Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (38 page)

The handout read:

WHAT THIS PARTICULAR M LIKES

1. Please remember: he is your absolute slave.
   
2. Make him undress you.
   
3. Order him to take off your shoes and socks and kiss and lick your feet.
   
4. Make him suck your balls.
   
5. Piss in his mouth (a little, not too much; make him swallow it by holding your hand over his mouth and pinching his nose shut).
   
6. Make him swallow your come. (He may try to spit it out.)
   
7. Put dog collar on him. Pull him by leash.
   
8. It is not necessary YOU come every time. Make him jerk off in front of you.
   
9. Spit in his face.
   
10. Beat him in the face with your hard cock. Straddle his chest.
    
11. Talk mean and nasty to him. Call him dirty cocksucker.
    
12. Wear dirty socks. Cram them in his mouth.
    
13. Give him a few whacks on the ass with your belt. Or use whip if one present.
    
14. Pinch his tits, or other tender spots.
    
15. Make him lie on floor, and piss some on him.
    
16. Do NOT ask him to rim you (tongue in ass). Many M’s are afraid of getting hepatitis this way or yellow jaundice.
    
17. Make him lick your armpits, the sweatier the better.
    
18. If you want to, make him give you a tongue-bath all over, or do whatever gives you pleasure.
    
19. In general, be as hard on him as you want to be.
    
20. Remember: he is your ABSOLUTE slave!
    

 

Steward was surely aware of both the irony and the pathos of this grim little document; yet rather than destroy it, he apparently decided to include it among his papers, and thus to make it a part of his sexual history.

As Steward was having these various S/M experiences, he decided to change direction in his fiction writing. Rather than write to Burckhardt’s specifications, he now decided to write stories about sex that would be true to his own experience—even if it meant the stories would never be published by
Der Kreis
. His life was, after all, pornographic: Why not write pornography? He told Renslow of the decision, expecting to be congratulated; but instead, Renslow merely scoffed, telling him “you’re too fuckin’ old to write.” These words, Steward later wrote, had an immediate and galvanizing effect:

•

Reyes, meanwhile, had begun pressuring Steward to pay him more money, for he wanted a car and was desperate to make a down payment. While Steward initially agreed to help him with it, he remained conflicted about his ongoing sexual patronage of one so young. In a journal entry, he noted:

Realizing his involvement with Reyes was truly wrong, Steward attempted to bring it to a conclusion by paying off all Reyes’s debts—a grand total of $252—in what he described as an “existentialist, ‘forever’ gesture.” But he then had second thoughts, fearing that in releasing Reyes from his employment he might place the young man in even greater danger.
^*
As a result, there was no break; their paid arrangement continued. It would last well into the late 1960s, long after Steward had left Chicago.

There were a few other noteworthy events that summer and fall. Upon learning that Frederik IX, king of Denmark, would be visiting Chicago, Steward wrote and invited him to the Tattoo Joynt, for the Danish monarch was well-known for his many tattoos. When the king arrived incognito, Steward recognized him immediately, but courteously pretended not to know who he was as he applied the desired design. Steward also had the pleasure that autumn of reading about himself in James Purdy’s novel
Malcolm
, noting in his journal that it “was rather hilarious…There was a very fine chapter laid in the Tattoo Palace of Professor Robinolte—a true portrait of [my] place in the [Sportland] arcade.”

In early December, Steward took Renslow and Orejudos down to Bloomington to visit the Institute for Sex Research at the invitation of Wardell Pomeroy. While there, Pomeroy gave the three men a private screening of Genet’s
Un Chant d’Amour
and the 1952 Kinsey film of Steward being dominated by Mike Miksche—the latter of which left Steward “embarrassed, with dry mouth and a fairly painful traumatic empathic reaction after all these years.” Steward also had a quietly poignant encounter with a graduate student he met at the Student Union,
^*
one who might easily have been Steward himself as a younger man:

Steward then traveled to Rome for Christmas—for as part of her newfound life as a Catholic, Alice Toklas had taken winter lodgings at Monteverde, the convent of the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood, close to the Vatican. Not wanting to go alone, Steward invited Pete Rojas and Rudolf Burckhardt to come with him. While paying for their companionship (like paying for sex) was not without its emotional complications, Steward knew that having the two along would at least make the trip less melancholy, for Rojas continued to be sexually receptive to Steward, and Burckhardt was by now his best friend.

Steward passed his first wintry afternoon in Rome by visiting the graves of Shelley and Keats at the Protestant Cemetery, during which Burckhardt snapped several photographs of him quietly meditating by Keats’s grave. On the way back to the hotel, the two men had a surprise:

Toklas had in fact been seeing many friends since her arrival: Thornton and Isabel Wilder, Bernard Faÿ, Donald Sutherland, and Virgil Thomson had all dropped by to see how she was doing. In the days that followed, Steward escorted her on a number of extremely slow-moving visits to various Catholic monuments, as a result of which Toklas later observed that Pius XII (whom she had known as a younger man in Paris) was rather like Steward, both in his interest in Huysmans
^*
and his generosity toward friends.

Toklas’s Roman winter lasted well into spring and ended in great trauma. During Toklas’s absence from Paris, Roubina Stein, the widow of Gertrude Stein’s nephew Allan, entered Toklas’s Paris apartment, inventoried the pictures there, and, finding several missing, secured a court order declaring the pictures endangered by Toklas’s absence. She subsequently had all of them removed. The eighty-three-year-old Toklas, having received no warning of the action, returned to her Paris apartment to find it stripped of all its artwork. The shock was profound; she never recovered from it.

•

On Christmas Day, Steward visited Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, and went the following day to Ostia Antica. On the twenty-seventh, he journeyed by rail to Naples and toured Pompeii in the rain. During a shared taxi ride with “about a dozen of the sleek and evil young men of Naples,” he found himself “uncomfortably wondering if I had hidden my wallet well, and feeling a good deal like Sebastian surrounded by the young men who ate him in
Suddenly Last Summer
.” By the thirtieth he was back in his hotel in Rome, where after a sordid encounter with a Bavarian hustler, he recalled feeling like the title character in Bunin’s “The Gentleman from San Francisco.” “I had a few moments of terrible revulsion after the whole experience,” Steward noted. “[It] seemed so dirty, all of it.”

Burckhardt, Rojas, and Steward then flew back to Zurich for the gala New Year’s Eve dance organized by
Der Kreis
, after which Steward said a quick good-bye to Burckhardt and flew on to Paris, where he had arranged a meeting with Julien Green, and another with Jacques Delarue, a married, heterosexual officer of the Sûreté Nationale who had published an important book on the tattoos of the Parisian underworld. Unfortunately, Steward contracted food poisoning from a dinner of steak tartare on his first night in town. After staying up all night to be sick, he staggered over the next morning for a visit with Green, who told Steward that after some unsatisfactory correspondence with the Institute for Sex Research he had decided not to give them his diary after all.
^*
“Well,” Steward wrote afterward with disappointment, “it was a noble second try.”

Steward then met Jacques Delarue for coffee at the Deux Magots. Delarue’s
Les Tatouages du “Milieu,”
^*
a study of hand-applied amateur tattooing in French prisons and among Parisian lowlife, was one of Steward’s favorite new books, not least because it featured Delarue’s own photographs of the crude “hand jobs” done by men in prison, as well as a series of line drawings of gang markings and other antisocial designs favored by Parisian street criminals. Delarue himself had carefully traced these works in order to include them in his book as illustrations. The meeting between the two tattoo aficionados was so enjoyable that they immediately arranged to meet again for lunch the next day, during which Delarue shared with Steward the most risqué photographs in his collection—a vast array of heavily tattooed penises and vaginas. “Here was an inspector of the Sûreté Nationale showing me dirty pictures!” Steward wrote delightedly in his journal. So began Steward’s last significant overseas friendship, one through which he hoped he might finally establish himself in Paris as a tattoo artist—for, faced with a life in Chicago that seemed ever more empty and bleak, he was once again dreaming, as he had twenty years earlier, of relocating permanently to France.

Even as he began exploring the possibility of opening a tattoo parlor in Paris, Steward continued experimenting with erotic narratives based on his sexual experiences that he vaguely intended for American publication. His decision to devote himself to erotic fiction during the early 1960s was based in part on the waning of the Chicago tattoo business, which left him plenty of free time to write; but also, paradoxically enough, on the waning of his sex drive. Steward had been charting his sexual decline since 1948, continually noting the steady increase in “periodicity” (or time elapsed) between “releases” (or orgasms) on a month-by-month basis. While still more sexually active than many, he felt the diminishment more deeply than most—for sex was by now not only a central and defining activity of his life, but also his preferred way of escaping the depression to which he was temperamentally inclined. Since his fantasizing about sex remained a constant, he seemed to have reached, like Casanova in the library at the Castle of Dux, that moment in life when creative reminiscence becomes the happiest possible way of engaging in the activity one has always most enjoyed. And indeed, in the coming years writing about sex would give his life new meaning, direction, and focus.

Steward wrote a number of essays for
Der Kreis
during this period, too, sending Burckhardt substantial reports on the changing American political and social scene. The most significant of these pieces, “What’s New in Sodom?,” carefully assessed the landmark legislation enacted by the Illinois state legislature in 1962 that had quietly decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults, and concluded,

Starting in January 1962, Steward took up yet another project: mentoring Cliff Ingram in the fine art of tattooing. Under his new name of Cliff Raven, Ingram would build on this early education with Steward to become the most accomplished Japanese-style tattoo artist of his generation. Steward found Ingram entirely delightful, for he was a good-looking young man brimming with enthusiasm, intelligence, good humor, and sexual mischief. His presence in the shop would prove a bright spot for Steward in an otherwise dismal winter, for Emmy Curtis, who had been ailing for years, was now sinking into senility. Steward spent the better part of his winter and spring devoting himself to her needs as a bedridden invalid. By spring she was completely unable to care for herself, and so, with great reluctance, he arranged to move her into a nursing home. Steward had been close friends with Curtis since 1938—sharing meals, seeing movies, and talking on the phone with her nearly every day. Though their sexual relationship had lasted only until 1949, and though she had frequently exasperated him with her peculiar and old-maidish ways, she was in many regards his best and most constant friend, and his gloom in watching her drift into dementia and paralysis was enormous. Some of that sorrow is reflected in a brief piece he published over the winter in
Der Kreis
:

After she died, Steward, who was coexecutor of her estate, closed up her apartment, arranged for her funeral, and oversaw the sale of her possessions. During that time Wardell Pomeroy wrote to him, “Paul [Gebhard] tells me…that you are now about ready to pull up stakes [for Paris]…Before you finally leave it would be helpful for us to secure any odds and ends, pictures, diary, calendar, observations, or you name it, before we lose you to the common market.” Steward replied that, on the contrary, he was obliged to remain in Chicago until the Curtis estate had finished probate, and added, “I must say that the reality of the projected uproot [to Paris] gives me the twiddles when I think seriously about it; I don’t know that at my age I still have enough git-up-&-go to dispose of my comfortable apartment and make the physical move [to Europe]…I keep wondering if I’d be satisfied after I got there.”

One thing, however, was certain: Steward had to make a definitive change, for he had few real friends left in Chicago, and both his tattooing business and his sex life were dwindling. Renslow and Orejudos were increasingly distant, in part because their business empire—which now included two new magazines, a bathhouse, and a bar—took up most of their time and attention. The bathhouse was particularly innovative: known as Steve’s Health Club, it looked on the outside like a fitness center and gym, and in that way became a model for a new generation of sex clubs.
^*
Meanwhile, the new bar, known as the Gold Coast, had proved an even greater success, for it was the first bar in Chicago to cater specifically and openly to men interested in leather and S/M. Steward was happy enough at Renslow’s commercial success, but he had no great interest in these new enterprises; if anything, he felt excluded from them, since as an older man he was much more comfortable paying for sex in private rather than cruising for it—and facing constant rejection—in public. Moreover, as a recovering alcoholic he was uncomfortable among drinkers and disliked spending time in bars.

He was nonetheless intrigued by Renslow’s successful transferral of the “master/slave” dynamic from bedroom to workplace—for Renslow now “owned” a goodly number of “slaves,” each of whom seemed entirely content to work for him full-time in exchange for regular sessions of psychic domination, a highly sexual communal living arrangement, and small amounts of spending money. Over the coming decades Renslow would continue to develop this “slave compound,” with new young men joining it regularly in their desire to submit themselves to a powerful, well-connected, and sexually dominant businessman.
^*
Describing this ever-changing assortment of young men as his “family,” Renslow would eventually incorporate his various bar, restaurant, health club, and publishing businesses under the tongue-in-cheek name of Renslow Family Enterprises.

While Renslow’s world had continued to expand, Steward’s by comparison had shrunk almost to nothing. In response to the various sadnesses in his personal life and the growing scarcity of his friends, he might well have reached out to new acquaintances, but he seems to have chosen not to do so. Instead he continued to cultivate the state of zenlike detachment he had described for
Der Kreis
in “Detachment: A Way of Life.” Even as he embraced this idea of detachment, however, Steward found himself in conflict with it, for his need for sexual variety and sexual activity continued to fascinate, compel, and distract him. Unwilling to give up the hunt for new experiences, he instead focused on what seemed to him a most reasonable course of action: protecting himself from emotional upset by having sex almost exclusively with hustlers. In doing so, Steward rationalized that despite his advancing age, he would still be able to satisfy his desire for sexual variety, and at the same time risk neither infatuation nor rejection, since the arrangement was “simply business.” As he later ruefully noted in his memoirs, he had reached a new moment in his sexual history:

Steward had few qualms about paying for sex; he had done so whenever the mood struck him, starting in the late 1930s. Now in late midlife, he felt very strongly that there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. To his mind, no exploitation took place in the exchange of money for sex when the parties involved were consenting adult males—particularly since the roles of hustler and customer were at that time defined in a way that was entirely to the physical, psychological, and monetary advantage of the hustler. In this well-established exchange, the hustler (who was understood to be primarily heterosexual) allowed the homosexual customer to perform oral sex on him. That was all. There was no exchange of affection, no variety, and no reciprocation. As a result, the hustler retained his heterosexual identity, asserted physical and emotional dominance over the homosexual client, and at the same time profited financially from what was to him an inconsequential (and basically pleasurable) sensation. So long as the hustler was above the age of consent, not subject to coercion, and not exposed to disease, the transaction was, to Steward’s way of thinking, beneficial for both parties—particularly since the male hustler, unlike his female counterpart, was basically invisible within the general population and, provided he was not exposed, suffered little or no lasting social stigmatization from his work.

Steward was adamant in his belief that hustlers and hustling were indispensable to the aging homosexual. After the well-known author Simon Raven profiled the world of the British hustler (or “rent boy”) with an article in
Encounter
entitled “Boys Will Be Boys,” Steward responded in
Der Kreis
with a similar survey of the American hustling scene entitled “The Bull Market in America,” a surprisingly bitter polemic asserting that American society’s abuse of the homosexual extended to its forbidding him to pay for sex with other men—which was after all necessary for older homosexual men such as Steward, who having consciously chosen solitary lives of sexual variety, needed to pay for sex in their later years if they were ever to have it at all. Since no harm was done to the hustler, Steward argued, the outlawing of male prostitution was just another senseless form of homosexual oppression. His impassioned argument went on to observe that hustling was, moreover, an ancient, worldwide practice:

Yet even as Steward cultivated his “detachment” by patronizing hustlers, he kept returning in his writing to those powerful fantasies of sexual domination and punishment that he had begun to describe (in his short story for Lynes, “The Motorcyclist”) nearly a decade earlier. He had always hoped to make that monologue the first of a series, in the style of Schnitzler’s play
Reigen
. Now, with few other projects to occupy his time, he went back to work on the series, determined to bring it to completion.

Steward’s interest in confessional narratives was long-standing—his early novel
Angels on the Bough
had moved from person to person to create a group portrait of young people centered around Ohio State University. Now, however, the technique was being used not to make gentle explorations of the heart, but rather to describe explicitly a series of violent sexual acts in which each “victim” deserves his punishment: Joe is beaten up and enslaved for soliciting a homosexual encounter; Mike is blackmailed into sexual subservience for seducing an underage youth; Steve is lynched by a black man for propositioning him. Yet the collection as a whole supports the sex researcher C. A. Tripp’s observation that the enjoyment of sadomasochistic techniques is usually limited to people who have had exceptionally strong social training “in either the be-kind-to-others direction, or the sex-is-sinful department, or both”—as Steward surely had. Naming the completed collection of monologues
Ring-Around-the-Rosy
, Steward toyed for a while with publishing it privately, then apparently sent his only copy to Wardell Pomeroy at the Institute for Sex Research, where the manuscript remained untouched for the better part of a year.

Steward’s interest in the ultramasculine paradigms featured in the manuscript—the motorcycle tough, the cop, the gang member, the truck driver, and the sailor—links the work not only to Genet’s 1947 novel
Querelle de Brest
, but also to a larger social movement that was becoming increasingly visible in the 1960s and ’70s: leather. The leather movement had started during World War II, evolving out of uniform fetishism. With his early fixation on sailors and other men in uniform, and his long-standing interest in various forms of punishment and domination, Steward had been caught up in leather long before the movement had a name.