Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (49 page)

While confined for recuperation, and despite his initial reservations about doing so, Steward finally relented and wrote up the tale of his 1937 visit to Lord Alfred Douglas for his friend Richard Hall. When he published it in
The Advocate
the following February, the piece was so well received that Steward published a similar reminiscence of his visit to André Gide. Writing of this sort now became, in effect, his one source of celebrity and his one remaining lifeline to the outside world. “There are times, God knows, when I’d like to get away from all the murder and mayhem,” he wrote to Knud Rame, despairing of what had happened to his neighborhood, “but I know I’d last about three weeks in the isolation of the country.” Instead, Steward remained right where he was, shutting out the grim reality of his current living situation by immersing himself in various writing projects relating to his sexually active past.

Meanwhile Steward’s neighborhood became ever more lawless, largely because of the ramshackle hippie commune next door, named Earth People’s Park. Home to an ever-changing population of approximately sixty people, the commune created an environment on Ninth Street of constant loitering, drug dealing, drinking, littering, public urination, and gunplay. To protect their backyard marijuana crop, the drug dealers of this commune installed a pack of half-wild guard dogs in its garbage-strewn front yard; one day, while Steward was walking Fritz, one of the attack dogs escaped the yard and severely injured Steward’s beloved dachshund. Steward responded by launching a letter-writing campaign to both the Berkeley police and
The Berkeley Gazette
about the many illegal activities going on at the commune. When no police action resulted, Steward began to fear that the dealers had nonetheless learned of his letter-writing activities and soon planned to retaliate with violence.
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Apart from securing the bungalow with an alarm system, nailing his windows shut, and placing live-ammunition booby traps in all the bungalow’s window sashes, Steward felt he could do little to protect himself, apart from carrying a loaded handgun at all times.

•

Publication of
Dear Sammy
had meanwhile brought Steward to the attention of Winston Leyland, whose
Gay Sunshine
was a leading periodical of post-Stonewall gay radicalism and activism. A former Episcopal priest, Leyland frequently interviewed established writers for
Gay Sunshine
; as a result, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Christopher Isherwood, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams had all discussed their homosexuality openly in its pages. Leyland, fascinated by Steward’s connections to Stein, Toklas, and
Der Kreis
, recorded a lengthy interview with him that he subsequently published and anthologized.

On February 9, 1978, on one of his increasingly rare nights out, Steward had the pleasure of meeting Tom of Finland, who was just then briefly visiting California from Europe. Steward wrote Douglas Martin that “the living legend Tom of Finland…is actually a Finn named Tuoko Laaksonen—a nice old geezer, my age bracket, with a kind of long horsey face…[Since] Jim Kane and Ike Barnes wanted to meet him…I arranged [another] dinner [with him] + [the art dealer] Robert Opel and Robert Mapplethorpe…Anyway, Tom and I were toasted as the two dirtiest old men in the Westron world, and as responsible for an ocean of cum deep enough to float a battleship.”

During the dinner, Steward had a long conversation with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who apparently told him that his erotic studies of black males had been partly inspired by similar studies by George Platt Lynes, including the well-known studies of Steward’s old friend and sex partner Johnny Leapheart. The conversation convinced Steward that the time had come for him to sell his Lynes photographs, since he knew that if he died without placing them somewhere, they might well be thrown away. After briefly corresponding about the works with Mapplethorpe’s lover and patron, Sam Wagstaff, Steward placed the fifty original prints with a Los Angeles dealer. The money from their sale came in handy, as three months later, Steward’s beloved dog Fritz suffered an accidental spinal cord injury, and to Steward’s horror, the dog lost the use of his hind legs. In an attempt to save the dog’s life, he paid a huge amount of money for an emergency veterinary operation.

Unfortunately the operation failed and, as Steward wrote Wilcox, “he had to be destroyed…It nearly killed me.” The sudden loss of the dear little dog to which he had become so emotionally dependent left Steward devastated. Fritz had been, in a very real sense, his only family and his only living connection to the world outside his bungalow. In the coming months, Steward would compare Fritz to the “ideal companion” that the British writer J. R. Ackerley had sought in vain among other men, and ultimately found instead in his German shepherd bitch. In an attempt to come to terms with his overwhelming grief, Steward began a novel about his life with Fritz; but after composing several hundred pages he had to abandon it, for the memory of losing the dog was simply too painful.

During the 1970s, at the urging of James Purdy, Steward had worked intermittently on his memoirs, and in the year following the publication of
Dear Sammy
, a well-known New York literary agent agreed to represent the manuscript. But while Steward had lived a fascinating and highly adventurous life, he was nonetheless far from famous, and his detailed discussion of his homosexual activities proved an even greater challenge to publishers than did his near total lack of celebrity. As a result, his manuscript went unsold, and his agent returned it to him without further comment.

In drafting the memoir, Steward had grappled mightily with the question of sexual discretion, for while he had no qualms at all about exploring his own homosexuality in print, he had a long-standing respect for the right to privacy of others, particularly since so many of his sex partners had lived as heterosexuals. As a result, in writing the memoir he altered many names and left a number of significant sexual experiences unmentioned. His youthful encounter with Rudolph Valentino, which he privately considered the most extraordinary encounter of his early life, was not included at all; in fact, he would publicly share the story of it with a journalist friend only in 1989,
^*
four years before his death. Similarly he chose not to mention his experience with Roy Fitzgerald/Rock Hudson in the elevator at Marshall Field’s department store in 1946.

By the late 1970s many of Steward’s friends felt that closeted homosexuals who were highly visible in society needed to be “outed”—since by declining to admit to their homosexuality these influential persons furthered societal perception of homosexuality as something shameful, bad, and wrong. Steward did not necessarily agree with the idea of “outing,” but as various praise-filled accounts of Thornton Wilder’s life began to appear, he found himself growing irritated with Wilder’s biographers. As he wrote Richard Hall,

In truth, Steward was puzzled by Wilder’s biographers, all of whom seemed disinclined to conduct any sort of inquiry into his sexual nature. Wilder had died in 1975, just a couple of months before his former friend Richard Goldstone had published
Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait
^*
against Wilder’s strenuous objections. But despite its title, the biography was anything but intimate about Wilder’s sexual or emotional inner life. Malcolm Cowley, in reviewing the book, had dismissed it as “biased, shallow and misleading.”

Linda Simon, the author of a lightweight biography of Alice B. Toklas, had contacted Steward after publication of
Dear Sammy
hoping to learn more of his relationship with Wilder. But even as she did so, she had suggested to Steward that Wilder’s sex life would take up no great part of her work, just as (to her mind) meditations on sexual identity had taken up no great part of Wilder’s literary production. Sensing yet another whitewash-in-the-making, Steward responded to Simon’s awkward request for information on Wilder’s sexuality by writing:

In a later note to Simon, Steward (who saw absolutely no advantage in going public with the particulars of his intimate friendship with Wilder, yet was disinclined on principle to conceal them) allowed her to mention their seven-year affair and to paraphrase his thoughts about Wilder’s puritanism. Meanwhile he obtained a copy of the Richard Goldstone biography, and wrote of it to Douglas Martin, “[G]ad, what camouflages and exculpations!” But when Richard Hall again urged him to write his own piece on Wilder, Steward again declined.

Years earlier Kinsey had impressed upon Steward the absolute importance of collecting and maintaining documentary evidence of the prevalence of homosexuality within American society. In contrast to Steward’s own lifelong project of saving all the names, dates, places, times, and acts of his own sex life, the Wilder estate seemed to Steward to be engaging in a very clear case of willful omission, one that was tantamount to the obliteration of truth. Steward sensed that further acts of willful omission would take place as Gilbert M. Harrison, who had rejected Steward’s memoir of Stein and Toklas in 1971 on the grounds that it contained “private experiences not meant for the public,” began a third biography of Wilder.

When Harrison subsequently wrote Steward asking for an interview, Steward responded,

In reviewing what already had been written about Wilder, Steward was particularly concerned that no one had yet mentioned the twenty-four pieces of correspondence from Wilder to Steward that Donald Gallup had purchased for the Beinecke Library at Yale. As a scholar, Steward knew such documents would by now have caught the attention of any serious biographer, and so he began to wonder if they might not have been suppressed within the library. His suspicions centered on Isabel Wilder, the spinster sister who had managed so much of Thornton Wilder’s life in his later years, working through Donald Gallup, the deeply private librarian-curator at Yale whom Stein had once described as “firm as a clam”—for Gallup was both the executor of the Wilder estate and a good friend to Isabel, who lived just two miles from the Yale campus.

Steward was rightly concerned that if the correspondence were to disappear, the integrity of his own lifelong records of sexual activity might well someday be questioned. Since he had not kept copies of the Wilder letters when he sold them in 1973,
^*
he contacted Gallup for photocopies, and upon receiving them wrote back a note of acknowledgment which, friendly enough at first glance, reminded Gallup that if scholars did not find those letters at the Beinecke, Steward would be able to produce them as required, and perhaps even to indicate their suppression by Gallup.

Anticipating that Harrison would engage in a whitewash, Steward composed a brief, bittersweet piece for Richard Hall detailing the specifics of his sexual relationship with Wilder, including dates, places, and types of sexual activity. The piece was published in
The Advocate
in May 1980, in tandem with a well-reasoned essay by Hall on the delicate question of “outing” literary figures in their biographies.

Gilbert Harrison seems to have found this account
^*
of Wilder’s homosexuality an awkward revelation, for he subsequently insinuated in a letter to Steward that if sexual acts between the two men really had occurred, they had probably occurred as the result of an aggressive homosexual seduction engineered by Steward. When Harrison then asked for particulars of their first encounter, Steward responded,

In a subsequent letter to Harrison, Steward explained how he had returned Wilder’s wristwatch to the Stevens Hotel after Wilder had left it on the night table in Steward’s Chicago apartment, even going so far as to cite the note about it from Wilder housed in the Beinecke. In yet another note, Steward volunteered, “I am on the trail of a Norman Pittinger (not sure of the last name’s spelling) who also had sexual encounters with TW. I’ll let you know if I can track him down—and if he w[oul]d be willing to share the ‘burden of proof’ with me. Or have you already found others? Or do you want to?”

In the end, just as Steward predicted, Harrison chose not to see any significance in Wilder’s homosexual activities. Harrison also suggested in the Wilder biography that Steward’s lifelong project of documenting his homosexual encounters was not only bizarre but also in very poor taste. While Harrison did not go so far as to deny that Wilder had ever engaged in homosexual acts—another sexual contact, unidentified by Harrison but possibly Norman Pittinger, had by then volunteered him stories similar to Steward’s—Harrison simply refused to see any importance or validity in them. “If one accepts the essentials of Steward’s story,” Harrison wrote, “the sexual act between them was so hurried and reticent, so barren of embrace, tenderness or passion that it might never have happened.” Clearly, the desire that the sexual act “might never have happened” was Harrison’s, for Wilder had instigated such sexual acts on twenty-six separate occasions over the course of seven years. Harrison had known and yet ignored this information. He had also seen (and intentionally declined to quote from) two remarkably tender letters sent by Wilder to Steward, and declined even to mention their existence in the Beinecke collections, simply because they did not fit in with the biography he wanted to publish, nor with his vision of the man about whom he wanted to write.

Though disappointed (and offended) by Harrison’s whitewash, Steward could at least console himself that this lapse was far from the only one in the Harrison biography of Wilder, which appeared to largely negative reviews.

•

In July 1979, Steward celebrated a significant birthday, his seventieth. The coming year would be a relatively good one for him, for as the summer came to an end, the legendary poetry editor Donald Allen made an offer to publish a heavily revised version of Steward’s memoirs. Allen was a former editor at Grove Press who had retired to San Francisco to found and run Gray Fox Press. He was motivated to publish the memoir by his long-standing friendship with Steward, for the two had first met socially during the late 1960s, after Allen had read through and declined
The Tattoo Jungle
for Grove. Upon publishing the memoir, he also offered to reprint all the Phil Andros novels. Allen had never been in the business of publishing erotica or gay pulp, so his decision to republish the Phil Andros work was in its way quite daring, for up to that point Gray Fox had primarily published the poetry and experimental fiction for which Allen himself was best known. But since he owned and ran this small press himself, he could basically publish anything he liked.

Steward’s revised memoir was of very modest length, and included only a single brief chapter about his life as a pornographer. The book appeared very quietly in the fall of 1981 as the 147-page trade paperback
Chapters from an Autobiography
, and consisted primarily of adaptations of the various articles he had already published in
The Advocate
and
Gaysweek
, along with a new chapter about his friendship with Kinsey. He subsequently republished the chapter about his life as a pornographer in
The Advocate
in December 1980, perhaps as a way of promoting the book.

Steward dedicated
Chapters from an Autobiography
to Scott Andrews, a strikingly handsome twenty-five-year-old porn actor who had recently become his lover. The two had met in October of 1979 through J. Brian, for the young man was in fact one of Brian’s “Golden Boys.” Initially intrigued with Steward after learning of the Stein-Toklas memoir, the impressionable young Andrews had subsequently begun visiting the bungalow on a regular basis, showering Steward with small presents, and finally persuading Steward to have sex with him. Steward was of course flattered, but even so was loath to involve himself emotionally with Andrews, for experience had taught him that all handsome young men would eventually reject and abandon him. And yet, in spite of himself, Steward felt himself falling headlong into complete infatuation: “As I watched Scott,” he later wrote, “I felt as I used to when I was drinking: I was a prince of the world and commanded fire and flames!” To another friend he observed, “From the very beginning I found him almost too much—too much to take in all at once, I mean. I tend to stammer or get incoherently lyrical when I try to tell someone about him. I feel like the guy in
The Duchess of Malfi
when he said: ‘Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle…’ Just so…my brain sparks and crackles and becomes short circuited.”