete in scope and method,” since “the findings were limited to white, better educated, less religious, and largely youthful women and men from the northeastern United States who volunteered to be interviewed about their sexual lives…the effect of volunteer respondents was to inflate the reported levels of some aspects of sexual behavior. The interview schedule and the interviewing were of high quality, but they could not correct for [these] biases in sampling.” (John Gagnon, Ph.D., reviewing the reprinted and updated Kinsey volumes in
The New England Journal of Medicine
, February 18, 1999.)

^*
Steward described these get-togethers in his journals and records alternately as “daisy chains,” “
spintriae
,” and “partouzies.” The latter was Steward’s whimsical adaptation of the French
partouze
, a sexual free-for-all.

^*
Tacitus (
Annals
6.1): “He [Tiberius] often landed at points in the neighborhood, visited the gardens by the Tiber, but went back again to the cliffs and to the solitude of the sea shores, in shame at the sexual vices into which he had plunged so unrestrainedly that in the fashion of a despot he debauched the children of free-born citizens. It was not merely beauty and a handsome person which fired his lust, but boyish modesty in some, and noble ancestry in others. Hitherto unknown terms such as ‘sellarius’ [literally, he who practiced lewdness upon a sofa] and ‘spintria’ were then for the first time invented, suggested by the vileness of the place and the countless variations upon the act of sodomy that were invented.” (Professor Stephen Colvin of University College, London, to author, 2005.)

^*
Steward used other Latin words in his Stud File. Of a trick named Jim Rogers, in November 1950, he wrote “
podex lambere
. Yum, yum.” (
Podex
is Latin for “anus”;
lambo
, “to lap or to lick.”) Another common notation in the Stud File,
lues
(Latin for “plague”), was Steward’s code word for syphilis.