Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (39 page)

Steward was hardly a joiner, though, and as leather had evolved into a social movement during the late 1950s,
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he had assiduously avoided its gatherings, remaining skeptical not only of its emerging rites and rituals, but also of the masculinity of its adherents. To the end of his life Steward would maintain that it was impossible to institutionalize a sexual practice that was, to his mind, based on the propositioning of rough, dangerous, potentially violent working-class or criminal-class men. This pursuit and seduction of an authentically masculine, primarily heterosexual, and barely civilized ideal was, to Steward’s mind, essentially a solitary practice, and not one that any homosexual man could possibly engage in simply by having sex with another homosexual. To him, the new homosexual leather crowd at Renslow’s Gold Coast bar was no more than a bunch of “Pussies in Boots.” As he observed about the leather scene in
Der Kreis
:

Steward’s skepticism of the leather movement (and his underlying conviction that homosexual males could never be authentically masculine) would later find confirmation in a friendship he developed with an experienced Colorado leatherman who first stopped into the tattoo parlor in April 1963. Jim Kane “came in wearing black pants and shirt, a long red necktie and a red beret, and his birdlike inflections were a marvel to hear,” Steward later noted, adding that this extraordinary man would eventually “develop a reputation for being the biggest S[adist] in San Francisco—or at any rate, one of the most accomplished, with an interesting ‘playroom’ full of daintie devices.”

Nearly twenty years younger than Steward, Jim Kane was in fact an ordained Catholic priest who had spent most of his professional years as the editor of a diocesan newspaper in Boulder, Colorado, even as he maintained a wildly active sex life. By the mid-1960s S/M was so significant a part of his sexual practice that in 1968 he would cofound the Rocky Mountaineers Motorcycle Club, an S/M sex club for men who had sex with men.
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By the early 1970s, Kane would leave Colorado for San Francisco. There, without ever leaving the priesthood, he would establish himself as a central and founding member of the Society of Janus, the nation’s leading BDSM group.
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Steward was both fascinated and appalled by Kane, for Steward himself had once been a Catholic, and since leaving the church he had spent nearly twenty years working for various Catholic academic institutions. He had met many a homosexual priest during that time, but never before had he met one so unabashed about his dedication to grandly theatrical homosexual BDSM sex. Steward repeatedly marveled at the outrageous and entirely unapologetic hypocrisy of this small, birdlike, leather-clad, motorcycle-riding “mad priest” who invested his domineering sexual identity with all the pomp and ceremony of a priest officiating at high mass. “How he settles his problems I’ll never know,” Steward observed on Kane’s card in the Stud File, which also detailed Steward’s thirty-five sexual encounters with Kane between 1963 and 1971, including a three-way with a bricklayer and a four-way with two black male army nurses.

Steward’s skepticism about the birdlike Kane’s self-proclaimed “master” status, however, spoke to his larger skepticism about the codified and ritualized forms of sexual activity that were just then emerging in the new leather subculture. These ritualized practices (which included various protocols for sexual and social encounters between leathermen both in public and private) were very different from the unscripted street pickups of thugs and ruffians that Steward and so many others of his generation had pursued in the barrooms and backstreets of the 1930s and ’40s. To Steward, this new “leather” way of negotiating a sexual encounter (essentially, going out to a leather bar dressed as either “master” or “slave” in search of a fellow homosexual pickup open to sexual role play) seemed entirely scripted and inauthentic. Writing to Paul Gebhard about Kane in response to a sex-research questionnaire about the changing sexual roles enacted by homosexual men during the course of their lives, Steward later observed,

Faced with these new developments in the American sexual underground, Steward felt more than ever that the homosexual underworld in which he had lived so adventurously over the past three decades was undergoing a radical change, and that as a result of this change, it was becoming less and less his own. His response would be to immerse himself ever more deeply in the world of his imagination, and in so doing to devote himself, as never before, to the writing of fiction.

In 1963, faced with yet another sexually suggestive story by Steward he could not possibly publish in
Der Kreis
, Rudolph Burckhardt amiably suggested that Steward try sending it to Knud Rame, a Danish bookseller who had just started a homophile publication more daring in its editorial policies. Since 1952 Rame had contributed to the Scandinavian homophile publication
Vennen
(“The Friend”); now, under the pseudonym Kim Kent, he had founded the Danish-language magazine
Eos
^*
and a related publication,
Amigo
(which featured similar content in German and English).
^*
Steward’s first submission to
Eos
, “The Sergeant with the Rose Tattoo,” received a cash prize in the magazine’s short story contest,
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and his subsequent story, “The Blacks and Mr. Bennett,” proved even more popular. As he wrote Paul Gebhard, “[It] got lots of letters, about 200, from commentators in Yurp, + many calls for sequels, so one is comin’ up.” This erotic fantasy of a black man dominating a white man proved so compelling to German and Scandinavian readers that, in Steward’s words, “Phil Andros [the writer
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] was thus ‘established,’ and the readers clamored for a sequel, and I went on writing.”
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Having established himself under the pseudonym of Phil Andros, Steward began to develop a character by the same name: an “intelligent widely-read and sophisticated hustler [who would] appear as the narrator ‘I’ in stories which were also signed with his name as the author.” In adopting this narrative technique, he was in effect conjuring an ideal self: a ruggedly handsome young man of extraordinary potency and endowment who also happened to have a heart, a brain, and a very well developed sense of the absurd. Steward had once shared his passion for hard-boiled detective fiction with Gertrude Stein; now, like Raymond C handler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Sam Steward’s Phil Andros would describe his erotic adventures in the American underworld with a mixture of humor and cynicism, employing his own very particular use of street vernacular for comic effect. But in his disaffected and sexually ambiguous wanderings across the American landscape (in the first Phil Andros novels, Phil describes himself as bisexual, and will only admit to having sex with men for the money; later in the series he recognizes and embraces his homosexual preference), Phil Andros would also resemble two other narrators: Sal Paradise, the young wanderer of Jack Kerouac’s 1957
On the Road
; and “youngman,” the unnamed hustler-narrator of John Rechy’s 1963
City of Night
.

Steward published his first story featuring Phil Andros in
Amigo
in August 1963.
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The date is telling, for he later wrote of having been both impressed and disturbed by Rechy’s
City of Night
, which had explored the world of homosexual hustling through the eyes of a hustler. It had done so in a hip, darkly moody way that had appealed to heterosexual as well as homosexual readers, and so became an immediate bestseller—but its message was hardly prohomosexual, for Rechy was coy about the “true” sexuality of his hustler-protagonist, and disparaged the majority of “youngman” ’s homosexual patrons, drawing them instead as pathetic, predatory grotesques.

Phil Andros took a much less angst-ridden approach to hustling, and Steward, for his part, portrayed the men on both sides of the hustling equation as basically friendly, attractive, and human characters simply seeking sexual release. Defending his decision to make Phil a hustler (which was not, after all, the most socially affirmative of homosexual role models), he later noted,

In time Phil Andros would express his sexual interest in other males quite openly. In the early stories, however, he simply describes himself as a stud who trades sex for pay. A drifter, he has only one great worry in life: age, and with it the eventual loss of his sexual appeal—and income.

Though bemused by the chilly ambivalence of
City of Night
, Steward had nonetheless been delighted to see John Rechy’s novel published, and when its twenty-nine-year-old author wrote to him seeking a review in
Der Kreis
in July, Steward had a cordial exchange of letters with him. Rechy wrote Steward that he had actually found his way to the Phil Sparrow Tattoo Joynt in September of 1961, and had intended to introduce himself—but on finding Steward occupied with a client, he’d contented himself with simply looking through the window.

In the summer of 1963, Steward decided to shut down the Tattoo Joynt, for Illinois had recently outlawed the tattooing of all those under the age of twenty-one, and the majority of his clientele had always consisted of these younger men. As he later noted, “Every year there were rumors about the Illinois legislature changing the age limit for tattooing…New York had closed its tattoo shops in October, 1961, because of an outbreak of hepatitis,
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although the blame [for that outbreak] was never flatly put on the tattoo artists…And [then] the winds of change began to be felt in Illinois, with the result that in 1963 a law was passed forbidding the tattooing of anyone under twenty-one.” Before locking the door to the Tattoo Joynt forever, Steward had sex there with a young black boot sailor from Great Lakes. He was not only the last person Steward ever had sex with in the shop, but also the first boot sailor Steward had had sex with at his place of business since the Kenny Kothmann affair a decade earlier.

With the shop closed, Steward found himself at loose ends. Since Emmy Curtis’s estate was still being settled and he could not yet leave Chicago, he provisionally agreed to co-rent a small storefront shop in Milwaukee with Chuck Renslow, doing so on a month-to-month basis. He did so primarily to work with Renslow’s “slave” Cliff Raven. Steward and Raven would go up there only on weekends, though, for the Milwaukee business consisted almost exclusively of sailors coming up from the Great Lakes training station on their weekend liberty passes.

Steward’s success as Phil Andros in Denmark now led him to raid his earlier unpublished erotic writings for material he could expand and use in his new fiction. He wrote Wardell Pomeroy,

The weekly commute from Chicago to Milwaukee gave Steward the opportunity to write his stories without interruption. By Steward’s estimation, most of the first twenty-five Phil Andros stories were composed, or begun, on the electric North Shore train between Chicago and Milwaukee; for most of 1963–64 he sent Kim Kent a new Phil Andros story each month.

•

The Milwaukee tattoo parlor was a former barbershop in a hotel on Third Street, just a few blocks from Amund Dietzel’s Tattooing Studio. The close proximity created “a somewhat delicate situation with the Old Master Dietzel,” but after a little while Dietzel seemed not to mind: in Steward’s words, “his reputation was firmly established, and all Cliff and I got was the overflow of sailors…there seemed to be enough to put money in everyone’s pockets.”

An unknown photographer, possibly Cliff Raven’s artist-lover Chuck Arnett, took a series of black-and-white photographs of the Milwaukee tattoo parlor that are today the most thorough documentation of Steward’s work with (and upon) the boot sailors of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. Dom Orejudos had meanwhile revised and improved the original series of sexually suggestive placards of tattooed men Steward had made for the window of his State Street Tattoo Joynt, and Orejudos’s new, hypermasculine versions established an even more outrageous butch-erotic ambiance for the Milwaukee shop. It was Cliff Raven’s company that delighted Steward most about the Milwaukee gig, however, for Raven had by now developed into a formidably talented tattoo artist as well as a good friend and occasional sex partner.

Early in the fall of 1963, Steward decided to travel abroad while the weather was still warm—first to see Knud Rame in Copenhagen, then to visit Alice Toklas in Paris. “Your letter [about closing the tattoo parlor] upset me—to have to give up your work shocked me,” she had written him from the bed to which she was now mostly confined. “Wouldn’t Paris [be as good a place to work] as Chicago? You will understand my prejudiced point of view.”

Much of Steward’s gossip with Toklas during his autumn visit to her centered on Francis Rose, who had fallen on hard times since the international scandal surrounding the death of Lionel “Buster” Crabb. After being released from the mental hospital at Virginia Water, Rose had returned briefly to Paris but only to sell his tiny apartment. He subsequently found a cheap flat in a decrepit quarter of the English resort town of Brighton, and there became increasingly reliant upon a number of old friends, most notably Cecil Beaton, for handouts of used clothing and money. “He is a man who causes such extraordinary violence around him,” Beaton wrote despairingly of Rose in his diary. “His life story is a long succession of suicides, killings, fatal accidents. In his wake he brings chaos.”

Frederica Rose was kinder. “In England…his art was still appreciated by a small cluster of friends,” she wrote many years after granting him the divorce and annulment that enabled him to marry another woman who had promised to support him.
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“In all these changing and often unhappy circumstances, Francis was sustained, and sometimes driven, by an irrepressible zest for living…eccentric and capricious as he became…[He] was, surprisingly, a deeply serious person.”

Though he still considered painting his principal vocation, Rose had worked on a sensational memoir of his early life during the late 1950s in the hope that it might bring in some sorely needed cash. The result was
Saying Life
, an autobiography so wildly improbable and so laughably self-contradictory that it was immediately dismissed by many as the work of a hopelessly eccentric fantasist.
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Though full of exaggerations, fabrications, and outright lies,
Saying Life
is a beguiling work of semifiction in the form of a celebrity memoir—one that in hindsight seems closely related to the writings of fellow Surrealists such as Dalí and Cocteau, for whom dreams and fantasies were just as “real” as everyday experience. The most bizarre aspect of the memoir—and certainly the most inflammatory—is Rose’s constant denial of homosexual interest or activity, a denial that is repeatedly betrayed by the focus and interests of his narrative. Aware that he could not possibly publish a true account of his already quite notorious sex life, Rose apparently chose to play with a basic assumption of the memoir form: namely, that it be written in earnest. Instead he created a narrative that, in the best Wildean manner, delighted in its own hypocrisy, and happily chronicled things that had never happened and couldn’t possibly have happened, and yet made sensationally entertaining reading. In doing so, he created what might be today considered a high-style metamemoir, one alternately earnest and not earnest, true and not true, entirely revealing and yet not revealing at all. It was, in its own way, a brilliant response to the sexually hypocritical culture in which he lived.

Alice Toklas, however, was not the least bit amused by it, and fumed about Rose’s “endless lies” in a letter to Princess Dilkusha de Rohan. Sorry as she may have been to discover Gertrude Stein and herself included (and ridiculed) in the memoir, she nonetheless agreed to look at Rose’s next project, a brief essay entitled “Gertrude Stein and Painting,” doing so largely out of loyalty to the memory of Stein—who had after all adored both Rose and his painting. Around this same time, Rose also wrote several letters to Steward in which he complained of being in poor health, and confided that the memoir had proved a financial disaster. He begged Steward to write his “son” Louis (no longer Luis but Louis, he was living far from Rose in New York) to ask him for money on Rose’s behalf. Steward did so. And then, for a while, the two old friends once again fell out of contact.

•

Despite receiving encouragement from Jacques Delarue, Steward returned from his November visit to Europe deeply discouraged about setting up a tattoo parlor in Paris. He laid out his problems to Paul Gebhard: “The restrictions for me as a foreigner, the terrifically high
bail
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to pay to buy the ‘four walls,’ the difficulties of licensing—oh well, I just gave it up. Besides, I can’t handle the argot well enough to be able to control my clientele completely, and that’s necessary. So it’s back to Milwaukee.”