Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (29 page)

With entries such as these, Steward began to discover the real significance of his journal: like Lieutenant Seblon in
Querelle de Brest
, his writing would explore feelings that were otherwise denied all expression—for there was no one in his life with whom he could share them, including even the young men who evoked them. Such stories could never be published, or even told to friends. Steward was entirely alone in this new world of his own creation, but the idea of an understanding listener—the father-confessor he had so vainly sought in his conversion to Catholicism in the 1930s, and subsequently found in Alfred Kinsey—now propelled him to write about his sexual thoughts, feelings, and activities as never before. It was the only place he could tell the absolute truth. As a result, his involvment with the journal became all-consuming, and would ultimately prove the most intimate relationship of his life.

•

Working at the university by day and then tattooing by night, Steward no longer had as much free time for sex. By December he was feeling the lack of it, and so he began scheduling sex meetings with his established contacts—either singly or in groups of three or four, hosting them by appointment at his home. He also began using a sign-in book down at the cage as a way of developing potential new sexual contacts via telephone and mail.

At the same time, he began taking tattooing ever more seriously. In early December he hosted Kinsey on a long visit to the tattoo cage; Kinsey was fascinated by all he observed. He also managed to obtain a rare copy of Albert Parry’s
Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art as Practiced among the Natives of the United States
. Published in 1933,
Tattoo
was a landmark work that had taken a Freudian approach to its subject, asserting that there was a strong affinity between tattooing and sex. Like sex, tattooing featured both an active and a passive partner; insertion; strong sensation; and an experience through consensual pain of a certain kind of symbolic domination and submission. Though Steward was no Freudian, he nonetheless felt that most of Parry’s conclusions were sound, for he was experiencing these sensations daily down at the tattoo parlor. He also felt that there was a great deal more to be written on the relation between sex and tattooing, and he resolved to write it. Over the next two decades, he would amass books, magazines, and articles on tattooing, as well as technical manuals, picture books, and memoirs. He did so with the ambition of someday creating the definitive work on the relation of sex to tattooing—basing it, in large part, on his own, hands-on experience.

By the end of his first two months at the Sportland Arcade, Steward was finding tattooing so satisfying on so many levels—and so much of an adventure (sexually and otherwise)—that he seemed hardly to care about his teaching duties at DePaul. Over Christmas vacation he traveled down to St. Louis to attend his sister’s wedding, but rather than linger with his family he came back to Chicago on New Year’s Eve, and upon his return he went directly to the cage. “I must get down to the shop,” he wrote a friend who wanted to stop by the apartment for sex. “I’m sorry, but it has a greater appeal…I’ve never done anything which has made the Id purr as this thing has.” As if to confirm the strange new direction his life had taken, Steward recorded a final sexual adventure for the year of 1954 in his journal, once again featuring his favorite working-class sex partner, Bob Berbich:

As 1955 began, Steward focused ever more intently on his journal writing, now recording events as they unfolded rather than trying to shape them into stories, essays, or anecdotes. “Everything [in the journal came] from direct observation,” he later wrote. “[It would be wrong to] expect [it to have] the arrangement and symmetry of the scholar’s monograph, [for] the order, logic, and design of the universe cannot be impressed on the chaos of life as it was observed on the skidrow of South State Street in Chicago.” Even so, his daily journal entries often read as excitingly as fiction, for as Steward later explained, “tattooing furnished me with a kind of continuing drama, exciting, odd, and unusual, and quickly spoiled me for any kind of dull workaday routine occupation…The unusual clientele—always different, always changing—kept me fascinated and swimming in the mainstream of life—certainly in its dark rich depths…For anyone with even the mildest interest in people, tattooing was an ideal occupation.” Then again, the journal was primarily a confessional work, and its most substantial entries concerned Steward’s daily state of mind as he reflected upon the relation of his various sexual activities to his increasingly solitary life.

To his own surprise, Steward found he had a knack for running a shop, as well as a natural ability for handling the many tough guys, criminals, and drunks who frequented it. The sex researcher and psychologist Wardell Pomeroy, who visited the shop with Kinsey and, later, on his own, recalled that “[I] spent many hours in his shop watching him ‘operate’ [and]…It never ceased to amaze me how he was able to transform himself from the academic ivory-towered English professor to an entrepreneur who could handle very sticky situations and some very tough customers with an aplomb that even those raised in lower social levels would find difficult to duplicate.”

Despite his primary focus on running the kiosk as a profitable business, Steward also began having a number of semipublic sexual adventures there, a form of risk-taking he found particularly exciting. One Sunday morning when Bob Berbich stopped by the arcade looking for some action, Steward did not take him back to his apartment; he simply pulled the curtain across the front of the booth:

The danger of exposure added greatly to the thrill. Steward courted danger in other ways, too; most notably by becoming involved with Kenny Kothmann, a “boot” sailor training for the medical corps at Great Lakes who despite being quite sexually experienced was still only sixteen, and thus recognizably below the age of sexual consent. Steward, knowing this, nonethless let Kothmann stay regularly at his apartment on his weekend liberties (just as he had let Bobby Krauss do the year before), and from February through August the two had sex together twenty-three times. As with Krauss, Steward kept photographs and records of Kothmann that noted his age and background as well as their various sexual activities.

Through his relationship with Kothmann, it seems the forty-four-year-old Steward had been experiencing a second adolescence. And indeed, the new world in which he lived and worked was largely populated by adolescents:

Kothmann initially treated Steward as if he were just another sailor-trainee from Great Lakes, and Steward was in heaven, for to be a sailor who had sex with other sailors had always been one of his great fantasies. With Kothmann and several other boot sailors now stopping by regularly for sex, Steward even went so far as to ask himself, “Now that the ‘Navy’ is opening up for me, which is exactly what I have wanted all along, shall I maybe give up tattooing and concentrate on sex? Else why did I take up tattooing in the first place? But…I like tattooing; it’s in me like a virus—[I’d] sooner cut off my head, really.”

Shortly thereafter, Kinsey came to Chicago for a visit, and the two men met to discuss some other possible projects. Steward noted that Kinsey “had an idea that we should all collaborate on an article on the sexual implications of tattooing…I was properly modest, and we both realized the difficulty of having anything appear under my own name, even under that of Phil Sparrow. ‘You’d be fired in a moment,’ he said, and I knew it too, perhaps not so much for tattooing as for being associated with his name.” After the meeting, however, Steward began to worry about Kinsey’s health, for he looked very ill.

Kinsey’s life had become enormously difficult since the second volume of his monumental study,
Sexual Response in the Human Female
, had been published in 1953. His lifelong habit of working himself to exhaustion had taken its toll on a heart that, already weakened by childhood illness, was now further weakened by chronic work-related anxiety and tension. Since the early 1950s Kinsey had been taking both amphetamines and Nembutal daily in order to keep himself going; he was now also taking digitalis for his heart, which was enlarged and arrhythmic. After a collapse that had required hospitalization in 1953, he had suffered a number of small heart attacks in the months that followed.

Popular resentment of Kinsey, meanwhile, was growing. Unlike his
Male
volume, which had been hailed as a landmark study,
Sexual Response in the Human Female
had been roundly denounced by both Catholic and Protestant groups, and had been received throughout the country with an enormous upswell of popular anger. Part of this popular rage against Kinsey’s sex research was a delayed response to the findings of the
Male
volume; but Kinsey also had to contend with the wholesale popular rejection of his statistical finding that women had strong sexual urges—a finding that many people thought deeply insulting to American womanhood.

The resentment of Kinsey was also part of a greater shift that had been going on in American culture since the late 1940s: a shift toward political and social conservatism. In the five years between
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, public fears about conspiracies, spies, and enemy agents working within the United States had been wildly exaggerated at the federal level by Republicans intent on seizing and consolidating their political power. As a result of this shift, Kinsey had lost his Rockefeller Foundation funding, which was crucial to his enterprise. In his naïveté, Kinsey had expected that the knowledge gained through his statistical studies would bring about a greater understanding, tolerance, and acceptance of sexual variation within the American population. What had happened, in fact, was just the opposite: both he and his research were reviled, and sexual intolerance grew and spread. As a result, Kinsey’s health collapsed, for he was worn down not only by exhaustion, but also by stress. He was also, in the the words of a close colleague, “crushed with disappointment.”

•

A few days after Kinsey left Chicago, Steward made up his mind, once and for all, to place the large rose tattoo in the middle of his chest. Accordingly, he drafted up a rose image featuring a phallic meatus at its center, planning to bring it to Milwaukee to have it applied by Amund Dietzel.

The phallic rose would soon become Steward’s emblem. When he left the Sportland Arcade to open his own tattoo parlor in the coming year, he would adopt it as his shop’s insignia and feature it on his letterhead. One of his first significant published stories, meanwhile, would be entitled “The Sergeant with the Rose Tattoo.” He was interested in the rose for its traditional symbolism: the mystic center, the heart, the garden of Eros, the flower of Venus. Originally from Persia, the rose had been considered by Arabs a masculine flower, and in ancient times was a symbol not only of joy but also of secrecy and silence. Moreover, the rose had been a staple of Western tattooing since the nineteenth century. Steward also associated the rose with Gertrude Stein, whose stationery featured a rose around which figured her famous saying, “Rose is a rose is a rose.” His decision to place a large rose on his chest probably also owed something to Tennessee Williams, whose 1951 stage play
The Rose Tattoo
featured a rose tattoo (similarly placed in the middle of a man’s chest) as the emblem of an overwhelming physical passion.
^*

Steward had an ulterior motive in going to Dietzel to have the rose put on. With his usual craftiness, he planned to extract (and absorb) as much technical information as possible from Dietzel during the process. Dietzel was, after all, a great master of the art: at the time Steward went to him, this former merchant seaman originally from Denmark was the greatest source of tattooing wisdom in the entire Midwest, and even today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest tattoo artists of the twentieth century.

While Steward would in many ways become Dietzel’s successor, the two would never quite be friends, for the differences between the two men were many and great. Born in 1890, Dietzel had gone to sea as a cabin boy at age ten. Between 1912 and 1915 he had worked as a traveling tattoo artist, and in 1915 he had opened a tattoo parlor on South State Street. As his sense of style, use of shading, and ability with finer lines made him sought after from coast to coast, he decided to move up to Milwaukee. There, starting in 1916, he introduced a number of designs that proved enduringly popular, including the leaping black panther. His fortunes took a turn for the better when World War II brought a tattooing boom to Milwaukee, which was just a short train ride away from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. By the time Steward met him in 1955, Dietzel had long since become independently wealthy from real estate speculation, and had continued to work at the tattoo parlor only out of sheer love of the art. He was also a rough and somewhat vulgar man, and entirely heterosexual. “The purity and assurance of his line, the supreme and absolute confidence with which he created his tattoos, could be recognized even by a lay observer,” Steward later noted. “‘Dietz’ was in a sense my teacher, and I learned more from him about tattooing than from any other person.”

•

When not teaching at DePaul or tattooing down at the cage, Steward continued to cultivate his contacts in the world of erotic art, in part because he enjoyed introducing these men to Kinsey, and in part because he himself was still toying with the idea of publishing his visual erotica. Steward devoted the majority of his energy during this time, however, to the cultivation of his sex life, for after years of standing before handsome and aloof young male undergraduates to instruct them on grammar, composition, and the history of English literature, he was now meeting similarly handsome young men on a daily basis—handling their bodies in any way he liked, and having a great deal of sex with them. In exorcising the sexual frustrations of a seventeen-year academic career, he was incidentally discovering something Kinsey had already published in his
Male
study: namely, that the sexual lives of working-class and underclass American males were quite different from those of middle- and upper-class American males, particularly in their attitudes toward premarital intercourse, prostitution, and homosexuality. According to the Kinsey findings, young men with only a grade school education experienced four or five times as many homosexual experiences as did young men who went to college. Moreover, lower-class males tended to be quite promiscuous in the early years of marriage, had a higher tolerance for homosexuality, and were much more direct, even blunt, in their approach to sexual acts of any sort. As a result of his move downward in the American social hierarchy, Steward found his sex life had been given an unexpected boost.

And yet despite Steward’s sexual success on South State Street, the stress of his double identity was beginning to wear on him. He was now regularly popping Benzedrine to get through the teaching day at DePaul, and people were starting to notice and comment on his erratic behavior. In a strange way he seemed not to care: during the early summer, despite the abundance of shocking new tattoos on his body, he began sunbathing regularly on a DePaul University rooftop, taking only the smallest of precautions to prevent his discovery there by administrators. With this and other actions Steward was clearly courting his own dismissal; nonetheless, he regularly experienced anxiety attacks.