Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (75 page)

^*
The cultural historian Michael Bronski describes the percentage as twenty, but Ellen Squires of Greenleaf, in a 1973 letter to Steward, complained that his manuscript was only 34 percent sex. In a letter shortly afterward, Steward noted to the anthologist Stephen Wright that the required amount had recently climbed to 50 percent.

^*
Dax was based on Ralph Steiner, one of Steward’s favorite bodybuilder-hustlers, who had become a Chicago police officer in the years since Steward had moved to California.

^*
San Francisco Hustler
was pirated in 1974 as
Gay in San Francisco
by “Biff Thomas”; in the pirated edition, Phil Andros is renamed “Sylvon Panos.”

^*
Townsend would write thirteen homosexually themed novels for Greenleaf (and others for Olympia Press) before starting his own self-publishing venture, LT Publications, through which he was able to publish his leather-oriented erotic S/M fiction without being editorially censored or financially cheated.

^*
Vector
magazine was published by the Society for Individual Rights (or SIR), the Bay Area homophile association.

^*
Harrison had begun his career as a journalist, but then married Anne Blaine, heiress to the McCormick harvester fortune. Blaine’s money had enabled Harrison first to buy
The New Republic
, and then the small publishing house of Boni and Liveright.

^*
“Ward Stames,” an anagram of Sam Steward, was the name by which Steward signed his more serious pieces of nonfiction and occasionally some of his more serious fiction.

^*
“The complete man, total, polished, and well rounded.”

^*
“He touched nothing without embellishing it.”

^*
By this, Phil means that (unlike their American counterparts) Italian men who sold themselves did not insist upon taking an exclusively active (“trade”) position—rather, they happily “did everything.”

^*
In response to this act of appropriation, Steward later did J. Brian one better: he re-created the filming scene in the opening chapter of
Blow for Blow
(later published as
Greek Ways
), with Phil Andros playing the young man being filmed.

^*
The film had a sound track but no dialogue; the sound track consisted of music by the Who and the Grateful Dead.

^*
Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005) was the first African American woman elected to Congress and a 1972 candidate for president of the United States.

^*
Steward later identified Danny Schmidt as the model for Larry Johnson (in
Understanding the Male Hustler
[p. 59]), but his description of Schmidt’s sexual technique (or lack of it; “he was almost corpse-like in bed”) makes clear that Schmidt was far from his erotic ideal.

^*
Kahane had called the house Obelisk Press, but closed it with the start of World War II. Maurice Girodias, Kahane’s son, reopened the house after the war, renaming it Olympia Press.

^*
Steward is quoting the final couplet from Pope’s
The Dunciad
(Book IV, lines 655–56).

^*
The screen name “Markum” varies in spelling, appearing elsewhere as “Markhum” and “Markham.” Markum’s film work is limited to silent black-and-white and color loops and short films, including in J. Brian’s
Tuesday Morning Workout
(in which he plays Phil Andros). Markum was also known as Angelo Maggio—but that, too, may have been a pseudonym, since it is the name of the character played by Frank Sinatra in
From Here to Eternity
.

^*
The premise of the title is that in each of the
four
instances portrayed in the film, the hustler does it “
for
more than money”—in other words, for personal reasons. The title was not Steward’s, but Brian’s (SMS to Squire, Feb. 5, 1973).

^*
Unlike the other works of J. Brian, all of which made the transfer to video,
Four: More Than Money
has disappeared. No copy of the film is known to have survived.

^*
The name Jerry is J. Brian’s real name, shortened from Jeremiah.

^*
The film,
Tuesday Morning Workout
, is basically plotless—an athletic fantasy shot in a San Francisco health club.

^*
In
Greek Ways
, Steward notes that Jerry was able to have his film footage developed in Sunnydale before skipping town for the Hawaiian islands; J. Brian may have done something similar with the
Tuesday Morning Workout
footage.

^*
The manuscript was submitted to Greenleaf as
Blow for Blow
, was later published as
The Greek Way
, and was ultimately republished by Perineum (the definitive edition, overseen by Steward) as
Greek Ways
.

^*
Greenleaf reorganized a year and a half later, however, ultimately publishing the manuscript in February 1975. (SMS to Wilcox, July 5, 1975.)

^*
Steward describes the moment of discovery as “roughly 1972” in his memoirs but other correspondence suggests early 1973.

^*
Steward had by then donated the Toklas letters to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, a short distance from his home, along with a number of photographs and handprints of Gertrude Stein that he had made on his two visits to Bilignin.

^*
Literally, “the fear of death confounds me.” The line comes from the Scottish poet William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers” (circa 1508).

^*
Toklas and Stein had saved Steward’s side of the correspondence and donated it to the Beinecke Library at Yale—but since Steward himself was unknown, his editor at Houghton felt that Steward’s side of the correspondence did not merit publication.

^*
Steward’s full, anguished two-year correspondence with and about Edward M. Burns, the Stein scholar who assumed the title of “Executor of the Estate of Alice B. Toklas” but who refused to answer Steward’s letters, is housed in the SMS papers, BU, and includes a three-page single-spaced statement about the experience, along with copies of correspondence from James R. Mellow, Gilbert Harrison, Linda Simon, Arnold Weissberger, Virgil Thomson, Donald Gallup, Calman Levin, and the literary agent John Schaffner. Burns at last sent a note to Steward dated Dec. 1, 1975, containing “two pages of a permission of sorts,” which settled the matter to Houghton’s satisfaction.

^*
Steward was right; the book’s royalties ultimately proved minimal.

^*
Though Steward may have experienced suicidal thoughts in later life, nothing in his papers (including his medical records) suggests he actually attempted suicide, or that his indulgence in barbiturates was on a scale approximating a suicide attempt. It seems more likely that Kane and Barnes, who cared deeply for Steward, exaggerated the precariousness of his life situation in their comments to Baldwin.

^*
Steward’s nickname for
The Berkeley Gazette
, a local newspaper.

^*
The exhibition also featured an interview with Steward and documentation of his life. The material had been collected by Albert L. Morse for
The Tattooists
, his self-published survey of the then-intimate American tattooing community. The exhibition subsequently traveled to the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

^*
Steward had favored a bow tie during his teaching years.

^*
The note about Steward on the
Dear Sammy
dustjacket had merely noted that he was a former English professor. No one at Houghton Mifflin was aware of his Phil Andros and Phil Sparrow identities. (Steward to Hall, March 24, 1977.)

^*
Richard Hall (1926–1992), novelist, short-story writer, critic, and contributing editor for books at
The Advocate
from 1976 to 1982.

^*
Jonathan Ned Katz (1938–), noted historian of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and heterosexual American history and author of
Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA
(T. Y. Crowell, 1976).

^*
In his note to Hall declining to write about Lord Alfred Douglas, Steward observed, “I wrote a [fictional] story about it ([featuring] Phil Andros) under the name of “Ward Stames” (an anagram for my own name) that appeared in
Der Kreis
for January, 1965, and was later reprinted in H.V. Griffith’s
In Homage to Priapus
(Greenleaf, 1970) as well as in #6 of J. Brian’s
Golden Boys
and a German translation in
Him
, for October, 1971. Under the persona of Phil it tells the story of Lord Alfred and the meeting.” He added, “The whole thing was more or less a debacle…Lord Alfred was such a thoroughly unpleasant man that it gives me heartburn just to call up those 24 hours again.” (Steward to Hall, Nov. 16, 1977, Steward Papers.)

^*
After placing the commune under surveillance for a year, police raided and closed it (in August 1979) despite massive antipolice protests.

^*
Karl Maves, “Valentino’s Pubic Hair and Me: The Many Lives of Writer Sam Steward” (
The Advocate
, June 6, 1989, pp. 72–74).

^*
New York: Dutton, 1975. Goldstone went on to write an annotated bibliography of works by and about Wilder that was published by AMS Press (New York, 1982). Richard Hall’s note to Steward about Goldstone: “He is the dreariest kind of academic—small-souled and territorial…a deeply conventional man.” (Hall to SMS, “Monday 11/12.”)

^*
After Steward sold the Wilder correspondence, John Howell’s bookstore sold it to the Beinecke in 1973–74. (SMS to Gilbert Harrison, January 14, 1982. BU.)

^*
Steward subsequently incorporated this
Advocate
piece in its entirety into his memoir,
Chapters from an Autobiography
.

^*
The problem lay not in the author’s scholarship but in its subject’s obscurity combined with the manuscript’s excessive length. Austen’s book was published posthumously through the efforts of Austen’s friend and mentor John W. Crowley (who edited the manuscript to two thirds of its original word count) as
Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard
(Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991).