Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (25 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
“Charming elfboy,” Steward had noted of Tomlin in the Stud File. “Big head, perfect small body. Affectionate, sucked nipples, liked me. Made a sketch of him, want to go on knowing him.” But from his apartment in Chicago, Steward could do nothing more on Tomlin’s behalf than to share the story of his misfortune with Kinsey, and to write the young man a note of consolation.
Steward had to start teaching a five-week summer course as soon as he returned to Chicago, and in the effort to do so he paid little attention to what at first seemed merely a summer cold or flu. By the third week of school, however, he was running a fever, was unable to keep down food, and his skin began to itch. He was deeply tanned from sunbathing in San Francisco, but when the whites of his eyes turned bright yellow, his doctor immediately diagnosed his illness as “jaundice.” Steward had, in fact, contracted hepatitis, and though he was able to avoid hospitalization by living for a month on nothing more than a sugar-water solution made out of Karo syrup, the condition left him entirely exhausted.
When a gossipy letter from Lynes arrived that September, Steward took a month before responding, explaining about his jaundice,
I resisted the hospital and went on working; it was quite a drag, and I’m glad it’s all over now. But San Francisco, my lad, was a marvel…Sex in Chicago’s a tired old thing with little excitement of the chase—but there’s a kind of frenzied wonderful excitement surrounding it out there…I stayed at the “most notorious Y in the States” (says Kinsey) a kind of Christian bordello, and I am full of tales about it…All in all, I don’t know when I’ve had a more sucksexful summer.
He went on to give Lynes the latest news about his fiction writing, which unfortunately was not good, for his novel had been rejected by Greenberg Publishers. Greenberg was at that moment the only house in the United States specifically interested in publishing homosexually themed fiction:
My novel is [now] in the hands of an agent, Greenberg being afraid to publish it although thinking it publishable. I take it they were afeard because of the three lawsuits in which they are involved in southern states over the publication of
The Divided Path
*
and
Quatrefoil
.
*
I am not sanguine about anyone’s taking it, however, this side of the Atlantic. For the next winter I’d like to do a kind of “Grand Hotel” about the Embarcadero Y, but am not sure the subject could ever be cleared up enough to be written in a saleable non-porno book.
Steward had taken a jocular and dismissive tone about his hepatitis, but the illness was serious enough that it permanently affected his sexual desires and practices. He later noted to a friend that “an old-fashioned doctor got me through it [on Karo syrup]…Needless to say, I never rimmed anyone after that.” Although Steward had been preoccupied with sexual hygiene since his early bout with syphilis, he was of course unable to eliminate the risk of various forms of sexually transmitted infection, and the severity of this particular illness had been a sobering reminder of the many grave physical risks he was now taking almost daily in his endless pursuit of sex.
Lynes, meanwhile, had been struggling for some time with a much graver illness, for he had cancer. In late November he responded sympathetically to his “dear old poor old Sam” that “there’s scarcely an ache or pain I haven’t had…in the lesser not-lethal categories. I have 20-odd kinds of pills which I take or don’t take, on discretion. Maybe…I’ll start feeling well again. Maybe I’ve already started…But what of your book? What about it? And what about your unacademic life? I’ve been expecting, though surely am undeserving of, new chapters of the San Francisco saga…Be big about these things. Live big and tell all.”
Steward was troubled by Lynes’s illness and disappointed by the rejection of his novel by Greenberg, but otherwise had a relatively quiet fall. During that time, however, he came across a local newspaper article describing how a Chicago judge, John T. Dempsey, had been seized and roughed up by two policemen while walking his dog in Humboldt Park on Chicago’s northwest side. The policemen afterward claimed Dempsey had seemed to them to be molesting park visitors, but Steward, recognizing it as part of a well-known shakedown racket, immediately wrote Dempsey otherwise, hoping that in his position as judge Dempsey might be able to do something about a situation that had by now become all too common among Steward’s friends. As he wrote Dempsey,
A man walking alone is considered fair game for the police, who either singly or in pairs—or working in collaboration with a district police branch—accuse him of homosexuality. The man is taken to the station, not booked, but terrified psychologically: his identity is learned, and then the sergeant suggests that he “talk things over with the arresting officer” who may or may not be in plainclothes. The arresting officer then suggests that for the payment of some money—from fifty to $750—depending on his estimate of how much the man has—all charges will be dropped. Usually the frightened victim will pay to avoid scandal, even if he be completely innocent…Unwittingly you have thus had opened before you a situation under which we have all suffered for a long time. Is it too much to hope that out of your brush against it will come some eventual good?
Steward had himself recently attempted to do something about the racket when a fellow professor of English literature and journalism at DePaul had been shaken down in just such a manner. Professor Art Lennon was a charming, charismatic, closeted professional colleague who had attended at least one of the sex parties at Steward’s apartment.
*
Steward later gave the details of Lennon’s ordeal in an oral history of Chicago:
[Art] had cruised a plain clothes cop in the Chicago Public Library, and had been taken over to the station in Grant Park, and scared to death, and shaken down for three or five hundred dollars…[So I] call[ed] [George Reginato]…And [he] said…I’ll ask my old man [to help.] So…[he came back to me and] said well, I know this captain in Summerdale station and he owes my father a favor, so I’ll go talk to him and spread a few bucks around. And he did. The captain went down to the Summerdale Police Station and just raised hell. He said you have put your finger on the wrong guy this time, and if you ever do it again to any of my friends, I’m going to come down here and there’ll be badges flying all over the place. So [Lennon] got [off] scot-free, except [that Lennon then] with typical bitch perversity went out the following Saturday and got stinking drunk in the same gay bars on Clark Street that he had been to [before], and of course the cops were laying for him. And they picked him up, took him out, and beat the hell out of him, you know, put him in the hospital. Ah, he couldn’t do anything about that because he’d been warned…to stay out of sight for the next month.
*
Steward’s concern was not just on Lennon’s behalf; after all, he himself was now enormously vulnerable to blackmail, for if police were to enter his home, his entire professional life would come to an end, and he would probably face prison time, too. Among the hundreds of sex photographs in his apartment—all of which were technically illegal to possess—many featured young men who might well have been below the age of consent. Steward had in fact been steadily involved with a sexually experienced sixteen-year-old named Bobby Krauss since March of 1953. In his zeal for record-keeping, Steward had kept Krauss’s name, age, and other detailed statistics and particulars of their many encounters on a card in the Stud File, and also written his name on the back of several of the Polaroids featuring him. Thus, even as Steward disparaged Lennon’s “bitch perversity,” he recognized a similar streak of perversity within himself: a desire—conscious or not—to self-destruct.
January brought a letter from Alice Toklas commiserating with Steward about his hepatitis, since she, too, had just recovered from it. She also sent more news of Francis Rose: “Francis has done some really beautiful line drawings for [my cookbook] and a dust cover [too]…He and Frederica are reconciled. She has bought the small top story of an old house in Ajaccio overlooking the bay and is building a small studio on the roof for Francis who in return seems to have offered the sacrifice (?) of renouncing his son Luis.”
She went on to observe, “Without any unfaithfulness to [your sister] or to legendary Emmy [Curtis] isn’t it time you found an Egeria
*
—what Thornton might call a serpent of the Wabash.”
Steward was moving further and further from any possibility of marriage, however. Having entirely ceased sexual relations with Emmy Curtis in 1950, he had gone on to develop a network of male sexual partners, pickups, and prospects far more extensive than any he had maintained as a younger man. One of the most regular contacts was the former serviceman Bob Berbich, a married man about whom Steward recorded, quite typically,
[Berbich] stopped in briefly around 9 to “invite” me over [to the Sun Times building]. We drove [to] the lower level to the parking lot south of the Trib[une Building], and there in a whirl of snow and reflected whiteness, I had him again. [He] made two large splotches on my black overcoat; I noticed them after I got on the El at the Mart—and wore my badge home proudly, reminding myself of an entry or two in Seblon’s diary in
Querelle de Brest
.
Immersing himself in a world of increasingly masochistic fantasy sex, feeling far closer to the dream world of
Querelle
than to the everyday world of academe, Steward was now seriously ignoring his work at DePaul and entering yet another period of extremely erratic behavior. In mid-February, after another visit by Johnny Leapheart, he wrote Lynes, “You will say I’ve been working, and I wish you were right—but I suddenly reached one of those complete and terrifying dead-ends with my writing…my invention has failed me completely…[and] it’s stopped everything else in me—except, of course, me ‘love life’…”
Leaving aside all questions of his career and his fiction-writing, Steward went on to describe his sex-party photography, for Lynes had been fascinated by Johnny Leapheart’s description of the Polaroid collection:
It was a lot of fun with Johnny, and we did take several px to add to the collection, which grows apace. It’s really a kind of obscene diary, actually; there’s no art connected with my picture taking—and I rarely use anything but flashbulbs (so they’re all pretty flat) but Dr. K has thought them interesting and copied one entire volume, and will get the other one (he says he wants it) when it’s full. I see no reason at all why you shouldn’t copy some of them if you would want them, but my face appears freely in almost all (well, a great many) so you would please have to be discreet. They stimulate some people, but wouldn’t you—and I must confess—they leave me fairly cold.
A month later, he wrote Lynes again with more news of his erotic, artistic, and pornographic activities:
Ask me what I have been doing. Lotsa, lotsa…“Thor” (a corporation of three persons selling those sex drawings under this silly name) has taken four of my drawings of motorcyclists and will shortly splash them across the country, advertising in various [publications] like
Tomorrow’s Man
, etc. I’ve re-drawn the “Motorcycle Pickup” series of 12 obscenities (you know it, certainly—the motorcyclist and the farm boy in the barn?) to suit my own tastes, and then was struck with the happy thought of writing a story to go with the 12 pictures—and I am sending you a copy [of the story] herewith, hoping your hard heart will melt. Then, an addition: I decided to make another
Reigen
,
*
a
Ronde
with it—long-term project, 8 episodes, 8 times 12 illustrations. I’ve been also adding dozens of Polaroid pictures to my collection, am well into volume III at the moment. And I have shelved my novel about Sir Rose, at least temporarily—everyone said it was indecent and libelous. I guess I’m just ahead of my time. Morihien writes thru an intermediary that he will willingly transfer the rights to
Querelle
to any American publisher who wants ’em.
*
But try to find, to find.
The day after writing this letter, Steward began to consider another tattoo, this time an extremely large one, describing his rationale for doing so in a journal he had begun keeping at Kinsey’s suggestion:
I simply must have a rose in the center of my chest, whether or not I have finished my sixth hundredth contact—this being an early self-prohibition
*
to help me resist too many tattoos, for the lust is in me now…Why not be honest and admit that I’m narcissistic, even with this old body, and this combines with my exhibitionism, plus a hope that it will make me sexually attractive, or tougher than I am.
Even as Steward was becoming increasingly interested in tattoos and tattooing, Lynes wrote him in early April to urge him on in his erotic writing: “The [motorcyclist] story you sent—oh, it has had a success!…More, much more, please. Make it soon. G[lenway] W[escott] was appreciative too; he went so far as to borrow and to copy it. Ditto Neel Bate, who, as you probably know, was responsible for that series in the first place.”
*
Lynes then went on to give Steward news of his own, for as his illness had progressed, he had been forced to think of a future home for his photographic studies of the male nude: “I am, it appears, giving all my negs of nudes into the custody of the good doctor [Kinsey], giving him (them) permanent possession eventually
*
…I’ve been lazy or uninspired in the picture making dept [recently]; not for lack of subjects, either.”
Despite Lynes’s enthusiasm for Steward’s sex Polaroid and erotic fiction projects, Steward found himself suddenly overwhelmed by an interest in tattooing, and in his distraction he began networking throughout Chicago to find out more about it. Through a local character named Tattooed Larry, he gained an insider’s view of tattooing and the tattooing community. During one such conversation with Larry, Steward seized upon an erotic image that would change his life forever. As he wrote in the journal he was keeping for Kinsey,