Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (40 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
The highlight of Steward’s lonely Wisconsin winter was sex with a Milwaukee police officer in full uniform—Jim Brashin, “a tall handsome young man, rather slender, for whom every attractive police uniform in the world seemed to have been designed.” Steward later wrote that “I tattooed him…That uniform of his which he wore so jauntily…made me foolish enough to spend a considerable amount on Jim-baby.” Steward had paid sex with Brashin seven times; during one of their get-togethers, Steward also painted his portrait, for he had recently taken up oil painting. During this time he painted surprisingly successful oil portraits of Johnny Reyes and Dom Orejudos as well.
*
Still, by early 1964 Steward had resolved to leave the Midwest, for he had come to hate the extreme cold of the long Midwestern winter, and nearly everyone he had ever cared about there was gone. The Wilcoxes, Steward’s last remaining close friends, had left Chicago for North Carolina after Esther was violently attacked and repeatedly raped while her husband was asleep in the next room. During his own last lonely months in Chicago, Steward found his most sympathetic friend in Paul Gebhard, the Indiana University professor of anthropology who had become director of the Institute for Sex Research in the years after Kinsey’s death. Responding immediately to Steward’s news that he would probably not be moving to Paris, Gebhard reassured him,
I’m glad you are going to be around [in the USA] for reasons of science as well as of friendship. Someday we’ve got to get beyond our present superficial knowledge of S/M. When we attempt this research, articulate people with insight are going to be invaluable. Which reminds me of a sad fact of which you may already be aware: Mike Miksche has been institutionalized again. I hear this time it is an unmistakable psychosis and not just an artistic revolt from reality.
A week later, perhaps prompted by news of Miksche’s breakdown, Steward presented Gebhard with a new idea: he would become a psychotherapist. “As you may know,” he wrote, “the law is very lax in Illinois: there are 95 of these people listed in the yellow pages in Chicago, ranging from the Hypnotism Institute to Bishop Lulu C. Trent (with an address in the heart of the negro district) who gives Spiritual Advice in All Walks of Life. For the past 25 years I have read practically everything in psychology and medicine, it being a great hobby of mine [and] when work and pleasure coincide (as they did in tattoodling), a person is very lucky indeed.” Gebhard accordingly made inquiries about graduate programs on Steward’s behalf at Indiana University, and encouraged him to think that psychotherapy might be a great new career: “Somehow I share the feeling that you would make an effective, if off beat therapist,” he wrote Steward. “You’ve got a nice blend of insight, blarney, sensitivity, and con man as well as enough common sense to counteract psychological or psychiatric dogma.”
•
While Steward inquired into graduate programs in psychology and pondered his next career move, he received a telephone call from a nineteen-year-old blue-collar worker named Danny Schmidt. Schmidt had heard from a benchmate in the factory where he worked that Steward often hired hustlers—and so in the interest of earning a little extra cash, he had taken down Steward’s name, number, and home address. It was in this way that he initiated Steward’s most significant late-life intimate relationship—one that would last, on and off, for nearly a decade.
Apart from being physically attracted to this burly young factory worker turned amateur hustler, Steward was fascinated to discover that Schmidt was a triplet with one brother who was heterosexual and another who was homosexual. Steward was moved, as well, by Schmidt’s life story, for his mother had consigned Danny and his two brothers to the infamous Boys Town orphanage for delinquent youth, “from which [Danny had] escaped about twenty times in two years.” Quite apart from being sympathetic to Danny’s difficult upbringing, Steward was fascinated by his triplet identity: “I wondered if he and his two brothers shared one soul among three…They claimed to get ‘flashes’ of intuitive knowledge from each other, no matter how widely separated.” Steward would have sex with Schmidt twenty-eight times as trade (at five dollars per encounter) between the day of their first meeting and Steward’s departure from Chicago,
*
and would see him again (regularly) during the year of 1966, and again (after Schmidt’s marriage had ended) from 1970 to 1972. Under the name of Ward Stames, Steward would write two stories about his relationship with Schmidt—the first describing the young man’s introduction to the world of hustling, and the second concerning Schmidt’s theft of money from him.
*
The tenderness he felt for Schmidt combined elements of both a father-son relationship and a teacher-student relationship despite the fact that it was primarily a sex-for-money arrangement. Steward’s feelings for Schmidt were significant enough that he preserved sheet after sheet of Schmidt’s awkward handwritten free verse among his papers, most of it simply describing his daily emotional ups and downs in the crudest of terms. Steward seems to have accepted these clumsy offerings without comment or criticism, and likewise to have been quietly grateful to Schmidt for his ongoing physical presence, despite the troubled young man’s many shortcomings, inconsistencies, and betrayals.
Having shut down the Milwaukee tattooing operation in the spring, Steward spent the better part of his summer deciding where to move. Inspiration came to him, oddly enough, through
Life
, which published an article entitled “Homosexuality in America” in its June 26, 1964, issue.
*
The article expressed a number of grotesque, derogatory, and pathologizing views about both homosexuals and homosexual activity; Paul Gebhard, speaking as head of the Institute for Sex Research, was one of the few sources included in the article whose words about homosexuality were balanced and reasonable. An entirely different message, however, had been communicated to readers through the story’s many photographs, which included a stunningly provocative two-page photo spread of the smoky interior of San Francisco’s Tool Box leather bar. This powerful chiaroscuro image had been meant, like the article itself, to illustrate the depravity of contemporary homosexual life; but paradoxically it had instead suggested to interested men across the nation that a darkly alluring leather scene was vitally alive in the San Francisco Bay area—and it is today thought to have prompted would-be leathermen from all parts of the country to make a beeline for the historically liberal city.
*
By 1964, a distinct and recognizable leather community had established itself both in the Tenderloin and in the South of Market Street area. The look and feel of this popular new leather culture was probably best described by Robert Opel in an elegaic article on the Tool Box for
Drummer
magazine:
On Saturday nights the bikes would be parked along the street for a whole block, lined up one against the next, a row of chrome and steel gleaming in the moonlight. The strains of “Stand by Your Man” filtered out from the jukebox…It was the only leather bar in a city named after a dude who talked to the birds, down there South of Market among the warehouses, the trucks and the loading platforms, an island apart from the social machinations of the rest of the city…The place smelled of sweat and leather and grease and beer; smoke hung in tattered patches licking the ceiling.
While Steward had misgivings about the “institutionalization” of leather culture, he was nonetheless intrigued by the San Francisco scene described in the article and its photographs. Moreover, since it was a shipping port as well as a naval center, San Francisco seemed to him a very good place to relocate as a tattooist. The city also promised him many new sexual contacts, for San Francisco was not only a booming youth center, but also had a well-established tradition of sex for pay that dated back at least as far as the 1849 Gold Rush. In an unpublished memoir Steward wrote of imagining himself comfortably established there in “a little shop right next to…the Embarcadero YMCA,” and decided that after a brief Christmas visit to Alice Toklas, he would travel there “to case the area with regard to opening another tattoo joynt, and also to find a place to live.”
•
En route from Paris to San Francisco, Steward spent a few days in New York, and there met a Bleecker Street bookseller named Howard Frisch. Steward was at that moment considering self-publishing his
Eos/Amigo
short stories in Denmark, but Frisch, who had read and enjoyed the Phil Andros stories in
Amigo
, suggested that he meet instead with H. Lynn Womack of Guild Press to see about publishing them in the United States.
Ten years younger than Steward, Womack was the publisher, distributor, and editor of the Guild Press and its affiliated enterprises, which at that moment included the Guild Book Service, the Grecian Guild, the Potomac News Company, and Village Books and Press—all of which published or distributed homoerotic work of various kinds.
*
Womack had a terrible business reputation, but he was nonetheless a commercial dynamo: he organized and ran a large pen-pal service; published overtly sexual porn paperbacks and hardcovers; and maintained an effective distribution network for homosexual and homoerotic titles in bookstores throughout the United States. Most important, his battle against the censoring of physique magazines had resulted in the groundbreaking Supreme Court decision of
MANual Enterprises v. J. Edward Day
in 1962, which had established the legality of publishing and distributing such magazines in the United States.
Steward flew to New York in March to discuss the story collection with Womack, who turned out to be a heavyset Caucasian albino from a tenant-farming family in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. Steward was mildly horrified by his appearance and his table manners, but their lunch meeting was nonetheless productive, for Womack wanted to publish Steward, and Steward wanted to be published.
After Frisch suggested to Womack that Steward might get Wardell Pomeroy to write an introduction to the new Phil Andros story collection in order to give the book a veneer of “respectability,” Womack pressed Steward (who had decided to name the book
$TUD
) to approach Pomeroy for the endorsement. But Steward thought the idea of such a foreword abominable, and wrote as much to Frisch, insisting that “the whole basic concept of the book is vicious and degenerate…[and] if you start drawing the line [between what is and is not obscene], where are you going to stop?”
$TUD
was a story collection written in a literary style reminiscent of one of Steward’s favorite short-story writers, Saki (H. H. Munro). It was not so much outright pornography as it was a collection of literary short stories concerning various sorts of graphically detailed sexual encounters between men—some of them brutal, some of them mercenary, some of them surprisingly tender. Its melancholy epigraph came from the Greek poet Constantin Cavafy, as translated by Phil Andros:
Now and again he swears
To commence a cleaner life,
But when the night comes
With its dark promptings,
Its uncertainties and its enterprises
When the night comes
With its own dominion
Over the body, he returns, lusting and searching,
Lost, to that same morose delight.
*
Nearly all the incidents described in the book had been taken from some sort of real-life experience: either Steward’s own or that of friends. The first, “The Poison Tree,” recalled Steward’s 1935 seduction of a bullying heterosexual coworker in Glacier Park, Montana. “Arrangement in Black and White” described a long-standing relationship between a white bank president and his black manservant, and drew from Steward’s own long-standing relationships with black men. “I (Cupid) and the Gangster” told the story of George Reginato. “Mirror, Mirror” contained Steward’s recollections of George Platt Lynes and the New York scene. “H Squared” was based on his friend Robert Dahm, who had been sent to the Raiford penitentiary for having sex with an underage adolescent.
*
“Once in a Blue Moon” described Phil Andros’s conversion of a country boy (based on Danny Schmidt) into a hustler—a project Phil undertakes because he cannot bear the purity of the love the boy offers him. “A Collar for Achilles,” meanwhile, was based on Steward’s combined fascination and disgust with the bodybuilder Ralph Steiner.
Two of the strongest stories directly addressed interracial sexual domination, and were based on Steward’s extensive experiences with Paul Jefferson and Bill Payson. “Ace in the Hole” set Phil Andros’s love affair with a black man, Ace Hardesty, against the backdrop of Texas racism and the Kennedy assassination (the two men share a Dallas boardinghouse with Lee Harvey Oswald). The follow-up story, “Two-Bit Whore,” recounted the end of the same affair in Chicago, and drew on Steward’s experience of being gang-raped by a group of black thugs in 1946.
The final story in the collection was “The Blacks and Mr. Bennett,” which Steward had retitled “Sea Change.” Bennett, having become the sex slave of a black Muslim named Adam X, ultimately decides to “transform” himself into a black man by taking a combination of 8-methoxypsoralen tablets and sitting for long periods under a sunlamp.
*
Steward probably got the idea for the story from George Platt Lynes, for Lynes’s friend and model Carlos Maclendon had once put himself through a similar transformation in order to perform as a dancer in all-black revues.
*