Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (18 page)

By now Steward was in a state of perpetual nausea, so he decided to give up sex for a while by joining Toklas at her rest home in Bourges. At the back of his mind, he knew that it was time for him to focus on his writing, and to explore with Toklas the possibility of somehow establishing himself for good in Paris. Before he left for Bourges, however, he met up with Witold Pick, the cultured, Paris-based Pole who had written to him a decade earlier to inform him of Mohammed Zenouhin’s death. “Long aperitifs hour with the mysterious ‘Pick’ from Alger,” Steward noted in his diary, also noting the presence of a young man whom Pick archly called his “‘cousin,’ a handsome blond Nordic boy…Pick’s queer as pink ink.” The evening ended with an invitation to dinner at Pick’s home the following evening. Steward went, and “as the evening grew later, Pick pressed me to stay all night, baiting the invitation with John, the beautiful Polish ‘cousin.’ So I did, and [John and I] made mad love most of the night. Whether from drink, or my unattractiveness or age, or general hetero-disinclination, he never did come…It was like bedding a bas-relief from the Parthenon.”

The next day, however, brought with it a nasty surprise: “Jacques [Delaunay told me] he had a discharge from his cock…Turns out my pretty clean-cut French lover had gonorrhea last April…caught from a Spanish lover. Certainly this news unanchors me somewhat, and is distressful.”

The horror of venereal disease hit Steward hard, for it brought back the trauma of his 1934 infection with syphilis. He canceled his plans to visit Versailles the next day and instead kept to his room, where, feeling very fragile, he “spent the afternoon finishing [tracing] the Cocteau drawings [from
Querelle
], and reading in
Querelle
, which is a very good book indeed and about the only one I ever wanted to translate…[It is] a remarkable satisfying book…Now even if the
douane
^*
takes it [away from me], I [will still] have the memory in my head.” That evening, having calmed himself somewhat, Steward had an awkward dinner at the Wagenende with Delaunay: “It could have—has—happened to any or all of us,” Steward wrote upon his return. “The love is replaced by a kind of universal pity, of which we are all in need—(No tears, now).”

Despite his fear of possible infection, Steward was unable to keep himself from a rendezvous at his hotel that night with Pick’s “cousin” Johnny. In keeping the date, Steward seems to have rationalized that the only activity they would engage in (nonreciprocal oral sex) would pose no danger to the boy—even if Steward did have an infection, which was still not even established, for he was so far free of any symptoms. Still, after Johnny left, Steward had a restless night. He spent the next day halfheartedly researching Fulbright topics at the Bibliothèque National, and returned to the hotel to find “a disturbing
pneu
from Jacques saying he really did have [gonorrhea].”

By Sunday, Steward had worked himself into such a state of anxiety about the possible infection that he had to hit a friend up for an amphetamine simply to get through the day. “I keep thinking of [a] friend who turned out to be a carrier and never could [have sex] again,” he wrote in his diary. “But at the same time I’ve been threatening for months to give up
la vie sexuelle
—and maybe this is the time to do it.”

He saw Delaunay’s doctor the following morning, who calmly reassured him that he probably was not infected, but nonetheless offered him a course of penicillin just to be on the safe side. Steward would not be able to begin the injections until the following Friday, however, since he had already booked his visit to Toklas at Bourges that week, and the injections needed to be administered in a daily sequence. “It probably means no more fucking, ever,” Steward noted grimly, for he was now convinced that he was infected, and was feeling very cast down. “Met Jacques, who was very
gentil
about it all…Good Lord, how I’d rather not go to the country, but begin the course [of drugs] immediately.”

Instead, as promised, Steward took the train to Bourges, where Toklas had installed herself at a very simple rest home, La Régie. He spent the next few days chatting with her and trying (unsuccessfully) to make his way through Ivy Compton-Burnett’s
More Women Than Men
. But neither Toklas nor the novel proved at all diverting. “I simply count the minutes until I can get on the train back to Paris,” he wrote in his journal the first night. “God, how awful it would be to spend a length of time here…I’d be mad in a week.”

The day he got back to Paris he saw the doctor for his first penicillin injection. He then had yet another glum dinner with Jacques Delaunay at the Wagenende, followed by a drink at a café with Pick. Steward had now became obsessed with the idea that he had infected Johnny—an obsession that rapidly escalated as Pick repeated over and over that Steward “looked sick.”

With the summer winding down, Steward arranged a farewell dinner with Delaunay, then made some last-minute purchases, which included a copy of
Fanny Hill
to read on the ship home. On his last night he took Delaunay’s doctor to dinner at Le Cochon de Lait, as a gesture of thanks for his discreet handling of Steward’s possible infection. “He came up to my room [afterward], and we talked for a long time,” Steward wrote in his diary. “He assur[ed] me my decision to give up sex was sulfa-induced and I’d be rarin’ by the time I hit N.Y.”

•

Despite its wild vacillations, Steward’s Paris diary of 1950 marked yet another new direction in his writing—for rather than engaging in mere pornographic fantasy (as in his toilet correspondence), he had chosen to spend his summer sifting through, savoring, and preserving a series of sexual experiences that were entirely private, intimate, and real. He had also chosen not to compartmentalize these experiences, but to link them to the larger picture of his life. In doing so he was gaining a much clearer understanding of his newly sober sexual self. The more melancholy moments of the summer diary bear a striking similarity to the musings of Genet’s Lieutenant Seblon, the introverted naval officer who is incapacitated by his desire for Querelle, and who turns instead to the expression of that desire in writing in order to ease his mind. The diaristic jottings of the lieutenant—anxious and full of longing, but also themselves a form of private erotic satisfaction—are described by Genet in the novel with something close to ridicule, for Seblon takes great and foolish chances by expressing his desires so openly on paper. Yet Genet, Steward, and Seblon were all united in this perilous activity of self-discovery through confessional writing. The way in which language described and defined not only a sexual experience, but also the inner life and motivations of the person engaging in it—and, in doing so, the opposing sexual mores of the society in which that person lived—would become ever more central to Steward’s own artistic project in the coming decade, even as his dream of establishing himself as a Paris-based literary novelist became increasingly remote.

Steward’s travel diary came to an end with his vacation, and for a year he wrote nothing more in the way of a journal. He recorded all the details of his increasingly active sex life in his Stud File, but his correspondence with Alice Toklas from the period was apparently lost, and hers to him consists, during fall 1950 through spring 1951, of just a handful of letters. She did not press him to visit in the coming summer of 1951, for she knew that his money situation was not good.

During that fall, Steward developed a powerful infatuation with a tall, brown-haired student named George Reginato.
^*
Steward became so infatuated with Reginato that he created a captioned erotic watercolor for Kinsey portraying himself whiling away the hours between the young man’s beautiful thighs. Reginato, who was then in danger of flunking out of DePaul, began visiting Steward’s apartment that semester, for he had arranged to barter oral sex for homework help and doctored grades. Steward’s note about him in the Stud File is “
figure d’ange, âme de cochon
.
^*
Gangster. This is it…” Whether “it” referred to the great passion of Steward’s life or to the sexual adventure that undoubtedly would end in his murder is unclear. In any event, Steward would later consider his infatuation with Reginato as the most powerful he had ever known.

In March 1951 Steward purchased a Polaroid Land camera and began using it to document his sex life (with Reginato and many others
^*
) more thoroughly than ever before. Along with these instant photographs, he kept charts of his daily sexual activities, noting (in code) which kinds of activities he had engaged in and when. The tally sheet for 1951 specifically noted the introduction of the Polaroid:

The 1951 tally sheet also noted a grand total of 197 releases
^*
in 1951, and a grand total of 184 contacts for that year: an orgasm every forty hours, in other words, and sex with a new man every other day.

•

Prior to the invention of the Polaroid Land camera, those without access to a photographic darkroom were unable to create photographs of their sexual activities, for the printing and distribution of sexually themed materials were both prohibited by law. Now, thanks to Polaroid’s instant-development technology, anyone with a Polaroid could use photography spontaneously in sex play.
^§
Steward wrote Kinsey in early March that “the camera works wonderfully well, and as time goes by and the subjects multiply, there will possibly be some interesting developments.”

Steward’s collection of more than three hundred early black-and-white Polaroid photographs of men engaging in individual and group sex activities in his apartment is the most extensive and disturbing imagery in his archive, for the flashbulb-lit scenes are not only remarkably detailed, but also quite harsh and graphic. Still, to Steward and his sex partners, they were thrilling, transgressive, and hugely stimulating. As Steward wrote Kinsey,

A short time later Steward snapped a Polaroid of Kinsey visiting his apartment; the location is immediately recognizable because of the antimacassar on the armchair upon which Kinsey sits, clothed, in a bow tie, taking notes (other photos show half-dressed young men sitting in the same chair). Kinsey had recently given Steward a signed eight-by-ten glossy portrait photo of himself, but Steward clearly cherished the Kinsey snapshot as documentary evidence of Kinsey’s (admittedly passive) participation in the sex Polaroid project.

By June 1951, Steward began another project at Kinsey’s request: duplicating his own private collection of sex-related disciplinary devices. This new, second set was destined for the archives of the Institute for Sex Research. He wrote Kinsey,

Steward mounted most of the Polaroids in albums. In some photos he is performing oral sex, and in some he is being anally penetrated; in others, men are either having sex with partners or else having sex as a group. Young men are also pictured lounging around the apartment in various stages of undress and arousal. Some wear leather jackets and motorcycle caps—props apparently provided by Steward—but others, being boot sailors, are wearing their (real) sailor uniforms. There are also several sequences of staged Polaroids, including one entitled “Surrender of Armed Forces” in which Steward and his friend Robert Dahm (dressed as a sailor) reenact the friendly seduction of a sailor by a civilian.

Steward seems to be playing with various fantasy identities throughout the Polaroids, sometimes appearing in a striped French
chemise de matelot
he had bought the previous summer in Paris. Elsewhere, in a series of staged and dramatically lit photographs, he wears a set of American sailor’s dress blues. In others, he appears as a street tough in undershirt, dungarees, and motorcycle boots, sometimes administering discipline to another man with a paddle, belt, or tawse. In yet others he wears an outrageous French leopard-print bikini or else is simply naked, instantly recognizable by his bikini tan line.

The Polaroids chronicle not only sex acts, but also sex fantasies. Just as Genet had imagined an array of male sexual icons and postures within
Querelle
—the construction worker, the sailor, the police chief, and the pimp—so Steward, too, was now creating a fantasy world of masculine erotic archetypes engaging in various forms of domination and display. The young men Steward photographed in his apartment are fit and good-looking, but the expressions of many are disturbing, for they vary from amused to bored to self-conscious to contemptuous. None seems overly caught up in Steward’s fantasies despite the wide variety of costumes and props available. None seems especially affectionate toward Steward, either—perhaps because, though still youthful in appearance, he was already past forty, and therefore much older (by far) than anyone else in the room. Ultimately, the most moving of all the images is a series of admirably composed chiaroscuro self-portraits, in which Steward wears the dress blues of a sailor in the U.S. Navy. In these pensive images, sporting jaunty white sailor cap and navy blue wool jumper, he is entirely alone.

•

Steward could not have picked a worse time to immerse himself in such dangerously indiscreet sexual adventures, for even as Kinsey was establishing the widespread incidence of homosexual activity within the American population, other forces within American society were marshaling to vilify it, further criminalize it, and, essentially, to stamp it out. The year 1950 may have been the one in which the Mattachine Society, the first American homophile organization, was founded in Los Angeles; but it was also the year in which a congressional report recommended that “perverts” (that is, homosexuals) be classified as unsuitable for employment in the federal government, with one congressional subcommittee going so far as to state, “There is no place in the United States Government for persons who violate the laws or accepted standards of morality…those who engage in acts of homosexuality and other perverted sex activities are unsuitable for employment in the Federal Government.”

The issue of homosexuals in government came to widespread public attention in February 1950, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin made headlines with his claim that 205 Communists were working for the State Department, and a few days later, the undersecretary of state security announced in his response to McCarthy that 91 homosexuals in government had been identified and fired. By the summer, congressional leaders were railing about Communists and sexual deviates infiltrating the government in a way that suggested the two were one and the same. Many homosexually active men chose to quit their government posts rather than face the possible public disgrace of dismissal. Similar resignations (many forced) would continue within the federal government throughout the 1950s. The FBI, meanwhile, began a broad surveillance program of suspected homosexuals; working with the assistance of local police departments, the bureau compiled lists of allegedly homosexual bars and other meeting places, and developed extensive files of news clippings on homosexuals and homosexual life across the United States.

The newly founded
Mattachine Review
quietly chronicled the scapegoating of homosexuals throughout society during this time, noting that “among homosexuals, learning that someone of the group has lost a job is commonplace. Many can list acquaintances who have gone long periods without steady, gainful employment.” To make matters worse, politicians avid in their denunciation of homosexuality interpreted resignations within the government as proof positive of homosexual “guilt”: the Republican senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, for example, noted to a reporter that “they resign voluntarily, don’t they? That’s an admission of their guilt. That’s all I need.” The action against homosexuals gained further credibility when, on April 23, 1953, President Eisenhower officially prohibited the employment of homosexuals in any branch of the civil service.

Steward’s outrageously daring activities as a resolutely self-documenting homosexual therefore must be understood in the context of 1951, when American homosexuals were being persecuted not only in the military and in the government, but also throughout civilian life as well, where they had few if any protections under civil law. Given these circumstances, Steward was not simply playing at outré sex games; rather, he was taking a potentially disastrous stand on behalf of his own right to sexual freedom within the privacy of his home. Forced resignation and its social stigma had ruined many men far more discreet than Steward, yet he persisted in his activities despite his very public career as an educator. What many of his friends considered at the time to be a wildly self-destructive game of Russian roulette was, in Steward’s own words, his stubborn insistence on his right “to be free.”

Even as he compiled his Polaroid collection, Steward was well aware that in creating so much documentary evidence of his sexual activities he was essentially courting prison time. As if to demonstrate that awareness, he kept a newspaper clipping neatly folded at the back of his Stud File, one describing the recent arrest of a heterosexual woman in San Antonio, Texas, who was discovered to have kept extensive records of her sex life. The article is superficially amusing, and surely appealed to Steward’s own dark sense of humor; but the consequences the woman had faced (a lunacy trial, forced commitment to a mental institution, and widespread public disgrace) were minor in comparison to the consequences that he himself would have encountered had his files and photographs been seized.

Steward’s risk-taking became even more pronounced that following spring in his dealings with George Reginato. Because Reginato was now routinely swapping sex for better grades, Steward drafted up two copies of a “contract” that both he and Reginato then signed. Steward gave Reginato a copy of the countersigned document, and placed his own executed copy in the Stud File. It read:

On the reverse of Steward’s copy (which was filed on an index card behind Reginato’s “regular” Stud File card), he taped a swatch of Reginato’s pubic hair, and made notations of the dates on which he and Reginato had met for sex as agreed. In later journal entries, Steward acknowledged that Reginato got his promised A grades in exchange for the arrangement.
^*