Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (13 page)

If enlistment as a seaman did nothing else for Steward, it gave him an inside view of life at the enormous naval training station. But not for long: after initially passing the physical exam (during which he purposefully neglected to mention that he suffered from multiple food allergies), he was given his beloved uniform. Within minutes of eating his first meal of navy “chow,” however, he experienced an allergic reaction so sudden and so violent that he was completely incapacitated. Sneezing, coughing, gasping for breath, covered in hives, his eyes swollen shut, he was sent to an infirmary where naval doctors interrogated him, determined him unfit for service, and immediately placed him in a holding tank to await discharge.

“I think I have about the shortest navy career of anybody,” he wrote Stein and Toklas. “Just a graceful little pirouette with a coupla entrechats—and it was all over.” His detention at the naval training station lasted several weeks, however, during which (according to his Stud File) he had sex with seven fellow detainees. At the end of that time, he was given a set of makeshift civilian clothes and sent back to Chicago as a reject. Only then did he learn that because of his medical discharge he was no longer eligible for work in any other branch of the armed services.

Though he made light of the rejection, Steward was devastated; with exclusion from the ranks of the navy, his desire to possess this uniformed masculine ideal—the sailor—grew ever stronger. And indeed, in the coming decade his sexual preoccupation with sailors would border on obsession.

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Luckily for Steward, he did not need to be a sailor in order to have sex with one. In truth, by living alone in Chicago, he was in a much better position to have sex with sailors than he ever would have been while enlisted. At the time of his dismissal from the navy, an average of fifty thousand soldiers and sailors were pouring into the Loop each weekend in search of an inexpensive night out on the town, and with it some form of sexual relief. Steward was clean, handsome, and physically fit; he knew the Bluejacket manual cover to cover, and he now had firsthand knowledge of the Great Lakes Training Station, too. After years of picking up men in bars and on the street, he was no longer the least bit shy; and since most of the boot sailors were only slightly older than his students at Loyola, he knew how to approach them, and did so with confidence and ease.

The early years of the war were a time of erotic opportunity and discovery for many men and women in the armed services, most of whom were away from their families for the first time. The crowds of soldiers and sailors swarming through the Loop created what one veteran later described as a “gay ambiance” in which many of these young GIs felt entirely comfortable. Since the government’s need for manpower was immediate, military authorities did little to crack down on possible homosexual activities among servicemen on liberty passes during the early stages of the war (only later, when men were no longer needed, would the large number of career-destroying expulsions begin). When local police and military police combined forces to control or shut down gatherings at which homosexual activities might be initiated, they unwittingly created “alternating periods of crackdown and openness [which] put urban gay life [in Chicago, San Francisco, and elsewhere] through major cycles of disruption and reorganization” that were not without their own illicit thrills. As a result, until the end of World War II, there was a new openness and activity among homosexuals who had been brought together by the American war machine—men and women who were, in the words of one historian, “not proclaiming or parading their homosexuality in public but [also] not willing to live lonely, isolated lives.”

While Steward was far from unique in having sex with enlisted men, his documentation of these encounters was extraordinary, for it consisted not only of his Stud File records, but also of short stories based on real-life events. He also wrote a short novella entitled
Bell-Bottom Trousers
that was designed specifically for use with his military pickups; in order to create it, he commandeered a Loyola hectograph machine and used it as his printer. The story chronicled the sexual exploits of a virile sailor, and was meant to arouse servicemen visiting his home. After sex, Steward would give the serviceman a copy of the work (along with his name and address).
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He later described the project to a sex researcher:

In his later years, Steward would roughly estimate that of the 807 people he had had sex with up to that day of his life, servicemen comprised a significant number: “sailors—a coupla hundred; sergeants—about 30; marines—2 dozen.” He would also tell an interviewer that his most personally significant experience of sadomasochistic sex had been with an (unnamed) sailor he had met in Chicago during the war.

During the second and third years of the war, Steward could not travel on his summer vacation; wartime hardships and the limitations of his own meager salary (much of which he was spending in bars and on whiskey) kept him home in Chicago. As he wrote Stein and Toklas, “I have been doing a lot of lecturing around and about…but it’s been mostly for love or peanuts…Mostly I’ve talked on literature or semantics or cryptography.” He was forced to move twice, finally ending up in a one-bedroom apartment at 5441 North Kenmore Avenue, in a drab, crime-ridden neighborhood at the north end of Lincoln Park.

During the last three years of the war, which were also the worst years of his alcoholism, Steward did no writing apart from collecting and transcribing dirty limericks and sexual graffiti (which he termed “latriniana”) from various public toilets around Chicago.
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His abandonment of his literary vocation was due, in part, to an overwhelming sense of futility and exclusion, for as he later noted when interviewed for a study of the homosexual novel in America, “At the time it was more rewarding to play games with rough trade in a city park than with editors and publishers in the world of American letters, and to a considerable extent it is for this reason that we have so few gay novels to tell us what it was like to be in the ‘shadow world’ of the 1930s [and early 1940s].”

Following the suggestion of Thornton Wilder, however, Steward did try his hand at essays and reviews, which he began publishing monthly in a most unlikely venue. As he later explained,

Steward’s column appeared in the
Illinois Dental Journal
every month, with rare exceptions, from January 1944 through October 1949. Its name, “The Victim’s Viewpoint,” ostensibly referred to the dental patient; but it was also a private gesture of self-identification, for Steward was by now entirely aware of his masochistic preferences, particularly where handsome, authoritative men like his dentist
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were concerned. (His first essay for the
Dental Journal
was in fact entitled “The Sublimated Sadist: The Dentist as Iago.”) His subsequent writings for the
Dental Journal
wandered from food allergies to psychiatry, A. E. Housman to Gertrude Stein, schoolteaching to bodybuilding, and served as a lifeline to his nearly abandoned ambition of becoming a full-time writer.

In November 1944, Steward developed a sudden, massive inflammation in one of his testicles. Doctors were unable to determine the cause of the problem but Steward’s pain was so acute that they immediately performed an orchiectomy, with surprising results. As Steward wrote Stein and Toklas several months later,

Steward later described the traumatic amputation of his testicle—and the horror of the biopsy that followed—in greater detail:

Steward was devastated by the operation, not least because of the centrality of his genitalia to his everyday life. (But, as he soon discovered, he functioned perfectly well with his one remaining testicle, and very few of his partners seemed to notice or care about the missing one.) Still, the surgery left him with a new awareness of his own mortality, and with it, a growing desire to get sober.

Steward’s life during 1945 is best chronicled in his correspondence with Sergeant Bill Collins, the sex-and-drinking partner he had known since 1938. The two wrote each other regularly while Collins was posted in Europe.
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With careful wording, Steward was able, despite wartime censors, to describe his growing “latriniana” collection, and to tell salty stories about various homosexual acquaintances, including a well-known neighborhood hustler. Steward also regaled Collins with tales of his more outrageous sexual escapades, for theirs was not a possessive relationship. Yet despite the ribaldry, there are moments of genuine intimacy in the correspondence, during which a love relationship seems to exist between them. During the summer of 1945, as he attempted to quit drinking, Steward wrote Collins of a visit home:

Since Steward and Collins were at that point separated by an ocean and a war, the relationship never had a chance to deepen. Perhaps as a result, Collins was not the only enlisted man for whom Steward would have strong feelings during this time. He had recently been particularly moved by a sexual encounter with one Lieutenant Art Craine. In the months that followed that 1943 encounter, he sent Craine a series of highly erotic letters (which Craine, to Steward’s chagrin, insisted that Steward sign as a woman). Three years after the war ended, Steward and Craine would meet again in Pittsburgh, and though that subsequent encounter did not amount to much, Craine would remain an erotic ideal to Steward for years afterward: his name would appear repeatedly not only in Steward’s journal recollections, but also in his Phil Andros fiction.
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