Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (23 page)
Authors: justin spring
Tags: #Gay & Lesbian, #Social Science, #College teachers - Illinois - Chicago, #Gay authors, #Literary, #Human Sexuality, #Novelists; American - 20th century, #General, #Sexology - Research - United States - History - 20th century, #Psychology, #Artists; Architects; Photographers, #Body Art & Tattooing, #Authors; American, #College teachers, #Gay authors - United States, #Steward; Samuel M, #Tattoo artists, #Pornography - United States - History - 20th century, #Novelists; American, #Gay Studies, #Authors; American - 20th century, #Education, #Art, #Educators, #Pornography, #20th century, #Tattoo artists - New York (State) - New York, #Sexology, #Poets; American, #Literary Criticism, #Poets; American - 20th century, #Biography & Autobiography, #Teaching Methods & Materials, #Biography
Something lovely happened last night. I know a guy from Chicago’s west side who’s a young executive downtown, and like me, he leads an extraordinary double or triple life—he’s one of the “wild ones,” about 34, and he likes me…he lives in Logan Square…[a] real tough neighborhood…He called me up last night to say he’d met [someone], and did I mind if he brought him over? Of course not, I said, except I’ve just painted my sailor-screwing-woman mural off the wall behind my bed and the place is a mess. Small matter, he said, and after a little while they came. The kid was eighteen, and cute as hell…He had slick black hair and was very polite and yet damned near took my hand off with his grip…He was very naïve still about the H life, Wally having introduced him to it not very long before. Well, it wasn’t many minutes until we were all undressing—I was sitting on the edge of the bed naked, and Wally crossed-legged in the middle, and the kid was wrestling himself out of his jeans and jockstrap, and then he suddenly paused and looked over at us and said in a little boy voice: “Cheez! I feel just like da T’anksgivin’ turkey!” It damned near broke up the whole party…but didn’t…When he came, he said a little after: “Youse guys sure treat a fella okay. I hope I kin come back.” And after the two of them left I sat there a little cold for a moment, thinking about two old queens using a kid that way—but if it’s evil, I’m glad, and I’m for more of it…So do tell me if you mind if I go back into the past a little further, for I love to write about these little excitements, and if you can stand them, that’s a wonderful incentive to me, because—strange as it seems—I’m actually a very shy and timid lil sensitive plant…
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88,
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Sam
But after a Christmas card from Lynes (of a photographed wall of erotic graffiti, such as one might encounter in a public toilet, which Lynes and his friends had actually created as a backdrop for Lynes’s nude male photography), Steward had to admit to some new difficulties, for in wanting to write well for Lynes, and at the same time wanting to write something “dirty,” he found himself at cross-purposes:
You’ve set up the d[a]m[n]d[e]st psychic block in me…I keep thinking that you, with your experience, would certainly not be interested in reading little commonplace eroticisms which I dredge up outa my past. And when I start to write one, I keep saying to myself “Will he be disgusted with this? Will he think this is silly?” and so on, until it [has] almost grown impossible for me to put a line down. That “lavatory correspondence” with a complete stranger, on the other hand, was different; I didn’t care what he thought about me, and so it just poured out.
He then went on to describe his most recent attempt at a novel, one in which he once again hoped to challenge the boundaries of what could and could not be written for a literary readership about the male homosexual experience:
The combined efforts of yourself and Glenway and Dr K[insey] have finally started me to writing again—I’ve been spending hours on that, and trying to work too—and I’ve got about sixty thousand words done on what is one of the queerest novels ever written, I’m sure—sex is woven all around and through it, every page, every line. I have a distinct feeling it’s not for publication here, although I have kept the downright erotic (pornographic) out of it. Yet it still is extremely sexual, in the insidious and thinly disguised way I have learned to lecture to teen-agers sexually…one of the reasons why they flock to my classes. I can’t talk about the novel until it’s finished, but then I’ll Tell All…
Steward heard again from Toklas just before the New Year, who wrote him with the sad news that Basket had finally died in November. Despite her grief, she was glad to hear that Steward was hard at work on yet another novel, and observed: “What a beautiful way to have recommenced—with a gushing flood.”
She also shared her most recent news of Francis Rose:
About Francis—the story has become involved as only his can. Frederica has been dragged into it for material and practical reasons—not at all certain that Francis is the father [of Luis]. With her permission Francis has recognized him—giving him French nationality for the moment—but when the boy becomes of age [Francis] wishes him to take Spanish nationality so that he may have the Spanish titles…May one ask a leading question—the only one that interests me—When in the course of the story did Francis hear that the boy was his son—from the beginning—soon after—or just when.
The same question fascinated Steward, to the point that in his free time he began a novel about Francis Rose, with a plot featuring the question of Luis’s paternity as its central aspect.
Steward continued meanwhile to work with Kinsey. In submitting his 1952 sexual data in January 1953, he included a note about the new wall mural he had put behind his bed, for he had replaced the rough mural of the sailor and his floozy with an elegant new one of two lounging, classically proportioned male nudes in a moment of post-coital relaxation. He suggested to Kinsey that it might be worthy of inclusion in Kinsey’s already quite extensive photographic documentation of Steward’s apartment. He then added a brief observation about his pornography writing for Lynes: “I’ve developed quite a correspondence with GPLynes, and we have a little barter arrangement [swapping photos for stories]…[But] somehow I don’t seem to be able to write to him with the same freedom I wrote to ‘B’
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down in the old Pure Oil Building.” He did not, however, mention that he was just then struggling to finish a first draft of a new novel based on the misadventures of Francis Rose. By coincidence, even as he wrote it, he received a semiliterate letter from Rose himself, one offering Steward all of his private papers, diaries, and “details and drawings,” in the event that Steward ever cared to write his biography.
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As he struggled with the new novel, Steward continued sending long pornographic accounts of his sexual experiences to Lynes, including an account of a recent
spintriae
Polaroid party that Johnny Leapheart had taken part in while visiting Chicago. Lynes responded enthusiastically:
I wish I had been there for your latest picture-taking session. Johnny [Leapheart tells me he] had a ball. He gurgled and geysered about it—like one of the famous familiar far-western marvels—but wasn’t exactly explicit. I didn’t make out just what you photographed, except that you got into the pictures yourself; of course I can imagine a lot. But when (when?) do I get to see this fabulous collection of yours? Its fame spreads. Isn’t it (is it?) possible to make duplicates of Polaroid prints? Can’t I, as well as our friend in Bloomington, have a set? Only business could take me to Chicago, and these days I have none in that direction. Too expensive just for a jaunt. Too bad.
…I see Johnny [Leapheart] now and then, preferably with his friend Bill—what wonderful names they have!—as a combination they’re fantastic, irresistible.
…Did I (didn’t I?) thank you for your 1st contribution to the general gayerty of nations, as KAP
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calls it…It’s a good one and rather frightening. My favorite so far is the piece about Wally Kargol. How well I’m getting to know these characters! Keep them coming when their composition doesn’t impede and interfere. The rate at which your novel progresses, according to your report, indicates you’re the demon sort of writer. Wish some of my other friends could “turn it out.”
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God bless…
Steward was glad that Lynes had been aroused by the episode featuring Wally Kargol, a former marine he had picked up one summer afternoon in the Indiana sand dunes bordering on Lake Michigan, and whom he had been continuing to see for years. Brutal, muscular, and strongly dominant, Kargol was just the sort of hypermasculine blue-collar worker Steward found most appealing as a sex partner—particularly since Kargol took great pleasure in slapping Steward around, giving him orders, and humiliating him as part of their sex play. In sharing the story of his exploits with Kargol with Lynes, Steward was not only savoring his memory of the experience, but also establishing a commonality of this extreme form of sexual activity with Lynes, one that served to draw the two men closer. Such intimacy was precious to Steward, for he had no friend like Lynes in Chicago, and few people with whom he could ever discuss such things, save Kinsey and his associates. Another note to Lynes suggests in an aside just how lonely (despite his ongoing sexual success) Steward’s single life in Chicago actually was:
The holidays were just other days for me. New Year’s Eve found me without plans, and sitting home alone doing a sketch. Just when I was beginning to feel a little sorry for myself and swear at A[lcoholics] A[nonymous] for its proscriptions (but not really…), the phone rang—and a charming young man, similarly lonesome on such a night, came over to call. So I cocked a snoot at the old year, and bent to taste firmer delights just as the hour was stroking…How pleasant to look down the long vista of 1953 through a fine young pair of extraordinarily hairy legs!
Steward included a new erotic episode in the same envelope, along with a closing observation, half apologetic, that “they come out very quickly and are somewhat repetitious as most pornography should be for its best effect.” But since erotic excitement was itself so evanescent, Steward protested that he could not dwell too long on the composition of the pieces. Rather, he told Lynes, “I have to catch them as they come.”
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Because Lynes was experiencing severe personal and professional difficulties, his correspondence with Steward subsequently became more sporadic; he wrote his next note to Steward on Saint Patrick’s Day 1953, mostly just to say he had found a new apartment and was having a group of handsome young men around for a party.
Steward, preoccupied with his new novel, responded a month later:
Now it’s your turn to get an apology…You can imagine what has been [going on] with me—guiding Sir Arthur Lyly
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through the tortured and ludicrous web that he spun out of himself…[The novel] is all done right now, finished a few weeks back; and I loathe it, it is all I can do to look at it…but maybe a cut or two above most of the Greenberg
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crap…thank god it’s come to an end. I hate writing; it stops almost everything else…
…except, of course, a modicum of sex…that has been taking a good deal of time, too: a few
spintriae
with some new people, some of them quite nice…
There is no news…Spring is beginning to come to Ch[ica] go, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to hold out until term’s end; for every day, more strong and lovely forearms appear, and the tan begins to deepen, and baskets bulge beneath the straining paper-thin pale-blue denim…and with my x-ray eyes I can see the level of the compelling white sap churning breast-high in their translucent young bodies—ah me, so much denied to one in my position.
Steward also mentioned his novel to Kinsey: “[It’s] not a very good novel, I’m afraid, but at any rate it’s a novel, which is quite an accomplishment for me, after a silence that I thought was going to last for the rest of my unnatural life. [It’s so obscene that] I’m gonna have to submit it under a double pen-name.”
By mid-May, Lynes had established himself at his new apartment, and he wrote Steward,
I’m glad you came out of the shadows. Stay out a while. It’s nice out. I know. I was in them too…But all is relatively sunshiny now. The flat is settled enough…the end is in sight. Most important, I’m pleased with it…
Let me see that novel—how about it—even if you go on taking the dim view…Do you go to Yurp this year? If so, surely you’ll be coming this way soon.
But Steward responded in mid-June that, due to time and money constraints, he would be traveling west that summer, not east:
That damned novel has taken ALL my fuckin time for months, and yesterday when I finally typed the last word and fell over the machine in exhaustion, I was gladder than I’ve been in a long time. So today the thing went off into the wild blue and I’d be just as happy if I never heard of it again…
And tomorrow morning I’m wild-blueing too, but in the opposite direction—San Francisco, where I’ll be until about the first of August. And guess where I’m staying: the Embarcadero YMCA, the “armed services branch”! [It’s a] Christian bordello…If you happen to know any excitingly evil ones in SF you might send me a name; my address is 166 Embarcadero, SF 5.
The winter partouzie season is closed for me—somehow they never seem to be successful in hot weather. But the last was a howling success of ten, among who were 1) a weightlifter, 22, who looked like a living bas-relief from the Parthenon, 2) a young soldier, paratrooper, with lustrous boots and smoky eyes, 3) a sailor who must have looked like Querelle de Brest, cruel mouth and tangled yellow hair, and 4) a
jeune dur
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from the West side, complete with motorcycle boots and leather jacket. My god, is
tout le monde en est
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nowadays?
Come my return, I’ll begin sending you little pornograffies again…Meanwhile, have a luscious summer and lots of playboys, light and dark and gentle and rough, and send me a note to the western world if the spirit moveth.