Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (30 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
Indeed, he faced the very real possibility of being shaken down, robbed, or possibly even murdered on South State Street. One evening, having been informed by two tattooed minors that the cops were trying to get them to sign a complaint against him, Steward wrote,
A curious day, the end of it doom-filled with the same empty terror I used to feel while drinking—that’s twice within a short space of time. [The youngsters’ story] was the beginning of the fear, which grew steadily all the rest of the evening. I thought of a dozen plans—denial, lack of proof, stopping completely…I left [a sex party with] the dread large inside me, and visions of capture. (I can easily see that panic grows in the criminal and leads him to do foolish things in that tight emotional emptiness which he feels.)
Sensing disaster was imminent, Emmy Curtis begged Steward to hide the great masses of erotic material and sexual records he had stockpiled in his apartment, and even volunteered to take them into her own home. Despite Emmy’s attempt at intervention, however, Steward made few changes to his lifestyle, for the semi-anonymous sex gatherings in his erotica-strewn home were now a well-established way of life: “In the evening Bobby Krauss came, about eight-thirty, and we called Bert Bauer and invited him over. He came, we spread the old chenille (freshly laundered by [Emmy’s cleaning lady] Mrs. Mersel, and brought back in a hurry by Emmy when I told her it was the daisy-chain blanket: ‘Oh, mercy! I’ll have it there by Saturday!’—and she did.)”
The Monday after the daisy chain, Steward noted in his journal that “school is…awful: Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, facing my big classes, I have to take half a benny—and even then it is hard.” His panic attacks continued as well: “There’s a definite kind of reluctant fear in me to go down to the shop any more,” he noted. “I kinda feel that each evening may be my last [as a tattooist], unless they let me tattoo in jail.”
•
The situation down at the arcade became even more difficult that June, when a young man fascinated by the tattoo cage and its decor introduced himself to Steward as a magazine writer, and told him he wanted to do a feature on Steward and his work. Steward was quietly horrified, but even as he knew he ought to refuse, he worried that by declining to be interviewed he might draw even more attention to himself. So instead he gave the reporter the interview, but lied extensively about his age, training, and background. “The Ancient Art of Professor Phillip Sparrow,” published in July 1955 by
Chicago
magazine, gave a fascinating glimpse of Steward’s double life:
The inside walls of the shack are covered with colored insignia: crosses encircled by thorny wreaths, lions rampant and entwined by bright green vipers, bleeding hearts capped by scrolls reading “mother” and “sweetheart,” blue anchors, red roses, obsolete army tanks, daggers, mermaids, hula dancers and fierce looking eagles clutching writhing lizards in their talons.
This is a tattoo parlor—the roost of professor Phillip Sparrow, one of the row’s four epidermal artists.
…Sparrow bears little resemblance in appearance or manner to any stereotyped conception of a tattooer. He is a wiry 36-year-old [
sic
] of medium height, with wavy blond hair and mustache and a handsome, almost patrician face. Although he carries six tattoos of his own, none are so located as to be visible to the public. His one sartorial concession to the trade is a nautical working costume of blue jeans and a dark turtle-neck sweater…Sparrow’s literary allusions…run [from the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament to] Freud and various books on the history of tattooing, and his soft polysyllabic speech helps account for his academic nickname.
…“He’s a real perfectionist,” said one of his customers. “One little flaw and he’s tearing his hair.”
…Sailors and motorcycle riders, Sparrow said, are the social groups most prominently represented among his clientele. Of approximately 400 people he has perforated here, only four have been women.
Shortly after the magazine appeared, two of Steward’s students discovered it and circulated it among other members of their class. The discovery caused a sensation among the students, but even so, administrators were slow to catch on. On Friday, July 1, Steward wrote in his journal,
If DePaul should fire me, it is pleasant to think what might be done: perhaps
Life
magazine would find enough sensational shock value (pointing up the plight of the underpaid professor who had to become a tattooer to make ends meet, etc.) in my petite histoire to run something about it—which might make DePaul known in years to come as “that university where they couldn’t pay one of their professors enough and he took up tattooing.”
Though worried about losing his job, Steward nonetheless took pleasure in the article, and sent a copy of it to Kinsey along with the next hundred-page installment of his journal. In response to Kinsey’s subsequent suggestion that he send Bill Dellenback up to Chicago to continue his documentation of Steward’s apartment, Steward wrote, “As for having things to photograph—well, I just haven’t been doing anything except the tattooing, and my ‘art gallery’ is now walking around the world.”
In a subsequent journal entry, Steward described how his sex life, too, had changed: “I have now seen so many [sailors], handled so many arms, helped them on and off with jumpers, that the wonderful spell they used to cast has all but disappeared. What a shame this is!…If the sailor-object disappears, what in the world can be left? I am afraid my old brain can not of itself engender a new illusion to live by.”
Sex with sailors had been Steward’s central erotic fantasy for more than fifteen years; now the fantasy had been overtaken by quotidian reality, and Steward had temporarily lost his bearings. Part of the problem was, as he noted, overexposure. But there was another, unmentioned problem: age. Nearly all the sailors in his shop were either still adolescents or else in their early twenties. Steward, by comparison, was forty-five. The situation was particularly difficult with Kenny Kothmann, the sixteen-year-old sailor from Great Lakes who had been living at Steward’s apartment on his weekend liberties—for though the two were still sexually active, Kothmann had become increasingly oblivious to Steward’s thoughts and feelings. Having ceased to respond to Steward as a lover, he had begun treating him instead merely like he would any other authority figure—someone to be taken advantage of whenever possible, and otherwise simply avoided or tuned out. Over the past several months Kothmann had driven Steward half crazy with his constant stand-ups and sudden, unexplained disappearances; what had once seemed to Steward a perfect romance was now only embarrassing and humiliating. Realizing he needed to end the attachment, Steward left a note on his kitchen table asking Kothmann to return his apartment keys. Kothmann did so, with a note promising to spend the whole of the following weekend with him. When Kothmann proved a no-show the following week, Steward wrote in his journal,
…the day [was] a blur of sailors…and more sailors, demanding anchors, hearts, skulls, daggers with snakes entwined…and finally, with my senses reeling, Kenny and [his friend] Peppy appearing, and Kenny saying he was going to a party, and did I mind? And all the small hopes built on the strength of last week’s note…shattered, dusty, gone…with the feeling that tattooing…[is] spoiling my sex life almost beyond all recognition. After next Friday—I hope I never hear or see Kothmann again, ever: and I hope that when my psyche re-orients itself, gets the gyroscope of common-sense working again, I shall never again permit myself to be so entrapped…
Kothmann showed up at the apartment the next morning. Having started the evening at a party, he had ended it in the Clark theater,
*
but then he had needed a place to sleep and shower before heading back to Great Lakes—and apparently he had kept a copy of Steward’s key in case of just such an emergency. “I got out of bed [and] confess[ed that] I had fallen in love with him three months before,” Steward wrote sadly in his journal. “[Then saying,] ‘so—if my actions seem a little odd and abrupt to you—consider why.’”
Then I went to shave. I heard him cough a coupla times, and when I came back he had fallen over on the sofa, ostensibly asleep—but how else could we have avoided an embarrassing moment? I give him credit for a dramatic resolution…When I got home there was a note from Kenny, saying amongst other things that yes, I did a good job hiding it, he thought he was just someone else to go to bed with when there wasn’t anyone else. “I can never thank you enough for all you’ve done. I know one sailor who would be awfully homesick and mixed up if it wasn’t for you. I have a little something I’ll give you next weekend.”
The following Saturday, however, there was no present for Steward. Kothmann had simply dropped him and disappeared.
That Saturday was Steward’s forty-fifth birthday, and even though the day passed in a blur of biceps and chests, he struggled hard to fight off depression. “The $91 I took home with me this evening didn’t make me any less lonesome,” he noted wearily in his journal. “I guess I’ll have to start arranging spintries again—it’s just been that I’m so damned tired after work that I don’t feel like [doing] anything.”
Four days later, Kothmann was caught having sex with a fellow sailor at the Naval Training Station, and authorities there placed him in hospital isolation for observation and intense cross-examination. In line with the nationwide hysteria about homosexuality, naval authorities were now actively seeking to uncover any and all traces of homosexuality within the ranks of enlisted men. In doing so, they had also decided to investigate any person or place in the Chicago area that might be involved in promoting or encouraging homosexual activity. Steward, not yet knowing the full extent of Kothmann’s trouble, noted in his journal that a couple of days earlier he had written “a note to Kenny, the tenor of which was that the Navy way of life was really an abnormal one and that frequently damage was done [by Naval authorities] in trying to create these ‘young men pure’ [through forced celibacy.] As a kind of bulwark against his despair [about his life at the Training Station], I tried [using my good-luck] amulet
*
on him…[and right after that] I got his letter announcing the worst had happened.”
Two days later, DePaul finished for the year, and Steward was free to immerse himself entirely in his tattooing. After putting tattoos on a pair of particularly handsome young construction workers, he noted in his journal,
God, if teaching was a martyrdom, what is this? A very real burning at the stake…I handle [these young men] so closely; I come so near to all these tanned young shoulders; I see the tension of the
serratus magnus
pattern; I feel the hair beneath the arm pit; I look into the eyes, I press the fainting head down between its legs and look at the ridge of the backbone curving like a well-fleshed bow; I see the hair running into a rivulet down beneath the belt center—my god, what is going to be left after all this? Probably nothing except the Catholic religion, or checking umbrellas in a museum.
A week later, Steward noted, “Thomas Mann died today. I re-lived the moments he and I had passed together. And wept a little…[Then] Kenny [Kothmann] came in, with horribly bleached hair (the underthatch quite dark), coarse and ropy; he looked like a male whore of thirty-five. He [has] got an Undesirable Discharge.” Two days later, Steward had even worse news from Thurman Peppington, an effeminate black boot sailor who was a friend of Kothmann’s. Peppington (or “Peppy”) had heard from a mutual friend “that Kenny had spilled the whole works to the Navy—with e special reference to the Daisy Chain [with Peppington and several others at my apartment on] May 22,
*
and that the Navy was going to declare my shop off-limits.” Steward was at that point more concerned about losing his business than with prosecution by naval authorities, since as a civilian he was technically beyond their reach. Still, he wrote, “There’s no describing the shock this gave me—like one swift terrible blow right to the solar plexus, leaving me kinda dark and non-functioning in the head, and unable to think or grasp what was going on externally.”
While Steward instinctively knew that Kothmann had betrayed him, he could not yet bring himself to hate this damaged, troubled, and heavily promiscuous sixteen-year-old whose entire professional future had probably been irremediably compromised by his undesirable discharge. When Kothmann stopped by the shop the following day, Steward bought him a bus ticket to San Francisco and gave him a tattoo as a going-away present. Afterward he wrote, “[I] put my big rose on Kenny’s shoulder, working Tab Hunter’s initials into it [at Kenny’s request]—half wondering if I should not have moistened the colors with curare or arsenic, or used my rustiest needles…I have never in my life been so glad to see anyone depart.”
The next day, however, the situation worsened yet again: “The pudgy little queer negro [boot sailor], Peppington, came in—and told me [all the] details. Kenny gave way completely, told them everything about me, gave Naval Intelligence my name, picture, told of the tattoo shop, intimately described the daisy chain with Tab Buonfiglio
*
[right] down to the color of the [chenille] bedspread [I had] put down on the floor…When I got home in the early evening, I called [another sailor,] Lou Tobler…[who] confirmed every detail.” Steward now realized that not only was his tattoo business in danger; he also faced dismissal from DePaul and public exposure as a “sexual deviant.” “The one thing I wonder [most],” he wrote, “is if [Kothmann] gave them my name at school, or told the Navy I taught at DePaul.”