Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (71 page)

^*
Lynes never signed his name (instead merely writing “Thine”) in any of his letters to Steward. He did so as a way of protecting himself from potential prosecution for sending (arguably) erotic material through the mail.

^*
The Little Review
, founded in Chicago and published from 1914 to 1929, featured modernist writing (most notably sections from James Joyce’s
Ulysses
) as well as Dadaist poetry and art. Its editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were lovers.

^*
While Luis could never inherit Rose’s English title of baronet, Rose did hold several Spanish titles, which can descend through female lines when there are no male heirs and which may also be left at will to anyone—including an illegitimate child.

^*
Rose also noted in his memoir that he had fathered an illegitimate girl when he was fifteen, and an illegitimate boy with another woman sometime after that.

^*
Scott Douglas, born Jimmy Hicks (1928–1996), joined the Ballet Theater in 1950 and became a principal dancer in the American Ballet Theater in 1953.

^*
Steward would later fantasize about a similar living arrangement among “three red-blooded butch boys” in his Phil Andros novel of police life,
The Boys in Blue
.

^*
A long pornographic account follows.

^*
The episode is noted, as described, in the Stud File; the boy’s name was Jimmy Hannigan.

^*
“88,” in the sex code Steward had developed for his Stud File, meant “hugs and kisses.”

^*
“Bob” Churchill, with whom Steward had conducted his “toilet correspondence.”

^*
Though Steward eventually sold all his other letters from Rose, he specifically saved this letter because in it Rose had expressed the wish that Steward write his life story.

^*
Katherine Anne Porter, short story writer and novelist, a good friend to Lynes.

^*
The reference is to Lynes’s housemate, Glenway Wescott, who had chronic writer’s block.

^*
Lyly was the Francis Rose–like character in
A-Hunting We Will Go!
, a manuscript that, after many years of heavy revision, would ultimately be published as
Parisian Lives
.

^*
Greenberg publishers, one of very few houses that dared to publish homosexually themed fiction and nonfiction during the 1940s and ’50s.

^*
dur
: French slang for “tough guy.”

^*
“Is everybody homosexual?”

^*
Despite her hepatitis, Toklas had written a superbly entertaining cookbook-memoir,
The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book
, which featured contributions from various friends, including Francis Rose, who was also the book’s illustrator. The most notorious of the recipes came from the artist Brion Gysin, whose Haschich Fudge—a concoction of dried fruit and nuts based on an old Moroccan recipe—had called for a liberal dose of
Cannabis sativa
, or marijuana.

^*
“…the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in / the cool night, / In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me, / And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.” (Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass
, Book V, Calamus, “When I Heard at the Close of the Day.”)

^*
Grand Hotel
: a well-known Hollywood film of 1932, which had described various melodramas taking place within a luxury hotel in Berlin.

^*
Ben Abramson (1898–1955), proprietor of the Argus Bookshop in Chicago and a well-known dealer in rare and used books.

^*
The Divided Path
, by Nial Kent (pseudonym of William LeRoy Thomas), tells the story of a young man growing up in a small town and discovering his homosexuality through his feelings for his heterosexual best friend. The book was published (by Greenberg) in 1949.

^*
Quatrefoil
(1950), by James Barr (a pseudonym for James Barr Fugate). For more on this novel, see pages 108–109.

^*
Lennon appears, masked, in Steward’s Polaroid sex albums; Steward pasted Lennon’s yearbook photo in the album beside the sex Polaroids in which he appears.

^*
Steward later fictionalized Lennon’s ordeal in his short story “Pig in a Poke.”

^*
In Roman mythology, Egeria was the Roman who inspired and led Numa Pompilius, the king who succeeded Romulus; she existed both as his goddess and as his wife.

^*
Der Reigen
, by Arthur Schnitzler, also known as
La Ronde
or
Hands Around
, was a privately printed novel of 1903, and later (more famously) a play first produced in 1920. The play features ten dialogues (by five men and five women) about the interlinked sexual activities of each of the characters. Steward had seen Max Ophuls’s film version (in French, starring Anton Walbrook and Simone Signoret) in the summer of 1952.

^*
This letter is missing from Steward’s papers.

^*
Steward had decided, after his first few tattoos, to allow himself one new tattoo for each hundredth sexual contact.

^*
Neel Bate, also known as “Blade,” was a former merchant seaman turned erotic illustrator living in New York. His series of illustrations of a farmboy and a motorcyclist having sex in a barn during a rainstorm had been widely circulated for several years by the time Steward created his own illustrated version of the story. Bate and Lynes were friends.

^*
The question then of what to do with Lynes’s negatives and prints of male nudes was a troubling one, since the works were considered obscene—and so illegal to sell or possess. More than 1,700 negatives of male nudes (and nearly 600 original prints) were eventually donated to the Institute for Sex Research.

^*
As a young man, Green had seen Lecomte de Nuoy’s painting
The Bearers of Evil Tidings
in the Musée de Luxembourg. He felt a lasting erotic response to the work, in which several barely clothed black slaves have just been put to death by a muscular and fiercely handsome Pharaoh (see illustration 315b of Rappoport’s
History of Egypt
, available on the Web at www.gutenberg.org/files/17330/17330-h/v10c.htm).

^*
Trägheit
is German for “inertia”;
schmertz
for “sorrow”; and
Weltschmerz
(world sorrow) describes a state of general sorrow or pessimism over the condition of the world.

^*
Steward had printed up business cards advertising his services as a tattoo artist and providing his home phone number.

^*
“Sad-mashy,” like “sadie-maisie,” is a slang way of referring to “sadomasochism.” (Steward had long known and used both expressions.)

^*
The original letter is printed on a negative print of a young man, naked except for socks, viewed from the back as he lies on his stomach with legs curled up behind him, ankles crossed. The words “just here” are centered on the buttocks. Steward later described it to Lynes as “quite the loveliest letter I ever received.” (Steward to Lynes, August [?] 1954.)

^*
Wescott has in fact conflated his three separate meetings with Steward in Chicago in this interview, for he visited again in July 1956 and in April (or May) of 1958. During the July 1956 visit he might have visited the tattoo cage at the Sportland Arcade, but only during the 1958 visit would he have been able to visit the tattoo parlor he describes in the interview (Steward opened it in November 1956). However, only on this first visit (and not the second or third) did he see the interior of Steward’s (old) apartment, which was highly decorated with erotic drawings and murals. By the time of the second visit (during which Steward purposefully avoided inviting Wescott to his home), he had already moved uptown to a new second-floor apartment.

^*
Unlike the elegant mural of two men over the Murphy bed (which had been created by Steward himself, and which remained on the wall for as long as Steward kept the apartment), these wall drawings had apparently been scrawled crudely in advance of a sex party (Steward to Lynes, December 19, 1953). Steward had done something similar in the late 1940s, judging from descriptions of a similar mural in the toilet correspondence. Steward kept a Polaroid of the later “rough” mural.

^*
Jam: a pun on the homosexual slang term “jam,” describing a heterosexually identified man who will sometimes have sex with other men.

^*
Clement John “Pop” Eddy (?–1957), a celebrated San Francisco tattooist who also sold tattooing supplies and machines.

^*
Sergeant John David Provoo had been captured by the Japanese during World War II and his alleged collaboration had caused the death of another American POW. The U.S. government spent six years and over a million dollars prosecuting him, only to have the conviction overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals on the grounds that the prosecution had unnecessarily introduced evidence of his homosexuality into the proceedings in an attempt to prejudice the jury against him.

^*
An air force base in Rantoul, Illinois, approximately one hundred miles south of Chicago.

^*
Pachucos (or Pachukes) were Mexican American youth gangs who developed a dandyish subculture in the 1930s and ’40s that gradually merged into the greater American street gang subculture of the 1950s and ’60s.

^*
“All is disorder, whirlwind, free-for-all.” Steward is riffing on Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au voyage,” the last lines of which are:
“Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme, et volupté.”
(“There, all is order and beauty, / Luxury, calm, and pleasure.”)

^*
That is, to have sex with a navy officer in uniform.

^*
Ultima thule
(Latin): an expression probably best translated as “something we strive for but never quite reach.”

^*
The course was offered by the tattooist Milton Zeis; Steward later contributed material to Zeis for inclusion in it. (Steward,
Bad Boys
; Don Ed Hardy to author.)