Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (42 page)

During that first meeting, Steward showed Hardy a recently published book on Japanese tattooing,
Irezumi
, written by the American Donald Richie and featuring Ichiro Morita’s dramatic black-and-white photos of large-scale tattoos done in the classical Japanese style. “Phil said, ‘the only real art tattooing in the world is done by the Japanese,’” Hardy later recalled. “I was floored [by what Phil showed me, and] my immediate thought was, if tattoos can look like this, I want to do them.” Hardy got a Phil Sparrow tattoo that day—a rose—and from then on visited Steward as often as possible. He designed a few small pieces for himself that he then had Steward apply, just as Steward had once brought his pieces to Amund Dietzel.

“I was fascinated with his character,” Hardy later wrote of their time together in the shop. “He told me of his background in academia, work in Chicago, and the move to California. He talked of being a writer…[I] knew Phil was gay but he was in the closet with most people…[so I] discreetly played along.” After they had come to know each other as friends, Hardy asked Steward to teach him to be a tattoo artist. But “Phil firmly discouraged this, speaking of the ‘deep, dark world’ of this dying art, of which I had no real understanding.” Steward also pointed out to Hardy that he had a wife and infant son to support, and so would probably do better by staying in graduate school and becoming an art teacher. “[His] essential message was that I was much too nice (square) to get mixed up in the strange subculture…At any rate, I persisted with him…My intention was to break tattooing into a whole new creative world [but he told me] that the mainstream tattoo clientele was not sophisticated enough to support any dramatic creativity…Nevertheless, he…advised me about purchasing a rudimentary set of equipment [and] showed me about mixing colors…soldering needle assemblies, cutting acetate stencils to transfer designs to skin, and a variety of other technical things. Everything about tattooing was [at that time] arcane, secretive, and jealously guarded by ‘those in the know.’”

Hardy applied his first tattoo (to his own leg, a tradition among beginning tattooers) at the Anchor Tattoo Shop in early 1967, with Steward watching and giving pointers as he did so. “My apprenticeship with Phil was by no means formal or lengthy,” Hardy later observed, “[but] I continued to show Phil the work I was doing [for years], both on skin and paper, [and] visit[ed] him frequently.” Through him, Hardy also came to know and befriend Cliff Raven, who within a short while would relocate to California and ultimately set up a tattooing studio on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. “Cliff was five years older [than me, but Phil] instilled an appreciation for Japanese work in both of us, and that is the platform that we elaborated on and made our marks with in our early careers,” Hardy later explained. “Both of us…were book hounds, and really responded to Phil’s erudition and eloquence.” Steward agreed with this assessment, at one point noting that under his guidance both Hardy and Raven had developed into extremely careful workmen who had distinguished themselves through their thin and tightly controlled outlines, and also through utilizing greater varieties of pigments and colors than other American tattoo artists. “Both can insert their brilliant pigments into the skin without scarring; and both can make sure that the colors are laid in properly so that they remain,” Steward observed. “Hardy excels in Oriental designs, whereas Raven succeeds in outré originality.”

•

During the period that Steward was mentoring Hardy down at the tattoo shop, he received a letter from Paul Gebhard at the Institute for Sex Research inviting him to respond to a detailed questionnaire about the major life passages experienced by homosexuals. Steward did so with pleasure. He felt that documenting the texture and quality of the every day lives of homosexual men and women was a vitally important undertaking, particularly given the historic scarcity of such information. He sent back a long response to Gebhard describing his own various life passages, a document remarkable for its clarity, comprehensiveness, and concision.

Describing his college and teaching days, Steward noted in his response to the questionnaire that as a young academic “you wore the mask and went to dull parties, and drank yourself silly because of the boredom, unless there happened to be a good-looking husband or bachelor in the crowd…but even so, it was a double life.” To Steward’s mind, the greatest change in his life had come, predictably enough, when he “took up tattoodling and said farewell to Academe,” for with that change his life had become “almost entirely—if not entirely—devoted to the h element.” In this he felt different from the majority of homosexuals of his generation, who had necessarily depended upon “their ‘obliquity’ in order to keep their jobs…[for] economics plays a large part [in the way our lives take shape].”

Even so, in his radical break from academe Steward did not feel entirely alone. “I have known many [homosexuals] who—reaching a certain stage in life, largely in their thirties, just say wotthehell and let [their homosexuality] be known to anyone who cares to know or is interested—and to hell with the job. It is about this time that the most curious phenomenon of ‘self-destruction’ arises; people begin to drift from job to job, or make a radical change as I did with tattoodling, or move to the ‘death-wish’ city of San Francisco, or drink themselves to death, or in some way try to destroy themselves.”

Some of them, Steward thought, managed to hold on to their closeted identities. “Yet even these—like that Jenkins
^*
in Washington—have their moments of breakthrough…[I think]
everyone
would break loose in his social life, if he did not have to maintain it because of the necessities of his job.” And yet, paradoxically, Steward felt that he, too, had remained constrained, even after opting out of conventional society: “During most of my life…as far as the social side is concerned (and even in tattoodling) I’ve had to pretend to be something which I wasn’t. I believe this may be true of all [homosexuals] except a few ‘daring’ souls who flaunt their deviation from the majority ‘norm.’”

Steward continued to be remarkably candid about his own sexual nature:

Steward went on to explore the trauma of illness as another significant “dividing point” in every homosexual life, noting Dom Orejudos’s hepatitis as an example. He then concluded,

In the personal letter to Gebhard that accompanied the completed questionnaire, Steward shared his most recent bad news from the worlds of tattooing and publishing. His business at the Anchor was a mere 15 percent of what he had once enjoyed in Chicago, he wrote; in some ways it was hardly a business at all. Grove Press, meanwhile, had held on to Steward’s tattooing manuscript for eight months, only to send it back with a letter of rejection. Worst of all, Womack had delayed releasing
$TUD
for more than a year, for he had been held up by “indictments for obscenity, Supreme Court decisions, and running out of money.” Steward’s conclusion: “Shit on this publishing business.”

The situation with Womack and Guild Press was indeed about as bad as a book-publishing experience can be. Steward had expected
$TUD
would be published and available just a few months after his arrival in Berkeley, but Womack’s legal troubles were so severe that he had retreated into a psychiatric ward at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., in order to avoid his creditors. From his improvised office in the hospital Womack could continue to run his business without restriction, but he had no money, and so
$TUD
was stuck in the warehouse without a binding. For the next three years Womack would evade all communication with Steward, leaving Steward unable to buy back the rights to his manuscript and incapable of publishing it elsewhere. Had the book been published in a timely manner, it might well have been recognized as a breakthrough in erotic publishing. But it had not been, and it would not be.

•

Steward spent Christmas of 1966 making his seventeenth and final visit to Alice Toklas in Paris, coming to her at her little apartment at 16 Rue de la Convention. “She was then completely bedridden,” Steward noted, “eighty nine and in very poor health.” The melancholy he felt at saying his final goodbye to her was intensified by a letter he received from Paul Gebhard upon his return, noting that
Querelle de Brest
was finally to be published in English by Grove Press, and suggesting that Steward volunteer them the excellent translation he had deposited at the Kinsey Archive more than a decade earlier. Steward responded by noting that he had long since volunteered Grove his translation of
Querelle
but his letter (and its offer) had been completely ignored.

Though the Oakland tattoo business remained slow, a number of noteworthy individuals stopped in to visit with Steward upon hearing he had opened the shop. Chuck Arnett, deemed by some to be “the Toulouse-Lautrec of San Francisco gay life,” came by to have a large butterfly tattooed upon his chest, and later returned with his friend and lover Bill Tellman, who recalled Steward quoting Menander in Greek to them, and translating the quotation as “a friend is a second self.”
^*
Steward also met the artist Mike McCaffee, whose “leather David,” a copy of the famed Michelangelo statue clad in leather, had recently become an object of widespread kitsch fascination. (Steward himself bought one.) The British expatriate poet and tattooed leatherman Thom Gunn also popped in, having first met Steward in a San Francisco leather bar, as did the controversial French diplomat and author Roger Peyrefitte, who granted Steward the spontaneous honor of inscribing all Steward’s copies of his many books.

In truth, Steward had become much more involved with the local civic and cultural scene during the past year, for his loneliness after moving to California had been extreme, and the lack of business at the tattoo parlor had forced him back out into the world. As a result, he had started volunteering for Vanguard, an outreach organization for hustlers based in and around the ultraliberal Glide Methodist Church in San Francisco—doing so mostly to meet some new hustlers, for his list of sexual contacts (paid and otherwise) had diminished greatly since leaving Chicago, and he no longer had access to dependable hustlers of quality through Chuck Renslow. To meet his immediate sexual needs, he had flown Johnny Reyes out from Chicago for a number of paid visits; hosted Bill Tregoz on a visit from New York; and even given Danny Schmidt a place to stay while he was looking for a job in the Bay Area. But by his third year in Berkeley, Steward had discovered one very talented and extraordinarily good-looking hustler he would rely upon almost exclusively for the next several years and who later took the porn name of Johnny Hardin. When the two first met, Hardin apparently had a drug problem; his Stud File card described him as a “dope drug theft bad boy.” By 1972 he would start appearing regularly in both heterosexual and homosexual adult films and magazines
^*
as well as simultaneously working as a fashion model for the Ford agency. Between late 1966 and 1970 Steward had sex with him 155 times—approximately once a week for three years.

In January 1966, much to Steward’s delight, the police raided Rens low’s Kris Studio again, and this time seized a large quantity of homoerotic photography and pornographic printed materials—along with three shotguns, a hunting knife, and some whips. Renslow, his favorite “slave,” Patrick Ryan, and two other young men were arrested, but Cliff Raven managed to escape through a back door. After giving Paul Gebhard a number of particularly delicious details about the raid (culled both from the newspapers and from conversations with Raven) and then describing Renslow’s increasingly complicated life at the Chicago “slave compound,” Steward concluded, “I am dying to write that story, but like the stuff of Mabel Dodge
^*
and others, it c[oul]d n[e]v[e]r appear in print until 50 yrs posthumous, I reckon.” When Gebhard responded by asking Steward about his current relationship to the Renslow “family,” Steward wrote back, “One of the major reasons I left Chicago was that…they rejected me…But iffn you want an earful about that screwy household, believe me I can give it to you, with figures and dates.”
^*

In any event, Steward had greater concerns than Renslow, for Alice Toklas had finally died in early March. She had spent several years as a bedridden and barely conscious invalid, and while Steward had been well aware that her death was imminent, the news of it had nonetheless sent him into another deep depression. “It upset me a great deal,” he wrote Gebhard, “but then she’d secretly wanted it for ‘all these empty years’ since Gertrude died, and I hope it was a happy meeting.” Indeed, Steward had been saying his good-byes to Toklas since the late 1950s, and on his last visit to her in Paris—during which he simply sat by her bedside while she slipped in and out of consciousness—he had realized that her life was essentially over.