Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (26 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
[Tattooed] Larry…said [we should go] up to Milwaukee on a Sunday that was between paydays at Great Lakes—for if it were right after payday, Dietzel’s shop was full of “sailors waiting in line” for a tattoo. He said it twice—and then it hit me. That idea of sailors waiting in line has been the longest-enduring, most-potently-effective fantasy of my whole life…I have always been powerfully stimulated by the idea of a line of naked young men, preferably sailors, waiting in line for me to go down on them. Pictures of young men in line have always excited me. I have several…And in the small book of [fantasies I drew for Kinsey] I [made] a similar sketch in inks.
Sailors in line, waiting! How odd that this should be my strongest fantasy. I am reminded of Julien Green’s reaction to the painting “The Bearers of Evil Tidings”
*
…I long for the day when—in my own tattoo shop in San Francisco on a Sunday morning, I can peek between the curtains, and find my own waiting room filled with nonchalant tanned young men, smoking, chatting—laughing…and waiting for me to leave my mark upon them.
Steward now began to investigate tattooing more closely, enrolling in a correspondence course and researching possible injunctions by the church against tattooing. On April 24 he wrote, “I went to the library [at DePaul]…not a word in the
Catholic Encyclopedia
, and not a word in the index to St. Thomas. It looks as if I were disgustingly safe on that score.” A week later, he added,
Without too much alarm, and yet with a kind of hypnotized im-mobility, I watch the progress of the tattoo complex in me. I find that I think about it much of the time during the day, and that I dream of it almost every night. A recurring theme in these almost-nightmares is that I have great huge ones on my body, and experience a kind of wild regret, a feeling of being lost, at having them there without any possibility of removal. The urge to put another on my self, and yet another, comes on me like the urge to go out and cruise…so strong you feel almost choked beneath it…
Just as he had thrown himself into sex after quitting drinking, now Steward had begun focusing upon a new compulsion: tattooing. Both tattooing and being tattooed seemed to Steward highly erotic. The horror of being indelibly marked upon the flesh—or, better yet, of administering that mark upon a pure and innocent other—had utterly seized his imagination. In a letter written at the end of May, Steward wrote Lynes:
[I have been suffering from] a vast ennui, a dreadful
Weltschmerz
—well, not so much Schmerz as just plain
Trägheit
*
—and so many other things to do—sixteenyearolds, sailors, truck drivers, big ones all—and a coupla little ones. [Most particularly there was] a tattooed boy, a sailor—ears pierced for rings—his small hard body lay on the bed in the dusky near-dark, the dragon curling upon his belly, the mermaid long on his thigh, the eagle wings touching the collar bone on each side, the nippled eyes staring unwinking through the gloom. In a kind of ecstasy of disbelief at what I saw, almost afraid to touch these designs, I at last ran my tongue along the length of the great dragon, beginning low at his tail almost within the bramble patch of pubic hair, and running in bending up-curves towards his right nipple. I sucked the unwinking eyes drawn upon the nipples, and licked the two sharks above his armpits, and then I pointed the arrowhead (on the head of his cock) straight down my throat until he came…and then relaxed, but pleasantly co-operative, he lay on his side and took hold of my cock and gently masturbated me, while my fascinated fingers, hypnotized, fled back and forth over the eagle’s wings, the dragon’s head on his chest and belly. Here, at long last, was the essence of the Sailor, his motions sure and deft. Here was the hand that had knotted the rope and spliced it, the Sailor who knew the far suns and seas, the bamboo huts of savages and the stone lace-work of Indian castles, crystal pools and sand of Persia, white columns against dark blue Greek skies, the golden suns and fountains of red-walled Rome. Here was the distillate of the Sailor—dark, romantic, strange, bizarre and sexual under his tattoos, his muscles working to bring me pleasure, his body close curving…The old professor exploded in a lyric burst of semen, star-sprinkled…
And now how did I ever get into
that
? Enclosed please find a business card,
*
the which I trust you will hand to a sailor in Times Square, headed west. Some fun with all this tattoo business—real sexual. Sad-mashy.
*
Hooboy!
Lynes wrote back at the end of June, using a printed photographic negative of a male nude as his typing paper, and working the image into the text of the letter: “Do you do the tattooing, anything anywhere? For example just here?
*
And—you do neglect me—where is the typescript of the sequel to the motorcycle story you promised? What other goodies? Alibis enough. Now I want action.”
Glenway Wescott (who to this point had never actually met Steward) came to Chicago shortly thereafter,
*
and later described the meeting with Steward to his biographer in a way that makes clear not only Wescott’s gossipy habits of exaggeration, but also (and more important) just how shocking Steward’s lifestyle then seemed, even to a man of considerable sexual experience. As Wescott told his biographer,
Sam Steward…was a smallish, lean, wiry, Irish-looking man…I would have liked a tattoo from him but I didn’t trust him, he was such a sadomasochistic character. He [lived in] a small ground-floor apartment, with one small room and one immensely large room, and a tiny kitchen and bathroom. The walls above the bookshelves and the ceiling were covered with scenes of intercourse. There were penises this big and people that big fornicating all over the walls, painted by bad amateur artists of his acquaintance.
*
Hair-raising from the point of view of a cop coming in, you know, who would then want to know what all these boxes and file cabinets were. And scrapbooks. All over the walls were pornographic photographs. And furthermore he had a photographic journal of his sex life, which he showed me. It was the most astonishing thing I’d ever known anybody to have. He had a camera…and he had pictures of himself making love to every type of person you can imagine, and especially young boys. He had their names and their addresses and he told me who they were…I said, “I can’t remember such a courageous man as you. It doesn’t shock me a bit, and it gives me great pleasure to look at it all. But it alarms me. Aren’t you running a frightful risk?” He answered, “Of course, I wouldn’t dare do it, except that my dream all my life has been to be in prison, and to be fucked morning, noon and night by everyone, and beaten.” I said, “If I hadn’t seen this I wouldn’t believe it, because what you say is so extreme, and you’re so rational and intelligent and gentle and cultivated, and not the least bit cruel yourself, I should think. You wouldn’t want to hurt anybody, and you’re so vigorous, I can’t imagine you letting someone hurt you.” I felt really frightened. And all through dinner he had been talking Jean Genet talk, about how thrilling it would be to be in prison…He was the most extreme masochist that Kinsey ever found.
While Steward was by no means “the most extreme masochist that Kinsey ever found,” Wescott was nonetheless correct in his observation that Steward had set himself on an extremely self-destructive course. Indeed, during that very spring of 1954, Steward began to tattoo by appointment out of the very same highly pornographic apartment—hoping as much to seduce the men who came to him as to build himself a small business. He began actively visiting the Great Lakes base a short while later in his search for business, writing Kinsey in late May, “I go out to Great Lakes every Friday night under the auspices of the Red Cross, in one of their buses, to play chess with the poor sick sailor lads in the hospital—and of course I leave a paper trail of [my business] cards everywhere…If this keeps up long enough, I’m bound to get a call sooner or later.” In his free time, he continued to create more homoerotic visual material with which to decorate his home, adding in his note to Kinsey, “[I] have lotsa new photographs to show you, and Thor has bought eight pictures of mine to sell—they are just now being advertised.”
Steward sent one of his new tattooing business cards to Alice Toklas with the suggestion she show it to Francis Rose, for Rose had long been passionate about sailors. She declined to do so, however, explaining that “
entre nous
I have engaged to keep him fairly respectable—he has cost his wife too much—probably in [both] tears and dinero.”
Shortly thereafter Steward wrote Lynes to apologize for not having sent any more stories, and he explained that his new tattooing business was partly to blame:
Yes, I know—I have been delinquent in typing off that second episode to follow the motorcycle story I sent you, but there’s been so many things…Maybe in California there’ll be time. I know that last year, despite all the s-x-l encounters there (hush, hush!) I got sixteen watercolors done—who can say what I’ll accomplish in the six weeks I’ll be [at the Embarcadero YMCA] this summer?…It’ll be nice to see young Mr. Leapheart there [too]…
There ain’t no news, really. The summer has been sexually fruitful, and still I’m not sure it was fruit-filled as jam-filled.
*
Such lovely trade—ah
le bon dieu
is good! Such youth, such truck drivers! Part of it arises from the tattooing business, and much of it comes from my following the old “link” method of meeting new ones. That’s why, once a year, I like to flex my cruising muscles in a place like the Embarcadero Y, where the competition is keen and cutthroat and high, and he who hesitates gets nothing but dregs.
•
As in 1953, Steward kept a detailed journal of his 1954 San Francisco summer vacation, but this time he did so with Kinsey strongly in mind as his ideal reader, making detailed notations about each and every sexual encounter. Even so, all did not go immediately as planned. Shortly after arriving on August 5, he noted:
From the very first moment of setting foot in the [YMCA] this summer, [I] could tell that something had changed. There was a kind of furtiveness everywhere: people were quiet, there was no loud talk of any kind, and everyone walked with eyes almost painfully (and certainly maidenly) downcast. Perhaps there was an explanation for the surface dullness in the set of “House Rules” that old Pruneface handed me—saying in effect that since they wanted to establish a “Christian atmosphere” here in this Y, that absolutely no one would ever be allowed up on the residence floors…and that even among residents there would be no visiting after 11:30, and that if anyone were caught loitering in the halls or toilets he would be asked to give up his residence…I don’t see why they didn’t simply say “we’re trying to get rid of the homos here,” and let it go at that. And they certainly seem to have succeeded.
Three days later he noted, “The place is like a tomb…I might as well face it: I ‘operate’ better at home in Chicago, with my clientele, than I do anywhere else in the world. I think about sending a note to Tommy Tomlin [who is now out of prison] but do nothing about it.” He did, however, begin contacting other friends from the year before, including an acquaintance named Audrien Bingleman, who soon became a close and trusted confidant.
Through Bingleman, Steward learned that “the reason for the quiet at the Y…[is that] a sailor committed suicide there, and that called the military police in, who questioned everyone on the sailor’s floor. The old-time residents said that there was a lot of h[omosexual]-goings-on…and the MP’s went to the management and said looky here…clean it up. It’s a logical story…B[ingleman] told me to move to the Golden Gate Y—and Monday night when I see Johnny Leapheart, I’ll ask [Johnny] what he thinks about it.”
Leapheart was in fact already staying at the Golden Gate YMCA. The next night Steward called for him there, and found that, unlike at the Embarcadero, at the Golden Gate “one simply went up in the elevator without difficulty. [Johnny] was bronze and naked under the silk lounging robe, smooth as satin and twice as animated. We had a lovely session of dalliance and innocent evil…After that we dressed and had a lovely large meal…and…he walked me clear home to the gate of the Reformed church of the Puritan Brotherhood. I couldn’t ask him up—and was tired anyway.”
Steward then attempted to move into the Golden Gate YMCA, but when the desk clerk discovered he was attempting to move in from the Embarcadero YMCA, he was denied a room. Steward then realized that he had been recognized and identified as a homosexual. “Baffled, bewildered, and feeling somewhat as if I had leprosy, I went out into the street…This kind of thing carries a shock with it,” Steward wrote in his journal. “I felt (with the usual h-guilt complex) that something had been found out about me…I went around the corner to the YMCA hotel for men and women on Turk Street, only to discover I had been blacklisted at that place [too]…I began to toy with the idea of returning at once to Chicago.”
It took Steward “24 hours to get over the shock of the Y episode.” As he tried to decide what to do next, he registered at a small, noisy family hotel called the Roosevelt, where he then spent a “dull week of suspended animation” having no sex at all. Finally, and after much searching, he found a place that would accommodate his sexual needs: “the ‘bargain basement’ of the Stanford Court Apartments (Hotel) at 901 California Avenue, corner of Powell, right on the top of Nob Hill, next to the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins.” There, according to Steward, “for $50 a month, you live in a plush little room with wall-to-wall carpeting, quiet corridors, community showers—and absolutely no surveillance of any kind!
Vraiment
, they expect you to be queer—no kidding, and said to one complainer [about all the sexual activity] (he was a desk clerk at the St. Francis) that they really didn’t very much care at all what went on in the showers.” The ejection from the YMCA had, however, left Steward deeply shaken. Describing it in his journal as a “minor Gethsemane,” he went on to note that Bingleman had been a huge reassurance to him during that difficult time. “Almost every afternoon I went over and lay on his roof in the sun, and [there, with him] my spirit began to heal…My shell is paperthin.”