Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (27 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
Steward was much happier in his new place of residence. He later described the Stanford Court Apartments in his Phil Andros fiction as being “for men only—rooms with community showers and toilets…a great place for the gay ones to stay when they came to town. The freedom was so nice and the management so liberal that a lot of people paid for the whole month willingly [even if only staying a week].” There Steward finally began to enjoy himself in San Francisco, noting in his journal of Sunday, August 23,
Went down an spoke to “Pop” Eddy
*
in his spotless tattoo joint. I introduced myself…and…he opened up and talked at length about business (not good) [and] other tattooers…He rather wistfully wished (though not saying it outright) for another war, to make things a bit better…When the moment seemed psychologically right, I showed him the rose [I had tattooed] on my ankle, whereupon he congratulated me warmly, and said my work was more professional than that of many so-styling themselves.
Steward was energized by the meeting, for he was beginning to think he might really make a career for himself as a tattooist. But his mood darkened again two days later when he received a haircut so bad that it affected his ability to find sex partners—for, as he wrote in his journal, “I look like one of those creatures from the
Oz
books, exactly.” Moreover, the weather had turned cold and overcast, putting an end to his daily sunbathing routine and sending him back once again to his dark room in the basement of the Stanford Court. There, with little else to do during the early part of the day, he read the local newspapers and brooded in his journal. On August 27, he noted with mixed feelings reading about a landmark ruling that had just been made involving the question of homosexuality:
Two things happened today that bear noting. One: an announcement in the papers of the reversal of the guilty-of-treason verdict of Sergeant Provoo of Berkeley. Reason: the prosecution had introduced “irrelevant testimony” regarding defendant’s homosexuality.
*
Did I feel the world shift just a little under my feet at that moment? My first interpretation was to read it as a kind of victory for enlarging mores, a feeling that such a thing didn’t matter, but a further amplification and quotation in the
Examiner
pointed out that the court had said:
“obviously [the] charge [of homosexuality] was utterly irrelevant to the issue of whether he had committed treason while a prisoner of war. The sole purpose and effect…was to humiliate and degrade the defendant, and increase the probability that he would be convicted, not for the crime charged, but for his generally unsavory character. We can conceive of no accusation which could have been more degrading in the eyes of the jury or more irrelevant to the issue of treason.”
The last [sentence], of course, dashes all idealistic hopes groundward. Still, there may be some small profit: it may be an object lesson to the army (and others) that they ought to tread lightly on such matters.
The second, and far more interesting matter, concerned two clippings Emmy sent. The story told of the holding of thirty young Chanute Field
*
airmen for being members of Pachuco
*
gangs—violence and sadism. They were all tattooed with the mark of Pachuco—the cross with “merit badges” for outstanding acts of violence.
•
Without the YMCA as a center for sexual opportunity, Steward had to spend his nights out, cruising the bars. As an older man, and moreover as a recovering alcoholic, he did not find the scene an easy one. While many of his sexual fantasies involved tough guys in uniform—like the airmen who were also pachuco gang members in the article sent to him by Emmy—he nonetheless found the San Francisco bar scene much too violent and unpredictable:
the club-cruising here seems utterly unsatisfactory and frantic to me; I actually much prefer the
modus operandi
I have worked out at home. True, the excitement of the chase is lacking in my method—but so are the hazards of black eyes, rolling, beating, and (to a large extent) blackmail. Here,
tout n’est que désordre, tourbillon, mélée
.
*
…I never did find Larry [Ferguson] (we were to go drinking) but I walked miles—to the Sundown, Black Cat, Gordon’s, Paper Doll (it was so packed they were drinking outside on the steps—is this a purge town?) and finally Dolan’s. All of a sudden I felt as empty as Mrs. Viveash in
Antic Hay
—when she and Gumbril, lost and alone in London, were taxi-riding to find someone they knew. No one at home, or all busy—or about to commit suicide. “Let us go back by way of Piccadilly,” Mrs. V. kept saying; “the lights at least give the impression of being cheerful.”
The loneliness and sense of exclusion from which he was suffering moderated, however, after a friendly encounter with an older naval officer:
at the Stanford [Apartments I met] a sailor with a hairdo…He is a great tall kind of bleached out thing, not too swish but a little…This evening he was in uniform and despite the “old salt” weatherbeaten quality of him and the bleaching and toupee (all curls in front like one of Louisa Alcott’s Little Women), he looked authentically Navy in his uniform. I introduced myself—and to an airman named George, too, who was tying his tie; they’d just finished something—and learned he was on an admiral’s staff (the admiral’s a gay one, too) and had been in the Navy 10 years—achieving by his position a kind of maritime diplomatic immunity. He and the flyboy went out to dinner, and then he came back alone—read the motorcyclist’s story, got hot, and when I asked him if he wanted a blow job, he lay back on the bed without undressing, his hands behind his head, and let me go at it—very wise as to what I wanted
*
…Then he looked at more pictures, posed for a sketch,—and later went and knocked up Ken McGrath (the Amer[ican] airlines boy…) and the two of them posed for a loose quick sketch, and then we had a three-way do, with myself going down on Ken, and Ken taking Mike the sailor, and then Mike going down on Ken (after I let go, Ken having come). This is the kind of wonderful goings-on to which I am accustomed, and I am certainly glad that some of it happened this summer! The Ancient Mariner’s name is Michael Duke, and he seems to be independently wealthy…
The next day, after “breakfast with the Ancient Mariner” up at Gene’s Coffee Shop, Steward’s mood had lightened, and he went down to “Pop” Eddy’s to have a tattoo put on. “We had a long talk, very pleasant; more and more I come to admire the relaxed easy philosophy of the tattooers,” Steward recorded afterward. “He’s had 44 years of experience, is one of the few old masters left—Dietzel and Tatts Thomas being others. The vacation has taken, on the whole, a decided turn for the better, and I find myself a little reluctant to leave on [September] the 9th.”
•
The following day Steward got a number of supplies from “Pop” Eddy, as well as some technical tips on tattooing. He then met up with his sister at her elegant suite of rooms at the St. Francis Hotel, for she was just then visiting San Francisco with her new fiancé, Joe Harper, a highly placed hotel executive who always traveled in great style. By the end of the week, however, Steward had had quite enough of them, for seeing his sister so happily in love seems to have triggered in him an acute awareness of his own perpetual isolation. In a desire to escape these feelings, he once more went out cruising:
Broke away from Jinny and Joe after dinner at Tommy’s, and Bing and I went cruising in Sausalito…we came shortly back to SF, entering once more on the horrible empty Mrs. Viveash rounds…In the [Black] Cat I fell to talking with a wonderful little butch motorcyclist, complete with fancy leather jacket and untidy crewcut and pug nose—a solid little
dur
, very fascinating…We knew many of the same s-m crew in New York, though he made it quite clear he didn’t “go in for that” in the least, whereupon I pooh-poohed it myself. But I had a lovely fantasy of his tight little hard body sitting on my face—and his leather jacket still on.
…[Later] I was turned down for the second time in one evening. This caused me to put my head against the doorjamb for a moment after he had gone, and wonder if perhaps the moment had not come when I should give it ALL up entirely…Then the pang passed, and I went to what I thought was the room of that little dish-faced blackhaired boy…who (being small) had a cock that actually did hang halfway down to his knee. Unfortunately, the only open door was to the bed of someone else—and I was startled at the stranger’s face, and left hurriedly.
Though feeling his age and isolation more deeply than ever before, Steward wrote his final journal entry the next day, September 8:
I made at least one good and permanent friend this summer, and that’s Bing[leman]…[Today] he said, in his quiet way, “You’ll never be lonesome, not with the richness of your mind,” and a little later, “it will seem like the end of summer, when you go.” These two small things I’ll certainly treasure, for they mean a lot coming from him. And then, so as to be able to put him in the studfile, and really because I was dreadfully fond of him, I went down on him a little—not much—standing there in the kitchen, naked from our sunbaths, and kind of smelly—and he so exhausted and bitten and bloody from Jimmy of the night before that he could barely raise a hardon. It was a kind of tribute, and we both knew it—unimportant to be carried further.
[Afterward], I went back to the Stanford Court and packed—and then towards midnight saw the ugly-faced little blackhaired boy with the malocclusion. I asked him if he would like a blow job. “If you’re good,” he said rather slowly. I grinned and said I was reasonably proficient. So we went to his room, and he threw the blind up so that there was light from Powell Street…He was most appreciative, and grew quite hot, and pushed with his hands on my head, and then called me up to kiss him somewhat. And when—panting, excited, his legs threshing—he grew ready to come, he grabbed it and squeezed it with both hands on it…I asked him why, and he said the orgasm was so violent with him that often he went unconscious, and stayed out for half an hour.
It was a nice ending to a stay in California.
The next morning I got up and took the morning plane home. There were no more adventures worth recording—a Filipino U of Michigan medical student sitting beside me, a mild flirt with a redcap at the airport. Emmy was there; it was grey and raining—and the key was melancholy, the drama ended, the “fun” over.
Several months after his lengthy conversations with “Pop” Eddy in San Francisco, Steward decided in early November of 1954 to try his hand at tattooing out of an amusement arcade in downtown Chicago. The decision was not one he made lightly; if his activities were to be discovered, he knew he would face immediate dismissal from DePaul. Even so, he seems to have felt that by doing something as dangerous and seemingly irrational as moonlighting as a tattoo artist he was somehow starting a new life. After all, he had been fantasizing about quitting academia to become a tattoo artist for nearly a year; as early as December of 1953, he had written Lynes that his great dream was to “hie me to a seaport town, rent a shack and hang out a shingle, and spend my golden twilight years putting lovely designs on strong young brown arms and shoulders—and thighs and buttocks and phalli, if the request arises. All my life has suddenly fallen into place with this resolve—and why should I else have been drawing for these years, and why do I like sailors? This is my
ultimathule
,
*
my dream of nirvana. I shall be called ‘Professor Sparrow’ and be the Mr. Chips of the tattoo world.
Ave atque vale
, for I am about to leave the world we know! (Blow jobs furnished free.)”
Although he had begun his study of tattooing via a correspondence course
*
a year earlier, Steward had soon realized that “learning to tattoo from a book [was] just about as successfully accomplished as learning to swim from a book in your living room.” He later acknowledged, “It was not until I began to go to [Amund] Dietzel, the old master in Milwaukee, that I really learned how to tattoo.” And indeed, while Steward knew enough about color and line from his art studies to draw illustrations on skin, tattooing required something much more technical: the precise insertion of ink below the skin using a rapidly vibrating mechanized needle. Mechanized tattooing needles were at that time almost impossible to obtain, so while searching for one, Steward purchased an electric engraving tool. He experimented with it on metal and glass, and used it to create a number of striking home furnishings: engraved aluminum tumblers and plates, engraved glassware, and an engraved brass cigarette box, all of them featuring images of nude males.
Steward soon realized why no practicing tattoo artist would willingly help him find tattooing equipment: with each new machine came a new source of business competition. Nevertheless, through Tattooed Larry, Steward finally learned of some available machinery. It was just then in the hands of a local wino (and sometime tattoo artist) named Mickey Kellet. Steward bought the entire outfit from Kellet—design sheets, machines, and stencils—for thirty-five dollars. “There were eight machines in various states of disrepair, a transformer and a rheostat, and hundreds of ancient stencils, all coated with greasy smearings of Vaseline and black powder,” Steward later recalled. “There was [also] a two-foot high stack of hundreds of [tattoo] sketches.” His first challenge lay in cleaning all these filthy things to make them fit for service. “It took [me] a week…[and even after] I scrubbed every stencil with detergent, they still stank.”
Steward’s decision to set up as a tattoo artist had been based, in large part, on his ignorance of the dangers of the tattooing life. “Could I have seen all the eighteen years ahead suddenly unrolled in their complexity,” he wrote after his career had finally ended, “I might never have plunged into the tattoo world. It would have frightened the hell out of me.” Indeed, apart from a highly unpredictable, often criminal clientele, Steward would also have to deal with a motley assortment of double-crossing fellow tattoo artists. “There is little that can compare with the cutthroat tactics, the trickery and chicanery of the tattoo world,” he later wrote. “And why should it not be so? A good forty percent of its practitioners in those days was composed of ex-cons or con-men, drunks, wife-beaters, military deserters, [drug] pushers, [and] murderers…This was the world I had joined.”
In an effort to keep his tattooing life separate from his life as a university professor, Steward decided to open his business using the pseudonym of Phil Sparrow. He later explained the name to friends by saying that a tattoo artist, like a sparrow, must peck (with his needle) to make his way in life; but Steward had in fact used a similar pseudonym (Philip Sparrow) while writing his columns for the
Illinois Dental Journal
. Given his wiry frame and small size, Steward was well suited to the name Sparrow. But it also had a literary precedent: John Skelton’s Catullus-inspired poem “The Boke of Phyllyp Sparrowe,” the mock lament of a young lady for her pet sparrow—a little bird that had, in happier moments,
…many tymes and ofte,
Betwene my brestes softe
It wolde lye and rest;
It was propre and preste.
So Steward’s new name as a tattoo artist, like so much he did, combined a playful eroticism with a bit of poetic allusion and literary erudition.
Even as he took steps to begin work as a tattoo artist, Steward was continuing to try his hand at homoerotic illustration, contracting to sell his sexually suggestive drawings through a small company called Thor Enterprises.
*
He was sternly warned off that project by Kinsey, however, who reminded him that by sending such material through the mail for money he would be “subject to both Post Office and F.B.I. Investigation…Nearly [everyone who does so] ultimately end[s] up in trouble with the Federal government.”
*
The best-known case of such trouble had been that of Bob Mizer, owner of
Athletic Model Guild
magazine, who had spent six months on a prison farm in California in 1947 for disseminating “obscene” bodybuilding photography. Since then, enforcement of the so-called Comstock Law against sending obscene materials through the mail was increasingly vigorous, with federal agents harassing not only purveyors of erotically suggestive photography, but also publishers of literary fiction. Mail addressed to Kinsey and to the Institute for Sex Research was routinely seized as well.
As a result, Steward focused more energy on writing about his sexual activities in what he named his “Chicago Journal.”
*
In doing so he updated his Stud File, and there made a startling discovery about his sex life: “In the past 7 years I had as many sexual contacts as I did in all my life before, up to that time. It is fantastic: 1,100 contacts to age 38, and 1,100 since then!”
As the fall term began, Steward was increasingly conscious of his advancing middle age, for his San Francisco summer had been full of sexual rejection, and on his return, Bobby Krauss rejected him as well. George Reginato, though enrolled in one of Steward’s English literature classes, no longer seemed interested in exchanging sex for grades. As the semester progressed, Steward felt increasingly deprived of sexual contact with the young men he most desired. He developed a series of severe, almost incapacitating crushes on various young male pupils—but, faced with the impossibility of consummating these desires, he sank instead into despair.
Indeed, Steward’s life situation at that moment was not good. His body was aging and his potency was diminishing; he was no longer the relatively carefree, attractive, and resilient young man he had once been. He had no savings and no job security, and he hated his job at DePaul. Now forty-four, he had accomplished very little as either a scholar or a writer apart from one early, promising novel. In battling depression, he had begun to rely upon Benzedrine to help him through his school day, and as soon as that day was over, he would escape down to the arcades and tattoo parlors of South State Street—for the wide-open world of skid row, however bleak, was nonetheless a welcome change from the claustrophobic faculty lounge at DePaul.
In his first attempts to establish himself as a tattoo artist, Steward had made a series of trips up to the Great Lakes Training Station on the pretext of visiting with maimed and injured sailors. Once there, however, he distributed his tattooing business cards throughout the station, and loitered in the hallways and restrooms to see if anyone interesting turned up. One journal entry described these visits:
What a warming and pleasant experience it was once more to drive in the gate at Great Lakes and see the handsome sailors—dozens and dozens of them, and watch them swagger down the halls of the recreation building, and go with them into their can, and peek from one’s urinal down the line at their cocks pulled sidewise out of their incompletely unbuttoned trousers!
The visits left him in a state of such highly pitched sexual excitement that he did not hesitate when, upon a return from one of these outings, Bob Berbich telephoned to suggest a late-night meeting:
Heated by the sight of the sailors, I said yes—put on jeans and leather jacket, and went down on the bus…to meet him in the parking lot by the Tribune tower. And there in full view, and with the Wrigley Tower bank of lights brilliantly illuminating the background, I went down on him…delighting in the thought of what my students would say if they could have seen me at that moment.
Steward’s contempt for academia (and his rage at his position within it) was now such that he abandoned all academic research and largely neglected his coursework as well. Instead he focused exclusively on writing about sex and tattooing. “In the past few weeks, the tattoo mark has increased in its sexual stimulation for me,” he wrote in one journal entry. “The sight of one or more on an arm becomes terrifyingly attractive; I find myself wanting to lick the tattoo, or suck it—or at the very least grab it and run my finger over it. The urge is building up in me again for the needle; if I don’t get someone else to be the victim, I’ll have to renew the one on my right hip.” In another he confided,
The passion overcame me today, and…I did [it] again, for the third time, [adding some work to] the small stylized flower on my right pelvic peak…then along the edge of my left palm and forearm I put a measurement series—small red marks, barely visible to the nekkid eye after they heal [I hope] that will indicate 5, 6, 7 and 8 inches. Thus I will never be without a ruler again…[and] those fantastic claims of [cocks that are] 10 and 12 inches can now be spot-checked and disproved.
Steward would continue to add tattoos to his body for years, many of them indelible statements of sexual rebellion. Ten days after applying the cock-measurement marks to his forearm, he described a wildly indiscreet new design he had created for his shoulder:
I want something added to the whip on my right [deltoid]…A flying penis, a winged phallus, Pompeiian, fitted right over the whip, wings spread, the body of it bright red. The kind of care I would have to exercise over this obscenity might be embarrassing and confining—and yet I do want it most powerfully. Just how much of the sense of guilt and punishment, of the brand of the mark of Cain, the Scarlet Letter, the mark on the minister’s face (and the black veil)
*
are mixed up in this? Out of what obscurities does the feeling of the necessity for punishment arise? I am astonished to see it in myself—and of course I begin to wonder if having the cock there is wholly the result of guilt feelings. Might it not also be thought of as a kind of advertisement?
Dietzel applied the winged phallus to Steward’s shoulder later that week. Having placed such a radical image indelibly upon his body, Steward then reconsidered what he had done to himself, and acknowledged in his journal that he was in the midst of a major life transition:
For some time now—say four or five years—there has been growing in me a tendency to sneer at the intellectuals…my disdain for intellectual phonies, for the elegant language of art and music criticism and literary criticism, my scorn for the
homo pedanticus
or
academicus
have been growing for some time; and [instead I am]…seeking out the opposites of the things I have long admired…Oh, of course, I realize the aping and the wish-fulfillment of the sexual—but there is also this leaving of the world I know. In an obscure way, I think that tattooing is connected with all this…The tattoos I have on me ally me with the herd, the toughs, the lower-class, the criminal—and I like it not only sexually but because that world [of the lower-class and the criminal] spits in the face of the one which has contained me thus far.
Kinsey, after receiving some of these writings, wrote Steward, “I have just gone over your manuscript…It is the most discerning analysis of the psychology of tattooing that I have seen…You have contributed an important document.” Encouraged, Steward continued to reflect upon what he had been doing to himself:
A New Thing that I have been developing: the idea that I have become subconsciously irked with the bourgeois matrix that has contained me [because] the matrix’s disapproval of homosexuality has finally become apparent to my buried self—with the result that I want to expel myself from the life which has held me thus far. Hence, tattooing…what better way to expel myself than to cover myself with tattoos—and to [cover] others [as well], thus drawing them down with me?
Even as he jeopardized his academic career, Steward was becoming newly aware of himself. Though strongly attracted to working-class and criminal-class males, he had previously had no easy access to such men. Tattooing, he now sensed, could change all that. In late October he wrote movingly on the subject of working-class men in his journals, in a way that makes clear that his desire to live and work as a tattoo artist was based at least in part on his persistent desire for encounters with men of this background: