Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (15 page)

Steward relapsed throughout his first years in the program. Eventually, however, he noticed a pattern to his relapses:

“Only three of my ‘old’ [drinking] friends survived into my new period,” he later wrote, “the others disappeared.” But far from feeling any nostalgia for his life as a drunk, Steward sensed he had barely escaped self-destruction: a good friend with whom he attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, George Barker, was not so lucky. “Barker put his head in an oven in Belleville, Texas,” Steward later noted. “He had become convinced that he could handle alcohol and started drinking again.”

Friends soon noticed a difference in Steward. “Physically he does improve, he really does,” Wilcox wrote Toklas about his dry-out. “It takes a long time I guess once you get really pickled in that stuff. He gradually comes back into focus however. For a long time he was distracted looking and tired as if it took every bit of his strength just realizing his own presence, now there’s enough left over for the outside world.” Recovery brought with it an almost overwhelming sense of sadness and loss, though, for Steward knew he had wasted precious time and opportunity as a writer with his drinking, and now he had to face starting over—doing what, he did not yet know.

In a letter from the period urging him to come back and visit her in Paris, Toklas wrote Steward of a similar instance of “reformation”:

Steward answered:

Upon quitting alcohol, Steward found himself much more interested in sex, and much more conscious of his sexual interests as well, for sobriety brought with it a greater day-to-day self-awareness. With the great increase in physical vitality that came with giving up drinking (not to mention the great increase in his free time), Steward began engaging in various forms of creative sex play on a regular basis, including a form that involved writing erotic fiction.

The activity developed out of a chance discovery. During his last months at
The World Book Encyclopedia
, Steward came across an anonymous note that had been left in a hidden nook in his office building’s hall toilet. Interested, he answered it with a note of his own—so beginning a secret, anonymous sexual correspondence with a man who worked in the same building. Leaving a note every day at the “back of [the] top of [the] toilet bowl, in [a] hole where [the] mortar had fallen out,” Steward wrote explicitly and enthusiastically about his various sexual adventures involving both men and women, and his reward for doing so was a note returned later the same day detailing similar adventures. Steward based his stories on anything that interested him—and they were, in a sense, the beginning of his life as a pornographer. The collected correspondence (his own, combined with that of his correspondent) would also serve as a calling card for the next great mentor to enter Steward’s life, the sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey.
^*

Steward’s “toilet correspondence” took place from March through June of 1947, and ultimately consisted of 126 pages of single-spaced, typed transcriptions of letters written by Steward to a man named “Bob,” along with Bob’s handwritten responses. The two never saw each other picking up notes, but they did meet briefly to take a look at each other during the first week of the correspondence, and later met once for oral sex. Steward’s letters to “Bob” describing heterosexual sex were, by his own reckoning, 80 percent fictional, with the remaining 20 percent based on his own experiences. His descriptions of homosexual sex, meanwhile, were 30 percent fictional, with the remaining 70 percent based on actual experiences that he had “dressed up” to make better reading. Steward conjectured that “Bob’s” letters, by comparison, were based mostly on fantasies, since many of the things he described were (as he later noted to Kinsey) “quite impossible…[He is] not married, lives with mother, advertises his interest in females but [this] may be only voyeurism or day dreams without experience…[He] spends much time at noon hour in Marshall Fields [
sic
] in [the] toilets.”

The toilet correspondence offers a funhouse glimpse of Steward’s otherwise underdescribed sexual experiences of the 1930s and ’40s, for they feature a number of highly plausible scenarios that are corroborated by Steward’s Stud File entries. They include an account of his experiences with the two soldiers in Morocco in 1939; another of an orgy of thirty-five men in the navy barracks at Great Lakes Naval Training Station (of whom Steward “had” seven
^*
); and of a sailor and paratrooper duo whom Steward had hosted in his home for a threesome. They also describe Steward’s frequent three-day-long sex-and-drinking benders with Bill Collins. The correspondence also provides “Bob” with the current reckonings of Steward’s Stud File, which in spring of 1947 consisted of “902 parties
^*
with 287 different people.” “I hope you don’t mind being 288,” Steward writes in one note. “Soon as I hit 1000 I’ll consider myself a whore.” In another note Steward recalls being pimped out to six different men in a Columbus hotel room by his black friend Leo, who then concluded the experience by being the seventh man to “take” him—an experience that, according to the Stud File, had taken place in 1942, not in Columbus but on the South Side of Chicago.

In his growing boredom and irritation with “Bob” (who prudishly insisted throughout the correspondence on his preference for sex with women), Steward undertook to educate him on the nature of sex between men, in one instance recommending that Bob read Havelock Ellis. In another Steward mentions his sex story
Bell-Bottom Trousers
, “about a sailor on a weekend liberty being entertained by a bunch of North Shore gals, along with some other young men.” He also revisited his pickup of a street tough on Rue de Lappe, making no mention of the robbery and assault that had followed it in real life.

Like Scheherazade, Steward had to imagine more outrageous things with each new story to keep “Bob” entertained. As the correspondence neared its conclusion, he began to describe rough sex:

Steward’s final fantasy for Bob was an elaborate one. In it, he announced that he had gone into business with a cab driver who was now acting as his pimp, delivering clients to his apartment and taking 40 percent of his earnings. In describing this scenario, Steward mentioned a mural he had painted in his apartment, in order to arouse visiting clients: “a ‘tantalizer’ about 6' x 4' of a sailor fucking a whore.”
^*
After growing tired of Bob’s repeated dismissals of homosexual sex, as well as bored with Bob’s own barely literate tales, Steward decided to bring the correspondence to a conclusion. He did so by describing how Jimmy, the cabbie and pimp, being “more than wise to all the ways of the world,” had been outraged to learn about Bob. “With typical Italian jealousy and quick reactions, he insisted I put myself
completely
in his hands and not have anything to do with anybody while he was ‘managing’ me,” Steward wrote Bob. “So this is the last from me, as I sort of like being bossed and having the private whore feeling.”

Bob’s response was conclusive: “Good whoring to you and please forget me entirely. Hope that you
destroyed
all these as I have being [
sic
] too
dangerous
. The pimp need not worry as I go for the babes and [am] not much on fruits. So long!”

Steward, however, would have the last word. As he later explained to Kinsey, “I left no more under the name of ‘Phil’ but discovered that B[ob had] started to leave preliminary notes all over again. I thereupon adopted a different personality (‘Art,’ 19, normal) and after a few illiterate exchanges, I ended it with a blast.”

Steward’s last note to Bob came from his new nineteen-year-old persona, “Art,” who wrote, “I was disgusted with what you wrote…and have decided you’re no good for me…So I am going to put my sign back here and hope for someone that seems to be less mixed up than you are and just wants a good old fashioned suck. You sound even queerer than I am. What do you do, jack off when you read shithouse messages?”

•

The toilet correspondence was but one of several new diversions Steward engaged in as he created a new life away from alcohol. Since he had always loved to draw, he signed up for classes at the Art Institute of Chicago with Salcia Bahnc, an accomplished Polish-born printmaker and illustrator, and there discovered he had a natural flair for line illustration. He simultaneously took up painting, clay modeling, and various other media, in each case working almost exclusively with the male nude as his subject. Over the next five years he would create murals, oil paintings, watercolors, scratchboard illustrations, wire sculptures, photography, incised metalwork, glass etchings, small clay sculptures, painted screens, and painted lampshades, all of them featuring homoerotic themes, and he would install all these various works of erotic art in his apartment. He also experimented with “small tempera portrait drawings with semen as a binder instead of egg white, the fluid being furnished by the subject of the drawing,” thereby creating macabre souvenirs of specific dalliances with men he found particularly attractive.
^*
In his free time he collected homoerotic fetish objects, objets d’art, curios, books, photographs, and prints. The collective result was an apartment
Gesamtkunstwerk
that made so bold an assertion of the homoerotic self that Alfred Kinsey, who first met Steward in late 1948 or early 1949, had the place photodocumented in its entirety for the Institute for Sex Research.

As Steward became ever more creative in his sobriety, he also became ever more diligent in his research into the nature of his sexual desires. Over the coming decade he would read extensively and in depth on the topic of human sexuality. Moved and inspired by the landmark statistical studies published by Kinsey in 1948, he also became ever more detailed in his own statistics keeping, journal writing, letter writing, and fiction writing about his sexual experiences. In alcohol Steward had sought only oblivion; but now, in sex, he was mindfully pursuing an activity that gave a new focus, meaning, and center to his life. Sexual activity, however much it might have limited or complicated his existence, was also becoming his vocation. Not content with being merely a sex enthusiast, he now sought to become a sex expert.

One of Steward’s greatest interests during this period was exploring the nexus between sexual pleasure and physical pain through spanking, paddling, caning, whipping, and various other forms of physical punishment. Steward had enjoyed such activities since the mid-1930s, but only when he could find someone to engage in them with him, which was rare. While no networks then existed for people with such interests to meet one another, he responded to a carefully worded classified ad in
The Saturday Review of Literature
of August 1947 requesting correspondence from men interested in whips. In doing so, he met an educated man from New York who worked in magazine publishing whose name was Hal Baron.

While Baron wrote that he had read all about the desire to be beaten in studies of abnormal psychology, he quickly confessed to Steward that he was “much more interested in the experience than in sublimating my desires into reading.” Starting in 1935, at age twenty-one, he had shipped around the world as an ordinary seaman, and during the war he had received a commission as a junior grade lieutenant. “Flogging was not something I ever ran into either in the Navy or the merchant marine,” he wrote Steward; “however I now have a strong suspicion that was because it was not something I looked for.” When Steward mentioned that he, too, was a writer, Baron responded,

Baron then introduced Steward to a professor from Ann Arbor named Hal Stevens, and according to the Stud File, Steward subsequently met and “beat the hell out of him.” Stevens liked his beating enough to return to Chicago later in 1948 and 1949 for more of the same, and more than a decade later he arranged for Steward and two other men to abduct him, beat him, whip him, and “rape”
^*
him.

After Steward’s successful meeting with Stevens, Baron put him in touch with several other Midwesterners who had responded to his
Saturday Review
ad in search of a good erotic whipping. The fact that both Steward and Baron were willing to take the dominant as well as submissive roles in such activity (combined with their shared literary interests) resulted in a growing epistolary friendship. But when they met several months later, they felt no sexual attraction whatsoever, and no further relationship (apart from a cordial friendship) would ever develop between them.

•

In early 1948, Steward came to the end of his work on the encyclopedia. Though given a warm letter of recommendation, he had no luck finding another editorial position in Chicago, and his misery at the prospect of returning to teaching triggered a major alcoholic relapse. As he wrote Hal Baron in April:

He later articulated the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of this first tattoo somewhat differently: