Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (70 page)

^*
For reasons of confidentiality, the sex photographs of Steward by Dellenback are not identified by the Kinsey library as being of Steward. The photographs record a group-sex gathering in which Steward (naked but nonetheless identifiable by his tattoos) wears a mask (identified in his journals as a “French gangster mask”).

^*
Out of consideration for the privacy of the donors, the Kinsey Institute does not share individual sexual histories with researchers. Thus while researching Steward at the library of the Kinsey Institute, I was not allowed to read Steward’s sex history interview, nor was I offered the institute’s copy of Steward’s Stud File, nor was I told whether it had a copy of the Stud File in its possession. There is no mention of the Kinsey copy of the Stud File in its Steward finding aid, though Steward’s own correspondence does indicate that a copy of it was made by Kinsey for the institute’s archive. Thus, only because I had access to Steward’s papers outside of the Kinsey library was I able to research his sex life and document it.

^*
Steward notes to Kinsey in a letter of November 7, 1950, that he is very eager to see “the pictures [Dellenback] took in Chicago,” and eager to have back his Stud File and his own erotic photo collection.

^*
The obscenity of the illustrations made it impossible for Cocteau to acknowledge them with his signature at the time of the book’s publication, but he was nonetheless widely known to have drawn them.

^*
Genet’s
Pompes Funebres
(1949); Apollinaire’s erotic novel
Les Onze Milles Vierges
(Paris, 1907).

^*
The Welsh painter George Melhuish (1916–1985), who was platonically infatuated with Rose for many years.

^*
A historic brasserie on Place de Clichy famous for its long association with painters and writers including Picasso, Apollinaire, and Henry Miller.

^*
Genet lived with André (or André B., as he is also known) from 1947 to 1954 in a hotel room in Montmartre. See White,
Genet
, p. 310. A fictionalized version of Steward’s and Rose’s experiences of André can be found in Steward’s
Parisian Lives
, in which André appears as André Vignot. (Steward also mentions a “story about André in Brittany from my novel” in a journal entry of September 22, 1959.) André B. also appears in the Genet film
Un Chant d’Amour
billed as Java. (White,
Genet
, p. 310.)

^*
Although everyone else called him “Dédé,” Genet apparently called [André B.] “Java” because the hustler had been working aboard a boat named
Le Java
when the two first met (White,
Genet
, p. 310). (The nickname was not so unusual; “Le Java” was a highly popular dance of the Bal-Musette of the 1920s and ’30s.)

^*
To fuck.

^*
“But it often happens that one soils oneself.”

^*
To get an erection. (But Steward’s “inability” was simply due to sexual exhaustion.)

^*
Steward is referring to U.S. customs, which would surely have confiscated the book if it had been found in his luggage.

^*
Reginato is a pseudonym. The young man’s real name appears in the Stud File, in the book of drawings at the Kinsey Institute, and throughout Steward’s journals. Characters based upon him appear several instances in Steward’s erotic fiction, most notably as the young gangster Luigi di Lupo in “I (Cupid) and the Gangster.” Since Reginato is still living, however, I have withheld any more specific details about him from this biography.

^*
“Face of an angel, soul of a pig.”

^*
Reginato appears repeatedly in erotic Polaroids taken by Steward in his apartment starting in early 1951, copies of which remain both in the Steward Papers and in the archives of the Institute for Sex Research.

^*
Aetatis XLII: Steward’s note (in Latin) that he is “Age 42.”

^*
Orgasms.

^*
Steward’s “spanking” paddle bore three Greek initials, in emulation of a fraternity-initiation paddle; but its Greek initials are BK (phi beta kappa)—a private joke, for Steward was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa national honor society.

^*
Steward’s short story “I (Cupid) and the Gangster” includes a character named Luigi diLupo, based upon Reginato. Another short story featuring a character named Reginato, “The Bargain Hunters” (
Der Kreis
, vol. 28, p. 29 [August 1960]), describes a lasting erotic bond between a professor and his student.

^*
“This very fancy pair has a shell inside to hold your testicles, prov[id]ed you have no more than two.”

^*
contacts…apace with periodicity”: Steward’s humorous way of saying, in technical jargon, that he continues to have sex with a new person each time he has sex.

^*
From the Greek
phil
(to love) and
anthropos
(human being).

^*
The Pilgrim Hawk
can be read as a portrait of the tortured love triangle then existing between Wescott, his longtime partner Monroe Wheeler, and the younger, handsome, and prodigiously talented photographer George Platt Lynes.

^*
“contacts continue to surpass periodicity”: Steward’s (humorous) way of saying that he has had more sexual opportunity available to him than he was able to handle.

^*
In Wescott’s recollection, Scott Masters; in the Kinsey collection, and in Steward’s recollection, Steve Masters.

^*
“…and Pomeroy only revealed the tip of the iceberg.” (Gathorne-Hardy,
Kinsey
, p. 333.)

^*
Steward later described these words to an interviewer as “the supreme insult” one could offer a homosexual. (“Jack Fritscher Interview with Sam Steward,” copyright Jack Fritscher 1974, 2004. Used by permission of the author.)

^*
Accounts differ about Miksche’s suicide. Wescott (who probably stayed in closer contact with Miksche since he was based in the New York area) told his biographer, Jerry Roscoe, that after being pulled from the Hudson River and hospitalized in Bellevue, Miksche had ultimately ended his life with an overdose of pills on a Manhattan rooftop. (Roscoe,
Glenway Wescott Personally
, pp. 198–99.)

^*
Afternoons.

^*
The Kinsey Institute keeps the only copy of the filmed encounter between Steward and Miksche in its archive, but its sex film collection is closed to all researchers, and cannot be viewed by anyone at all.

^*
Well built.

^*
Anal sex.

^*
Handsome fellow.

^*
For more on Genet’s hustlers, see White,
Genet
, pp. 84–111, 310–13; and
passim
.

^*
The painter and printmaker Paul Cadmus (1904–1999) had scandalized the nation with his satirical erotic paintings of sailors on shore leave during the mid-1930s. He was just then living in Europe with his lover of more than a decade, the artist Jared French, and French’s wife, Margaret Hoening French.

^*
Cocteau’s conversion to Catholicism was brief, and motivated in large part (according to his biographer Francis Steegmuller) by his attraction to Maritain.

^*
A polite way of noting that a person is homosexual.

^*
Charles Nisard’s
Etude sur le Langage Populaire, ou Patois de Paris et de sa Bainlieu
(1872), a study of Parisian slang and street language.

^*
A wax museum, similar to Madame Tussaud’s in London.

^*
The very old district on the right bank of the river Penfeld, opposite Brest proper.

^*
In
Querelle
, Genet describes the bar and brothel known as La Feria as having a spiked door; Steward found one.

^*
Jacta alea est
, or “the die is cast,” was Caesar’s famous utterance upon the crossing of the Rubicon, the first step in his conquest of Rome and his overthrow of the Roman Republic. Steward’s fanciful notion that he, too, would conquer Rome (sexually) is reflected in his later Phil Andros novel
When in Rome, Do
…, which he subsequently republished as
Roman Conquests
.

^*
“Kinsey speculated [about the exchange of money in Italy for sex between men that] it was not poverty [that motivated them], but that they would lower their station if they offered themselves without asking for payment. [Kinsey] thought it was probably an historical carry-over from Greek and Phoenician backgrounds.” (Gathorne-Hardy,
Kinsey
, p. 427.)

^*
The Stud File notes: “3–viii–52 ‘Pasquale,’” but the lack of a money symbol suggests that on that evening in the Colosseum Steward gave the 2,000 lire as a tip rather than by prearranged agreement.

^*
Though a proper biography of Lynes has not yet been written, Lynes’s financial difficulties are detailed in William R. Thompson, “Sex, Lies and Photographs: Letters from George Platt Lynes” (master’s thesis, Rice University, 1997). The bankruptcy is also mentioned in Woody,
George Platt Lynes
(p. 11), and in the Glenway Wescott journals.

^*
Through an introduction made by Kinsey, Steward conducted an elaborate erotic correspondence with a man named Jorge da Silva, who was similarly inclined to record keeping about his sexual experiences, and similarly obsessed with “collecting” and “having” men in military uniform. Only da Silva’s side of the correspondence (sent from Rio de Janeiro) remains in the Kinsey Library, however—donated by Steward.

^*
“On one occasion” is not strictly true; there were several others apart from Leapheart.

^*
Querelle de Brest
would not be published in the United States until 1973. The first English translation, undertaken by Genet’s friend and agent Bernard Frechtman, was rejected by Genet (who also broke with him; Frechtman subsequently hanged himself). The novel was published in English in the UK only in 1966, with a translation by Gregory Streatham; Frechtman’s translation and another by Anselm Hollo were published subsequently.