Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (31 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
Several days later Steward spoke with his friend Bill Bates
*
in San Francisco. “I alerted the west coast against Kenny Kothmann…Since we are all, as Jacques Delaunay once said, ‘
un grand Mafia
,’ word like this can travel quickly, [since] no queer fears anything so much as one of his own breed who’s turned informer…I’ll get Kothmann if it takes me twenty years.”
The next day, while Steward was applying a tattoo, a heavily decorated chief yeoman from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station appeared at the entrance to the kiosk. When the last of Steward’s customers left, he asked Steward if his name was Phil Sparrow, and if he happened to live in an apartment on Kenmore. Steward said yes, and asked how the man knew. The yeoman replied, “Let’s just say it’s my business to know such things”:
Here it comes, I thought. And it did. Then he asked if I knew Dion White, Kothmann…Peppington and Malone.
*
I admitted to “remembering” Peppington and Kothmann, said I didn’t know the others. Then he muttered something about “living in Chicago and the police” which didn’t register precisely, although I knew he was threatening…Then he told me, “Keep away from the sailors, you know what I mean, or the next time I won’t be alone.”
He left, and I called after him, “Is this official?” “Yes,” he said.
Naturally I was in a whirl, and near-state of shock, but managed to get home, and sought solace in a sleeping pill. This looks like ruin—or was it just the “friendly” warning?
By popping a handful of Sedormid pills, Steward managed to get a few hours sleep. The next morning when he returned to work at the arcade, he was stopped at the entrance by Frank, the building’s manager, who informed him that “a guy from naval intelligence was in asking just what goes [on] with Sparrow.” When Steward asked Frank what he had told the intelligence man, Frank responded that he had covered for Steward: “[By] the luckiest sort of coincidence, Frank had known [the guy from naval intelligence] from way back, and gave him a song and dance in his best Lithuanian bluff manner, saying everything was on the up and up, and just let that pasty-faced little motherfucking little goddamned liar [Kothmann] come around and make his accusations face to face.”
“I hope that settles it,” Steward concluded, “but I am fearful still.”
The shock of the Kothmann incident was such that for a long time Steward took no great pleasure in recording his erotic exploits in his journal. In fact, he decided to lie low. Aside from a few entries concerning another visit from Kinsey, the journal trails off in the autumn of 1955, and in the last entry—at the end of October—he noted, “I am now so highly moral (with sailors) in the shop that I begin to look on myself as the north door to the Pacific Garden Mission.” Because the journal came to a temporary halt with this entry, there was no record in it of Steward’s reaction to Kinsey’s news (later recounted in a memoir) that George Platt Lynes was just then nearing death from cancer. But during the fall, Steward later wrote, “George [Lynes] spoke [with me by telephone] of his aches and pains…‘I am taking twenty-odd kinds of pills,’ he said, ‘and there are terrible pains in my chest, as if an elephant is sitting on me.’”
On November 17, John Martin, the noted author and dance critic, wrote to Steward from his desk at
The New York Times
that “George…returned from Paris a week or so ago and went to the hospital again…his situation is extremely grave.” Lynes died a little more than two weeks later, in early December. Steward never wrote directly about the sorrow he felt at Lynes’s death, but he kept an index card with him on his desk until the end of his own life, some thirty-eight years later, on which he had typed, “George was an atheist, and so am I. But how I long now for an afterlife—a world of light or of deep dazzling darkness, where he and the others we’ve lost reside, unscathed, forever accessible—to have tea with, to talk nonsense with, to reinvent the world with.”
•
That same autumn, a different kind of tragedy complicated Steward’s life considerably when three young boys were discovered naked, bound, and strangled in a ditch near the Des Plaines River. Since police had only a vague description of a middle-aged male as a suspect, the murders triggered a citywide panic over homosexuals and homosexuality that would last for many years.
Panics over homosexual sex crimes took place all across the United States during the early 1950s, fostered by the nationwide vilification and scapegoating of homosexuals that had begun with postwar military down-sizing, then intensified through the actions of various hate-mongering politicians, most notably the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. As a result, reports on predatory sexual psychopaths began to proliferate in newspapers and magazines, and in these reports homosexuals were particularly demonized, with the press routinely portraying all homosexuals as immoral, mentally ill, and a predatory threat to unsuspecting youth. The Chicago boy murders (which came to be known, after the victims, as the Peterson-Schuessler murders) were particularly incendiary because no murderer was found or taken into custody.
*
Chicago police deflected criticism of their failure to find the guilty party or parties by engaging in a highly visible campaign of harassment and intimidation of the city’s known or suspected male homosexuals.
On January 1, 1956, Steward moved uptown to 4915 North Glenwood, an apartment building on a cul-de-sac overlooking St. Boniface Cemetery. Various diary entries note that he furnished the apartment with candles, a human skull, and a number of screens, lampshades, and sculptures of classically inspired nude males. In early January he wrote Kinsey to apologize for having fallen behind on his journal and correspondence, and explained it was partly due to his move uptown. Despite Kinsey’s own very serious financial and health problems, he promptly and kindly replied, “I have thought of you repeatedly and I continue to marvel at the extent of the cooperation that you have given through these years…I never realized that I could learn so much more about sex as I did in the seven weeks in Europe…We will discuss this when we get together. Your help in my thinking will be very useful at this point.”
Resuming his journal on Valentine’s Day 1956, Steward noted that his sexual adventures had continued despite the warning he had received from the navy. Even so, he felt increasingly anxious—not only about losing his job at DePaul, but also about being threatened in the arcade. In one instance, two policemen came in for tattoos, and one of them repeatedly pointed his gun at Steward, threatening to shoot him unless he did a good job. “I laughingly pushed it away from my belly two or three times,” Steward wrote, “[but] after they left…I sat in the corner and shook for ten minutes.” In mid-February, Steward again wrote a note of apology to Kinsey for having fallen out of touch, blaming his silence on his two full-time jobs. Kinsey responded almost immediately: “Frankly I was a bit worried that something might have happened to you. I should, on the other hand, have known you well enough to know that you have managed to get through all sorts of situations that other persons wouldn’t have.”
Kinsey had been right to worry, for toward the end of February, De Paul administrators apparently learned about the tattoo shop. When Steward met with the dean of the school to discuss the renewal of his contract and the raise that was to go with it, the dean told him tersely that he would receive none, though everyone else in the department would. Steward then asked among his colleagues and learned, as he wrote in his diary, that “my raise had been proposed in committee and agreed upon, when word came from President O’Malley’s office that I was not to be given a raise.” As Steward wrote Kinsey, “I kinda feel the authorities at the school have got wind of my other job, and I think in their outraged Christian way they may be trying to force me out.”
But then the situation took a wholly unexpected turn. Early Sunday morning, March 11, Steward was at home in his apartment, painting an erotic screen in the nude, when the doorbell rang. Thinking Emmy had arrived early to help him with some housework, he punched the release. As he noted in his journal afterward,
It was two cops, the same ones that on March 8th had dropped into my shop to ask if I knew Roy Hyre,
*
whom they were looking for to question about the Peterson-Schuessler murder case…they said they’d found my [tattooing] card in [Hyre’s] effects…A moment I had nightmared over for years had come to sudden shocking reality. They came in…looked around, commenting on the pictures…one of them said he understood I had quite a collection of obscene pictures; I did once, I said, but I gave them all to Dr. Kinsey and got rid of them. Ah, yes, they said—well, we’d like you to come down to the station for questioning about these murdered boys.
During Steward’s questioning at the police station, he was asked his whereabouts for October 17–18, Monday and Tuesday. In order to give himself an alibi for the Peterson-Schuessler murders, he had needed to explain that he worked as a professor at DePaul. He was then released on the condition that he return on Tuesday the thirteenth at 5:00 p.m. for a lie detector test.
As soon as Steward returned home, he set to work transporting the remaining photographic collections and sexual records in his apartment to the home of Emmy Curtis, not knowing if his home was going to be raided. He returned to the station two days later, and even though he was told at the end of the interview that he had passed the lie detector test, he sensed he was in trouble, writing afterward in his journal,
They’ll probably pick me up from now on. So often you see the line in the newspapers: “Police rounded up all known sex deviates in the vicinity” of this crime or that. Can one face an existence like that?…
If word of this gets to DePaul…it would definitely end me there—involvement of the innocent or not.
…Emmy reminded me I’ve known I was playing with fire, however, as I indeed have been. I seem to have some fundamental urge to destroy myself…Why can’t I lead a dull and happy and
carefree
life? The answer, I suppose, is that I’d rot; I have to have excitement, even at the price of ruin.
Steward later described his questioning over the Peterson-Schuessler murders for an oral history project: “I was cleared on…the murder, largely because I had no car and [since I don’t know how to drive I] couldn’t have driven out into the woods and killed the boys…and take[n] them out there…[The police] took in six hundred people, all of them queers…and they never did find out who killed the three boys.” Much to Steward’s relief, the police did not return to his home to demand the homoerotic and pornographic materials they had stumbled across during their visit. In fact, the new apartment was much less outrageously decorated; in moving uptown he had already placed the most shocking, graphic, and incriminating of the materials into storage. Moreover, while the charge of possessing pornographic materials then carried a fine of one thousand dollars per article in the state of Illinois, the detectives had initially come to Steward without a search warrant, and they knew Steward would have cleared his apartment of everything illegal in the hours after their visit.
Nonetheless, by the end of the same week the dean of the school called an immediate meeting with Steward. In it, he simply told Steward that his contract would not be renewed:
I tried to get him to say why, but all I could force out of him was “Shall we say for outside activities?” I said that covered a lot; yes, he said, and that I could discuss the matter with President O’Malley [the head of the university] if I wanted to. The whole business took less than 40 seconds.
I staggered back to the faculty house (white-faced, I presume)…and then…retired to my office and sat for 20 minutes staring at the wall…all I could see was the appalling loss of face in having nothing to do except be a tattooer.
…The thing that will be hardest to accustom myself to, of course, will be the “loss of face” and the diminishment of Gertrude’s “sense of the importance of yourself inside yourself.”…For years I have loathed teaching: the futility of it being broken all too rarely by the reward of finding an intelligent single one whom I could watch grow. I have liked being the most popular teacher in that branch; it would be silly to deny the feast such a realization furnished my ego…[yet] gone now will be the mornings when I had to take a halfa benny in order to face the room of witless faces in their Monday stupor.
There’s no denying, however, that there are still many moments of terror, when awake at night or even during the day’s lulls, I wonder if I can make a go at this business of tattooing. There are so many factors…uncertainties at every turn—the customers, the law, the legal age limit, mistakes possible everywhere. It requires a kind of courage and assurance very difficult for me to summon.
And worst of all, of course, the remaining seven weeks of school…
Steward had chosen his vocation more than twenty years earlier at Ohio State University, and ever since then had prided himself on his extraordinary ability (and popularity) as a teacher and educator. Indeed, quite apart from his teaching duties, he had devoted the better part of his life to being a scholar, poet, and man of letters. And yet, over the course of the past several years, he had been letting go of that identity, for there was no place for him in that world. While shocked at having been fired, he was at least strong enough not to self-destruct—unlike other, more accomplished and dedicated academics, such as Harvard’s F. O. Matthiessen, a leftist homosexual critic who had killed himself in the midst of Senator McCarthy’s 1950 attacks on “domestic subversion,” or Smith College’s Newton Arvin, whose life would come to an end shortly after his home was illegally raided by police for possession of homosexual pornography in September 1960.
*
Instead, Steward rallied over the weekend, taking the train up to Milwaukee and there presenting himself to Amund Dietzel with an enormous garland-of-flowers design he had created for application to his chest. “I plunked down a couple of $20 bills in front of him and said, ‘tell me about tattooing,’” Steward later recalled, “[and] for the 40 bucks I got five hours of advice and teaching and a tattoo to boot—an excellent investment.” Creating the garland actually took three long, bloody sessions; the immediate physical pain may well have been both a distraction and a relief from the much greater psychic anguish Steward was experiencing over the abrupt termination of his academic career.
After describing the trip to Dietzel’s in Milwaukee in his journal, Steward noted, “James Purdy stopped into the shop today and applauded my decision, he also having given up teaching as a shitty, futile business (I guess he was caught in fragrant delicious.
*
)” He also looked forward to a visit from Kinsey, noting, “In a sense he, as a father image, will be more important to me in what he says than any other person. I am hoping he will not disapprove. He has undoubtedly known other cases…now, at any rate, I can collaborate on a tattoo article with him and have no fear.” And indeed, Kinsey proved very supportive: “Prok
*
…said he would cherish me as much as a tattooer as otherwise, and suggested that I try to keep up an academic connection of some kind—reviewing, writing, teaching one course. It was he who thought I might stand a chance at Roosevelt University
*
since they were so ‘militantly broadminded’—and so indeed I might.”
Steward took an upbeat tone in his next letter to Kinsey, noting on May 21, “I now have a fine and efficient new air conditioner installed in my apartment, and I look forward to Friday, the last day of school for me. With all adjustments now perfectly made, I can’t for the life of me understand how I endured the restrictions of a Catholic teaching career for as long as I did.”
By the end of the school term, Steward had not only reconciled himself to his departure, but also realized that he owed his adoring students at least a brief explanation of his decision to quit teaching. He delivered a farewell lecture to his last class at DePaul on Friday, May 25, 1956, and afterward described it in his journal: