Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (72 page)

^*
Thor’s ads for Steward’s drawing series appeared in the fall 1954 issue of
Physique Pictorial
.

^*
Steward nonetheless introduced Kinsey to Roy Hyre, the businessman who ran Thor; Hyre eventually gave the Kinsey Archive a vast collection of letters sent to “Thor” from its subscribers, many of them poignantly describing lives of intense loneliness, isolation, and sexual frustration.

^*
Steward at first thought he would keep details of his private life in one journal, and details of his tattooing life in another, but by 1955 (in part because so much of his sex life was intimately connected to his work at the tattoo kiosk) he had combined the projects into a single diaristic endeavor that he later referred to as his “Tattoo Journal.”

^*
“The Minister’s Black Veil” is a story in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
Twice-Told Tales
(1837).

^*
Steward gives the move-in date as November 11, 1952, in
Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos
(p. 26), but he is mistaken, as both his journals and correspondence confirm that he started at the Sportland in November 1954.

^*
The professional baseball player Billy Sunday (1862–1935) wandered into the Pacific Garden Mission some time in 1886 or 1887 (while playing for the Chicago White Stockings), and there began his conversion from outfielder to charismatic evangelical preacher. The most popular preacher of the first two decades of the twentieth century, he made a small fortune preaching a doctrine of conservative Christian values.

^*
“Considering Kinsey’s general unshockability in almost everything,” Steward wrote in his memoirs, “his forthright disapproval [of my taking up tattooing] somewhat nettled me.”

^*
East Liverpool, Ohio, a small town roughly ninety miles north of Steward’s own hometown of Woodsfield.

^*
Smith, Avery, and Johnson were not sex partners, only former students.

^*
Steward mentions “the demand among young men for a rose tattoo on the chest, following the 1955 movie of
The Rose Tattoo
by Tennessee Williams” in
Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos
(p. 129) but makes no reference to his own rose tattoo in that paragraph.

^*
A Chicago movie theater known for homosexual activity, which featured all-night movie screenings.

^*
Steward had purchased the amulet in Algeria in 1939, and had since used it to bring his lover Sergeant Bill Collins back from overseas, to help another friend obtain an automobile, and to assist George Platt Lynes to find a new apartment and photography studio. He had used it on Kothmann in an effort to help Kothmann adjust to naval life.

^*
Steward had previously described the daisy chain in his May 22 journal entry.

^*
According to the Stud File, “nondescript sailor, brought by Kothmann.”

^*
Bates, a strikingly handsome and very masculine six-foot-six hustler, had been introduced to Steward in December 1953 through “Bob Smith,” a man Steward had picked up at the Lincoln Baths only to discover (after sex at Steward’s apartment) that “Smith” was an undercover police officer. Bates, then nineteen years old, soon became a regular visitor to Steward’s apartment for one-on-one encounters,
spintriae
, and photographic get-togethers. After Bates had attempted suicide, Steward helped pay for his move back to California.

^*
Steward’s Stud File notation: “Brought by K Kothmann. Sailor. Evanston. Involved in the Navy Scandal. Real butch-pretty type.”

^*
The identity of the murderer remained unknown until 1977. He turned out to be Kenneth Hansen, who at the time of the murders was a twenty-two-year-old stable hand. Hansen was finally convicted of the murders in 1995.

^*
Hyre was the businessman who had marketed Steward’s erotic drawings through his company, Thor Enterprises. (He was in no way implicated in the Peterson-Schuessler murder case.)

^*
Seven men were convicted and given suspended sentences in the Arvin scandal. The two other Smith College professors appealed their convictions and were later acquitted in light of a 1961 Supreme Court ruling barring illegal police searches.

^*
In flagrante delicto
. Steward was of the opinion that Purdy had been caught while having sex with a student. No account of Purdy’s departure from the school where he taught exists; two query letters from the author to Purdy on his friendship with Steward and life circumstances during the period of their close acquaintance went unanswered and unreturned. (Purdy died in 2009.)

^*
“Prok” was Kinsey’s nickname, originally coined by his students as a contraction of “
pro
fessor” and “
K
insey.”

^*
A Chicago university strongly dedicated to principles of social justice.

^*
“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part / Nay, I have done, you get no more of me; / And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart, / That thus so freely I myself can free.”

^*
“Smart lad, to slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay / And early though the laurel grows / It withers quicker than the rose / Eyes the shady night has shut / Cannot see the record cut / And silence sound no worse than cheers / After earth has stopped the ears; / Now you will not swell the rout / Of lads that wore their honors out / Runners who the name outran / And the name died before the man.”

^*
“At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blew: / To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.”

^*
Double-entendre.

^*
Steward’s nickname for the Chicago-based department store chain Montgomery Ward.

^*
Fifteen days later, Steward followed up by noting that “Gordon Krull, on whom I rhapsodized a bit back, is now in jail for having stolen a car. Oh, well.” (Steward,
Journal
, July 10, 1956.)

^*
Steward continued to have sex with Saklovitch until 1961, noting long afterward that “he went steadily downhill, gradually losing his good looks as he moved into his twenties…He ended in a state mental hospital from which he wrote to me asking me to become his sponsor so that he could get out. But had I taken care of all the lame dogs who came to me for help during the tattoo years, it would have been myself in the asylum, not they.” (Steward,
BBTT
, p. 143.)

^*
Handsome as the dawn.

^*
One of the Platonic dialogues, a conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus on the nature and practice of love.

^*
Crabb’s nickname “Buster” was derived from the Olympic swimming star and Hollywood actor Buster Crabbe (who starred in the serials
Flash Gordon
,
Buck Rogers
, and
Tarzan
). But the two were not related.

^*
Crabb’s life and death are chronicled in several books on what came to be known as the “Frogman” scandal. Crabb’s early introduction to diving (via a friend of Picasso, who introduced him to a group of young Italian naval officers) is noted in Rose,
Saying Life
(p. 403).

^*
He had most probably been shot and killed by a Soviet sniper.

^*
By “periodicity,” Steward means the amount of time between sexual encounters.

^*
Steward later described Tregoz’s life in a short story entitled “The Tattooed Harpist.”

^*
Steward’s Stud File note about Allan Mayle (who also went by the name of Allan Delaney): “skinny ballet student…but migod, how the kid can love! Quite a sadist, with the cruelest mouth! No one has affected me so much for years!” Steward had sex with him forty-two times between March 24, 1954, and August 13, 1964, including four times during the 1957–58 trip to Paris.

^*
While some literary fiction during the late 1940s and ’50s managed to suggest that homosexuality was not an illness (Gore Vidal’s
The City and the Pillar
being probably the best-known example), the pulp fiction published during the same period usually carried a depressingly antihomosexual message. Then again, according to the bibliographer Ian Young, while many homosexually themed hardcover novels had faced vigorous prosecution for obscenity during the 1950s, a vast number of equally controversial pulps simply “show[ed] up [in paperback] at the local drug store or soda shop, [thus] help[ing] spread the word about a way of life that until then had largely been hidden from public view…[and in doing so] both reflected and influenced [an] emerging gay consciousness.” Ian Young, “How Gay Paperbacks Changed America,”
The Gay and Lesbian Review
, Nov.–Dec. 2001, pp. 14–17. See also Michael Bronski,
Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), and Tom Norman,
American Gay Erotic Paperbacks: A Bibliography
(Burbank, Calif.: privately printed, 1994).

^*
Burckhardt was a pseudonym; his real name was Rudolf Jung.

^*
Although Steward donated his sex calendars to the Kinsey Institute, they are considered part of his sex history, and so are not available to any researchers, including his biographer. Copies of Steward’s 1950 and 1951 sex calendars remain in his papers, showing (in calendar form) the number and type of his sexual experiences on a day-by-day basis. A letter from the sex researcher Wardell Pomeroy to Steward of January 28, 1958, noted that Steward had contributed sex calendars “from 1948 through 1953 inclusive” and also noted that his subsequent sex calendars might have been misplaced within the Kinsey archive.

^*
One of Toklas’s biographers has in fact noted that while Toklas “explained to friends that she had been baptized as a child…there is little likelihood of that early baptism…Alice’s claim of returning to the religion of her childhood had been made, most likely, for expediency…Her embrace of Catholicism, in any case, was not a return to the security of her childhood beliefs, but the fulfillment of her need for an all-consuming passion, an ordered pattern of life, and, most of all, for the conception of a populated heaven where she would find Gertrude.” (Simon,
The Biography of Alice B. Toklas
, p. 237.)

^*
For several years Toklas had been overseeing publication of Stein’s unpublished work by Yale University Press in conjunction with the Beinecke Library.

^*
McKibben had been a sex partner from 1953 through 1955, of whom Steward noted in the Stud File, “balding egoist exhibitionist; carrying timbre; nelly.
Does
say some funny things.”