Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (44 page)

A later friend of Brian’s, the
Drummer
editor Jack Fritscher, has noted that “for all his flamboyance, [J. Brian] was modest…a ruddy-faced, heavy-set, jolly guy with reddish-blond complexion and hair.” Fritscher felt that “Sam [Steward] and J. Brian were each globally positioned with a latitude of art that intersected the longitude of sex. Both raconteurs enjoyed dropping names as much as dropping their pants…Sam orbited his
haute
planet of
Brideshead
literary friends…[while] J. Brian’s map was more an archipelago of mattresses.”

When Steward met him, Brian was experimenting with eight-millimeter film loops, for his secret ambition was to produce and direct fully plotted, feature-length all-male films. His call-boy service and house of prostitution were staffed by the same models who appeared in his photography and film loops—and so, as with Chuck Renslow, the various J. Brian businesses fed into one another. But Brian was hardly as street-savvy as Renslow, and he was almost immediately targeted for police investigation and prosecution—in large part because, by brazenly advertising his house of male prostitution (through his magazine, his pornographic movies, and his own direct-marketing mail campaigns
^*
), he quickly made himself a target for police vice squads as far away as Chicago and New York.

Because Brian felt that his work as a male madam and pornographer was part of the larger sexual revolution just then sweeping America, he consciously chose not to conceal either his activities or his assets. This act of principled daring appealed mightily to Steward, as it suggested a stance on hustling that was very much in line with Steward’s own. Brian was indeed so progressive in his thinking about his hustling business that he opened his brothel to an interested academic researcher who documented its comings and goings in a remarkable 1971 scholarly journal article entitled “The Male House of Prostitution.” The article gave specific details of how the house worked: prospective models could not be known to the police as homosexual, nor could they have had hepatitis or veneral disease, and they were required to complete a full physical exam before starting. On the business side, Brian kept 30 percent of the take, with models allowed to keep all of their tips. Models were not allowed to give out their real names or phone numbers, and were warned not to develop attachments to their clients. However, models had to agree before starting that they would accept all the assignments they were given.

Steward was fascinated by Brian’s business setup as well as with his models; never before had he been so intimately aware of the goings-on in an actual house of prostitution, or so closely connected—on a day-to-day, friendship level—to so many handsome young hustlers. He was so taken with Brian’s freewheeling, sexually liberated approach to both prostitution and pornography that he allowed Brian to publish several of his stories in
Golden Boys
magazine during 1968: “The Link,” a fictionalized version of his 1937 visit to Lord Alfred Douglas, and “Pig in a Poke,” a Phil Andros story with a strong S/M component.

As an older man who had immersed himself in homosexual pornography for most of his life, Steward felt he had a great deal to share with Brian, including the (then unwritten and undocumented) history of underground homoerotic pornography in twentieth-century America. With Steward’s encouragement, Brian decided to adapt one of the most famous of these underground stories for film. The result was Brian’s first hit,
Seven in a Barn
. Though made on the tiniest of budgets (with Brian as director, chief cameraman, writer, editor, and sound dubber), the film achieved a wide circulation and had an enthusiastic following. Technologically advanced (it was the first gay porn film to feature both color and sound), it was also arguably “literary,” and it ultimately impressed academics enough that Brian was invited to screen and discuss it for film classes, sociology workshops, and psychology clinics on several different California university campuses. Brian went so far as to tell one interviewer that he hoped someday to direct “a regular theater, full story-line, Hollywood-scale treatment of gay life in an open, healthy, natural way. It’s a field with maybe only one title in it so far—
A Very Natural Thing
^*
…I’d like to be the man who cracks that market open.”

In 1969, after hearing about Steward’s trouble with Womack, J. Brian offered to publish a cheap paperback edition of
$TUD
. Steward, who now considered Brian a close friend, agreed to the project with enthusiasm. Brian was able to undertake the publishing project not only because of his well-established pornographic printing contacts, but also because he already had a large distribution network in place for the sale of anything he cared to produce. His cheap, sloppy, small-magazine-format version of
$TUD
featured a number of photographs of Brian’s naked young male models that had nothing at all to do with the Phil Andros text, but which served nonetheless to attract his usual buyers. While H. Lynn Womack still held the contractual rights to the book, Steward and J. Brian had undertaken their edition based on an escape clause in the Guild Press contract, one that allowed for the book’s publication in paperback after a term of three years from signing. Steward later wrote that as soon as his paperback was published, the infuriated Womack had quickly printed an authorless three-volume cheap edition of the text of
$TUD
, and shortly thereafter “he evidently found the money to pay the binder [for] the hardcover edition of
$TUD
with a jacket by [Dom Orejudos].” But rather than attempt to sell the book, Womack instead remaindered it immediately, and as a result the book would never appear in bookstores, nor earn a penny in royalties for its author.

Shortly after the
$TUD
debacle, Knud Rame/Kim Kent decided to publish Steward’s earlier S/M-themed, Schnitzler-inspired monologues as the porno novel
Ring-Around-the-Rosy
. He did so in Copenhagen, in a trilingual hardcover edition. Though Steward was sorry not to have the book published in the United States, he was delighted to see it in print, and delighted as well to publish a book with his old friend Rame. The experience seems at least temporarily to have restored his faith in book publishing.

•

Steward now wanted to write and publish more than ever, for despite his love of tattooing, he was slowly but surely coming to the conclusion that his tattoo shop’s days were numbered and that his future now lay elsewhere. After being attacked and robbed in the shop, he began to acknowledge that the Anchor was in too dangerous an area. “I was strongarmed and robbed by a coupla our black soul-brothers on June 5,” he wrote Paul Gebhard shortly after the incident. “I consider myself lucky not to be daid or beat-up in a hospital.”

But the tattoo parlor was becoming a liability for other reasons. By the end of the 1967 Summer of Love, an estimated hundred thousand restless young people had moved to San Francisco, and during 1968, drug use among them had shifted away from “mellowing” substances such as marijuana and LSD toward agitation-producing substances such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and PCP. Violent crime was on the rise, and with it a new feeling of bitterness and disillusionment. With the stabbing murder of the rock fan Meredith Hunter by the Hells Angel Allan Passaro at the Altamont Raceway concert in December 1969,
^*
the fortunes of the Hells Angels in particular took an abrupt turn for the worse. “After Altamont,” Sonny Barger later noted, “life was one criminal cluster fuck after another.” As a result, each new day at the tattoo parlor seemed to Steward to bring with it some new problem or incident relating to the Angels.

There was also the question of accidental hepatitis C transmission. Shared needle use among hippies was now a major cause of concern among local health officials, and in tattooing hippies, Steward knew that he risked spreading the disease despite his careful use of an autoclave for sterilization purposes. The explosion of hepatitis in the Bay Area led Steward to expect that both Oakland and San Francisco would soon order the closing of all area tattoo parlors—particularly since, by the end of 1968, forty-seven other major American cities had already enacted special ordinances against tattooing. Even if the city of Oakland did not order Steward to close his doors, however, he knew that the legal liabilities connected to hepatitis transmission had the potential to ruin him financially.

Perhaps most important for Steward, however, was the new absence of sex from the tattoo shop. Due to both his own advancing age and to the changing nature of his clientele, tattooing had simply ceased to be a locus for seduction. With fewer sexually appealing young men coming in for tattoos, Steward now found the work almost unbearably tedious. “The irritant factors in a tattoo artist’s life are numerous and intense,” he later wrote. “He is continually faced by an unending barrage of questions from both customers and onlookers…multiply the [hundred or so] questions by about a hundred and fifty thousand customers, allowing about ten questions a person, and you begin to have an idea of the kind of patience required…Not all of us [are] able to maintain a high degree of this virtue.”

Steward was then assaulted and robbed a second time in his shop, and while still recovering both physically and psychologically from the incident, something happened that he barely ever mentioned to anyone, even the best of his friends: he witnessed a next-door robbery, then watched and held the hand of his neighbor as the shopkeeper bled to death from gunshot wounds. Steward wrote of it only briefly in his memoirs, noting in passing, “The shop next door—a pawnshop run by an elderly Jew named Herman Cartun—had been several times victimized, and between my own second and third experiences [of being robbed], poor Herman was shot and killed by a couple of blacks who disapproved of his racial remarks.”

But Steward had both known and liked Cartun, whose pawnshop, the Trading Post, was adjacent to the Anchor. After hearing the loud “pop” of gunfire at close range, Steward had run to the door of the tattoo parlor to see what had happened. As he did so, Cartun, shot in the chest and bleeding heavily, appeared at his own door, and from there took five shots at his fleeing assailants with his gun. According to the newspaper account of the crime, Cartun then “fell at the door of his shop with four bullets in his body.” Cartun’s partner, gun in hand, chased after the robbers. Steward meanwhile bent over Cartun, who lay in a rapidly growing pool of his own blood. “Cartun asked [Steward] that the police be called,” the newspaper article noted. “It was his last request [and] Steward obeyed it.” Steward then attempted first aid, but nothing helped; as they waited for the ambulance, Steward simply held Cartun’s hand and watched him die.

A few weeks later, Steward was robbed yet again, and seeing in this third robbery the possibility that he, too, would end up like Cartun, he made the painful decision to close down the shop. He took the place apart with his own hands. After selling off his tattooing equipment, he put all his flash and memorabilia into storage boxes and hauled them back to the bungalow.

With the closing of the Anchor, another significant period in Steward’s life was coming to an end. Like Prospero breaking his staff, Steward had set down his tattoo needle, and from the fantastic life of the tattoo artist, he returned to the mundane reality of his suburban ghetto bungalow:

After closing the tattoo parlor in the spring of 1970 Steward felt particularly disconnected from the world around him, for he despised the druggy, self-satisfied dropout culture of the university city in which he lived. “If you wanted to see the scruffy, barrel-bottom scrapings of the 1960s,” he wrote in his memoirs, “you [needed look no further than] the Land That Time Forgot—Berkeley.” To alleviate his boredom and disgust, he turned first to television (never having owned one before, he built one from an electronics kit), but then seeing in it only “the decline of Western civilization,” he moved on to other hobbies, which included clock collecting, science fiction, and the inventing of various electronic gadgets—including a doorbell that he programmed to chime
gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus
^*
“because of its melancholy view of youth.”

One of his electronic inventions, an anti-telephone-bugging device, seemed commercial enough that he founded a small company called Privacy Unlimited to market it. But when legal complications ensued almost immediately, he returned once again to fiction. This time, Steward decided to try his hand at a pornographic novel. He later described the enormous pleasure he felt in “Phil Andros springing full-grown from my temple, like Athena from the brow of Zeus.” James Purdy, who had been corresponding with Steward frequently since 1968, encouraged him in the project through a series of camp and teasing letters, some of them including pornographic “press releases” about Steward’s “invisible house” and its dark erotic goings-on.

In his memoirs, Steward noted that his return to erotic writing was timely: due to a recent Supreme Court decision revisiting the 1957 case of
Roth v. United States
, “suddenly
all
the old four-letter words (and some new ones) appeared in print almost overnight [and] publishers no longer had to write prefatory notes condemning what they were printing; they could merely suggest the social significance of erotica, and lo! All was satisfied. The court’s decision had more holes in it than a colander, and publishing houses sprang up like mushrooms after rain.”

Steward’s first challenge, of course, was to find himself one of these just-sprung-up publishing houses. After doing some networking in San Francisco, he came to an agreement with “a short, fat, greasy French Canadian” named Roland Boudreault, owner of a chain of erotic shops known as Le Salon. Boudreault would first publish a “Frenchy’s Gay Line” version of
Ring-Around-the-Rosy
(which up to that point had been published only in Knud Rame’s trilingual Danish edition of 1968), retitling it
The Joy Spot
and bringing it out in 1969. He would also publish the first three Phil Andros novels in 1970 and 1971 through his newly renamed publishing house, Gay Parisian Press.

While the writing of novels has never been regarded as a particularly lucrative occupation, the writing of homosexual pornography during the early 1970s was not only unprofitable but also thankless, for its disreputable publishers were entirely indifferent to the rights and expectations of their authors. These publishers wrote contracts stipulating that authors received only a small flat fee for their writing, which was sold as work for hire—meaning that the author signed away all rights to his work and all editorial control over his manuscript. The publisher then required the author to write each book to the publisher’s exact specifications, including length of manuscript and percentage of text devoted to sexual description. Finally, the publisher retained complete freedom to cut, rearrange, discard, and rewrite at will, even if doing so resulted (as often happened) in a finished work that made little sense.
^*
In later life Steward noted that in his own case “the payment for [the Phil Andros novels] from [Boudreault] was a flat fee of $400—no royalties, no further correspondence, no nuthin’—and if any fan letters were received, they were never forwarded to the author. It was like writing into a vacuum.”

In writing his Phil Andros novels, Steward was, in essence, attempting to create the sort of good-humored accounts of homosexual activity he wished had been available to him as a younger man. His writings described a wide range of sexual interests and practices with warmth, enthusiasm, and little in the way of moral judgment. By approaching the subject of homosexual activity with openness and quiet good humor, he hoped to provide not only erotic entertainment, but also a basic enlightenment about the everyday nature of the non-relationship-oriented sexual encounters that had taken up so much of his life. Doing so was relatively easy for him, since he could base his fiction on his own extensive and in-depth documentation.

The gay paperback pornography industry of 1970 was, however, a business in which lofty sociological aims were of little concern to the businessmen engaged in its highly profitable and often risky distribution and sale. Nor was good writing: atmosphere, plot, and character development were simply not important to businessmen like Boudreault, since his customers were hardly discriminating about the porn they were buying. As a result, all Boudreault needed or wanted was a series of stimulating descriptions of various sexual acts strung together with something approximating a story.

While Steward was frustrated by the basic indifference and glaring mendacity of the porn business, he was nonetheless hugely relieved to have finally found a way in which he could publish his graphic tales of sex between men, for getting writing of this sort commercially published was, in a sense, the fulfillment of his lifelong ambition. Moreover, on an immediate personal level, the novels allowed Steward a much-needed escape into fantasy at a particularly difficult and lonely period in his life—especially since, as Phil Andros, Steward was no longer a short, slight, failed English professor living alone, hooked on barbiturates, and bumping sixty. Instead he was a paragon of sexual virility, a burly professional hustler bursting with animal magnetism and attired in

Steward’s first Phil Andros novel was
My Brother, the Hustler
,
^*
a tale of the road that would ultimately distinguish itself as his most comically self-indulgent effort, and also his most surreal. In it, Phil awakens from a nap beneath the Golden Gate Bridge to find himself mistaken for a man named Denny who is apparently his doppelgänger. Various couplings with strangers ensue, with all of these men initially mistaking Phil for Denny (who is, like Phil, a hustler, and possibly Phil’s long-lost twin). Phil then begins receiving a series of mysterious psychic summonses from Denny, ones that prompt him to travel across the country in search of this mysterious “brother,” making stops in Chicago, Columbus, and New York.

The premise of psychic communication between separated twins was one Steward had developed out of his conversations with Danny Schmidt, who had long claimed to receive psychic messages from his two triplet brothers. Another inspiration for the story was the “lost twin” Steward had learned about in the 1947 biopsy of his amputated testicle. But Steward also had plenty of literary inspiration: the search for a second self, and more specifically for a second self through which one achieves wholeness, is at the heart of Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s
Symposium
. Genet had shown a similar interest in the twin (or second self) in
Querelle de Brest
, for in that novel not only does Querelle encounter his heterosexual twin, Robert, at the brothel, but also he feels he has met his “double” in the character of Gil Turko—a fellow criminal he both loves and betrays.

Steward’s casual invocation of Whitman at the beginning of the novel
^*
also suggests Whitman’s great claim in “Song of Myself” that “all men ever born are my brothers.” And, indeed, Steward returns to Whitman’s idea of universal brotherhood in the last pages of the novel by paraphrasing (without attribution) Ezra Pound’s poem on Whitman, “A Pact”:
^*
“O my brother! Let there be commerce between us! May we always be together.” So the preoccupation with the lost brother is far more than a mere plot device.

Steward used the novel to settle an old score: Chuck Renslow and Dom Orejudos appear in its Chicago chapters as the deeply grotesque characters Mike (a low-life pimp) and Ollie (an LSD-addled foot fetishist). Phil’s visit with them includes a detailed description of “The Black Castle,” the bizarre series of interlinked apartments that Renslow and Orejudos inhabited on Belmont Avenue
^*
that featured a dungeon play space—a home they shared not only with Renslow’s many “slaves,” but also, oddly enough, with Renslow’s aged mother.

After two more psychic summonses—first to Columbus, to meet an evocation of Steward’s adolescent self, and then to New York, to meet a tattooist—Phil returns to the San Francisco Bay area, where at last he meets with his mysterious twin. The novel concludes with their dreamlike sexual embrace.

In
My Brother, the Hustler
, Steward established Phil Andros as a peripatetic American hustler, forever on the road and forever adrift. Steward had met men of this sort in the cafés of Paris, at the Embarcadero YMCA in San Francisco, at George Lynes’s New York apartment, and in his own Chicago tattoo shop. Johnny Leapheart, Mike Miksche, Bill Tregoz, Chuck Arnett, and Cliff Raven had all been sensitive, intelligent drifters and dropouts, moving from life to life and city to city in their endless, disaffected search for sexual adventure.

Thematically and structurally,
My Brother, the Hustler
has much in common with the Beat novels. While Steward had never been a Beat, many of the Beats had been gay or bisexual, and their rootlessness had been predicated in part upon their sexual as well as social nonconformity. Though Jack Kerouac had once stated in an interview, “We were just a bunch of guys out trying to get laid,” Ann Charters’s
Kerouac
and, later, Winston Leyland’s
Gay Sunshine Interviews
would clearly establish that, in the words of one scholar, “the guys didn’t always have to go
out
to get laid.” Steward’s
My Brother, the Hustler
had been published anonymously by a fly-by-night pulp fiction publisher, with a plot so abstract and self-indulgent that it seemed half sex fantasy, half comic hallucination. But in its oddball way it posited an alternate (if later) vision of the Beat generation, one featuring a comic hero who was both an articulate social dropout and a well-adjusted sexual nonconformist.

Steward’s satiric description of Renslow and Orejudos did not go unnoticed. In response, Orejudos published the erotic comic book
Locker Room
with Kris Studio in 1971 under the name Stephen, and there created a wonderfully childish revenge fantasy in which the young Sam Steward is characterized as a weakling and a snitch. As a result of informing on various sexual goings-on in the locker room, Sam gets his erotic comeuppance from a lusty, robust, and formidably endowed football team, who then go on to enjoy one another in an orgy. Renslow, meanwhile, formulated an even more substantial form of payback for Steward, for he was just then opening a transvestite cabaret in Chicago—and knowing Steward’s lifelong abhorrence of effeminacy and drag queens, he both named the club after Steward and featured a wickedly accurate caricature of Steward dressed as Whistler’s Mother on the club’s signage and menus.
^*

Renslow and Orejudos were not the only people Steward caricatured in
My Brother, the Hustler
. Knud Rame appeared in the novel as Knud Gunnarson, a dentured old man with a taste for discipline who eventually reveals to Phil that he is a Catholic bishop obsessed with astrology and the occult (as Rame in fact was). Johnny Reyes made a brief appearance as himself, under the name Johnny Mendoza. Even one of Steward’s aunts appears in the book: she is “Aunt Ellie Andros,” and Phil visits her at her boardinghouse in Columbus.

•

In the second Phil Andros novel,
San Francisco Hustler
, Phil picks up a motorcycle cop, Greg, in a parking lot while visiting his sister in Santa Monica. When the two men meet again in San Francisco, Greg has left the Highway Patrol to join the San Francisco Police Department, and he encourages Phil to join the police force, too, so that they can room together—and so have all the sex they like without attracting suspicion. A third cop then joins their ménage, and they begin a series of leather-and-uniform, BDSM erotic adventures. The speed with which Steward wrote the book suggests not only that he was enjoying his new life as Phil Andros, but also that he had quickly mastered the highly restrictive erotic-novella form—for porn novels were really short works of 50,000 to 65,000 words, of which 20 percent to 50 percent needed to be detailed descriptions of sexual acts.
^*
In
San Francisco Hustler
, Steward’s writing is deft, his plotting succinct, and his characterizations are strong; the ingenious sexual descriptions—most of them featuring some aspect of domination, uniform fetishism, and S/M—are drawn from Steward’s own sexual experiences. Later republished as
The Boys in Blue
, the novel would stand as Steward’s most sexually exuberant, for it featured a triangulated love relationship among three cops that allowed for every possible permutation of domination/submission sex play. The three-way relationship is also described in terms of strong and complicated feelings of both friendship and emotional attachment—even though none of these three cops requires or hopes for any kind of emotional commitment from the other two. Phil, in fact, becomes confused and upset when Greg’s sexual domination of him triggers in him a response of passionate obsession, for even as he hungers for sexual domination, Phil dislikes the idea of being in a relationship: