Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (17 page)

In early March, Steward wrote to Kinsey again, this time about a new undertaking: “I’ve arranged a small
spintriae
of six for tomorrow evening; those things need a kind of Emily Post to be run successfully. I think that perhaps just for the hell of it I’ll write one up for you, and tell you what has been my experience in arranging and conducting them.”

The word
spintriae
was both concealing and revealing, for it was Steward’s code word for the all-male group sex parties he had been hosting regularly in his home starting in September 1949.
^*
He would continue to host these gatherings for the next eight years, eventually hosting twenty-nine in all.

Steward’s use of
spintriae
located him as a man with both a classical education and a sense of humor, for it is based on the first declension masculine noun
sp(h)intria
, the nominative plural of which is
spintriae
, or, literally translated, “sphincters.” Tacitus had been the first to note the Latin word, which had been borrowed from the Greek under the reign of Emperor Tiberius, who had enjoyed having sex with young men.
^*
The word
spintria
had thus entered Latin usage as a word describing a particular kind of male who had sex with other males; Steward’s
spintriae,
by extension, meant a group of men who had sex with other men.
^*

Steward’s collecting and sharing of erotic materials and information on his sexual activities was very dangerous. Yet his compulsive risk-taking seems to have thrilled him precisely because of the high stakes: namely, professional self-destruction. In 1950, the mere possession of obscene works was a crime punishable by imprisonment in most states, even if the possessor had no intention of selling or exhibiting the objects (only in 1960, with the Supreme Court review of
Mapp v. Ohio
, would these laws begin to be revised). Yet Steward now presided over a wildly obscene apartment in which nothing at all was hidden, and where large numbers of anonymous men were gathering regularly for sex parties. Any one of them might easily have betrayed him to the police.

In late May of 1950, Kinsey’s photographer Bill Dellenback photographed Steward’s apartment, then remained to take photos of Steward and other men having sex there while masked.
^*
Kinsey and Pomeroy also seem to have been present; the team returned to Bloomington with Steward’s Stud File
^*
and some of Steward’s own erotic photographs, both of which they kept until the fall.
^*

•

Despite his excitement about working with Kinsey, Steward had been making plans for over a year to return to Paris in the summer of 1950, and as a result, just six days after Kinsey and his team came to the apartment to photograph one of his
spintriae
, he took the New York Central’s
Pacemaker
from Chicago to New York, where he registered at the Pickwick Arms Hotel for a few days of sexual indulgence. He then embarked once again, this time for Paris. After his several very wild nights in Manhattan, he found the crossing a sexual anticlimax, for 1950 was a holy year, and the dingy, single-class S.S.
Washington
was crammed with fourteen hundred Catholic pilgrims headed for Paris, including enough Catholic sisters “to make a floating convent.” Apart from a brief restroom encounter with a Puerto Rican father of four, Steward had no sex at all while at sea, feeling oppressed at every turn by the horde of watchful nuns.

Toklas had reserved a room for Steward in Paris at the Hotel Récamier, just beside the monumental église Saint-Sulpice. Upon arrival he went immediately to Toklas’s apartment on Rue Christine for a reunion. It proved unexpectedly moving. “The number and length of [Toklas’s] letters, the outpouring, seemed almost to result from the desolation that she felt because of Gertrude’s absence,” Steward later noted. “[It was] as if by maintaining a contact with those [like me] who had known them both she was drawing life from the past to help her continue in the present.”

Steward recorded his 1950 trip to Paris in a diary that gave detailed descriptions of the many sexual activities he engaged in throughout the course of his stay. In it, Steward writes with almost manic good humor about his daily adventures with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of sex-obsessed men—Americans, Frenchmen, Britons, and assorted Europeans. But there is a quiet pathos to his adventures, and to the diary as a whole, when considered in the context of Steward’s original intentions for his long-awaited 1950 trip. He had, after all, been thinking quite seriously about emigrating to France since his first visit there in 1937, when Paris seemed to welcome him with open arms as an aspiring novelist, scholar, and man of letters. During World War II his passion for France and the French way of life had remained so strong that he had even written a letter (sealed, stamped, and sent to his own home address) in which he renounced his American citizenship in favor of fighting for and with the French. Throughout the postwar 1940s, Paris had continued to beckon him, promising him a return to the avant-garde literary life he had once so easily assumed he would eventually lead. The bohemian literary and artistic existence he had been dreaming about since his boyhood in Woodsfield would be his, he had then thought, if only he could find his way to Paris. There he would escape the dreary world of teaching, and instead live among artists and novelists, poets and aesthetes. In the city of Huysmans and Verlaine, of Cocteau and Diaghilev and Gide, of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, he had been sure he would find a place for himself. Alice B. Toklas was waiting there for him, ready to offer him entrée to the brillant world of Parisian arts and letters.

That, at least, had been the dream. The reality would be, in its way, literary; within forty-eight hours of his arrival, Steward noted in his diary that “after much deliberation, [I] bought
Querelle de Brest
, with the Cocteau illustrations—12,000 [francs]. Contracted for English
Our Lady of the Flowers
& Sade’s
120 Journées de Sodome
. Must buy them before realization of the value of the franc descends on me.” The book purchase was, in a sense, the emblem of his summer—a summer devoted only casually to literary pursuits, and primarily to sex.

Steward’s purchase of the pornographic limited edition
Querelle de Brest
was a considerable expenditure: the same money would have paid Steward’s bill in the Hotel Récamier for more than three weeks. Then again it was an exceptionally rare and daring edition, for Genet’s landmark novel of brutal sexual passion between men had been published underground by Cocteau’s secretary Paul Morihien, who had put out the novel in two editions, one of them featuring a shockingly graphic series of homoerotic line illustrations by Cocteau.
^*
It was this rare, deluxe illustrated edition of 1948, with its close-up imagery of hairy anal sphincters and rigid phalluses, of sailors fucking sailors in cheap hotel rooms, that Steward had sought out and purchased.

When not reading Genet’s novel and marveling at the power of Cocteau’s seemingly casual erotic line illustrations, Steward soon established a daily routine in Paris of sunbathing every afternoon on the
quais
of the Ile de la Cité “among the beauties with bikinis,” and then, later in the afternoon and evening, scoring pickups at La Reine Blanche, the wildly popular homosexual bar in St. Germain. There, too, he met up with Daniel Decure, a young French associate of
Der Kreis
, the Swiss homophile magazine that Kinsey had recently recommended to him. After having Decure back to the hotel for sex, Steward noted that he was “rather un-distinguished, [a] talky but sensual (and nice) 25 yr old Frenchman…we had a mediocre 69.” Before they parted, Steward showed Decure some of his own drawings, and promised to contribute some erotic illustrations to the magazine.

After a day of buying more books, including “a small dirty Apollinaire &
Pompes Funebres
&…
11,000 Vierges
”
^*
(as well as purchasing another series of illustrations to
Querelle
by Leonor Fini), Steward had dinner at the Wagenende, a seedy St. Germain brasserie, with a street pickup, a young French lawyer named Jacques Delaunay. They concluded the meal with “a lovely two hours in bed,” with Steward noting afterward that “he’s had 61 lovers in 4 years—not bad. I just love to rim him—he’s so clean & cute. Then I made a sketch, and after, he whipped me a little…Such mad love. He thinks I’m 35, was not disillusioned by me.”

A week later Steward was reunited with his old friend Sir Francis Rose at a lunch at Alice Toklas’s home on Rue Christine. The two agreed at the end of a very enjoyable afternoon to meet up again several days later, this time at Rose’s apartment on Ile St. Louis. When they did, Steward arrived to find Rose’s place in a state of total uproar. His diary noted, “George Melrish
^*
[sp?] was there & wild disorder in the apartment, wrecked by 2 Americans. Francis & I then went to see his landlord, then wandered in Montmartre, lunched at Wepler’s
^*
& went to his gallery, Renou.”

As it happened, Rose frequented a bar in Montmartre often patronized by Genet, whom Steward now wanted very much to meet. Since Rose sometimes paid Genet’s companion, a young hustler named André, for sex, Rose offered to introduce Steward to him. Accordingly, on July 22, Steward and Jacques Delaunay went with Rose to “the small bar on rue Lepic [in Montmartre], where Francis took up with a young convict” who was in fact Genet’s hustler friend André.
^*
Half French, half Russian, and powerfully built, André (or Java, or Dédé, for he went by all three names) was just then making the most of his money as a jackroller operating in and around a public toilet in the gardens at the bottom of the Champs-Elysées.

A couple of days later, Steward noted in his journal, “Mad, fascinating day. To Francis, & found him in bed with [André] the young murderer of Genet’s
Notre Dame
, the ‘Dédé aux beaux yeux’ of Saturday night.
^*
Made a date with Dédé for Friday night & conceived the wild project of taking him to the country for 3–4 days. This is danger.”

But Steward’s adventures, dangerous and otherwise, were fast being compromised by an unremitting case of diarrhea. The following day he noted, “Alice, in lieu of taking me to see [the artist] Marie Laurencin (who is ill) took me to a frightfully expensive restaurant for bouillabaisse, which so overwhelmed me with three kinds of fish, lobster & garlic that I had to go without dinner and subsist mainly on alkaseltzer…I…have had to take paregoric to offset the Perrier shits.” He nonetheless managed to rally, picking up a twenty-year-old Scotsman that evening and sneaking him upstairs to the hotel room for sex.

On July 28, Toklas departed on a restorative trip to the country, suggesting to Steward he visit her there for a little rest and relaxation a week or so later. He had already set his sights on a weekend with Genet’s murderous hustler, however, so he told her no. But by the next night, he had had a change of heart, for after a night out with André, Steward thought the fellow more boring than terrifying: “[He] drank beer all evening [and ignored me to speak with his friends]…I don’t particularly want [to go to] bed with him…I went home—not feeling jilted but free.”

Steward’s stomach condition meanwhile grew so bad that on August 1 he wrote,

Two days later, he noted that “in addition to the [meddlesome] concierge, I have my shits and my inability to
bander
^*
—I guess this burned out husk of an old Don Juan had better quit—or wasn’t I always this way?”

Finally, Steward had no choice but to take a “long weary trek” out to the American Hospital in Neuilly for a sulfaquandine prescription. That same evening he had another date with the young Frenchman from
Der Kreis
, one that resulted in “a gathering of 9 French
pédés
at Daniel Decure’s, in a depressing stuffy little apartment…a smelly pile of perspiring bodies on a scratchy sofa—all in all a most depressing partouzie. Still we can put it down as an experience in Paris.” The Stud File described it even more vividly as “8 Frenchmen in a small hot room, messy and smelly, with Camembert crotches.”