Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (51 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 AIDS crisis during the early 1980s was cataclysmic all over the United States, but nowhere was it more devastating than in San Francisco. Every day Steward seemed to learn of yet another friend or acquaintance who had been diagnosed with the disease. Steward’s horror at the AIDS crisis combined with his own very severe health problems led to a significant worsening of his depression and a marked increase in his barbiturate use. A former DePaul student was now providing him with large amounts of “reds” smuggled in from Mexico, even as Steward regularly pressed his doctor to prescribe him ever more Seconal for his insomnia. Among his late papers are a series of light verses addressed to that doctor, each one begging him for more drugs. One ends,
You don’t suppose
(alas, alack!)
I’ve got a monkey
On my back?!?
There’s little chance
For that to be,
My bed’s too small
For two, you see.
So prithee, Doc,
Just once again,
For this ol’ senior
Citizen.
When his runaway barbiturate abuse began interfering with Steward’s other drug therapies, his doctor ordered a blood test, one that quickly revealed the magnitude of Steward’s addiction. Upon being confronted with the results, Steward professed to being thoroughly ashamed, and abjectly wrote his doctor an apology, which concluded, “It will be easy for me, and a relief, to let Ike Barnes have complete control of future prescriptions, if you continue to give them to me…I will not go looking for more. I sometimes wonder if addiction is inherited, for my father was addicted to drugs and also to alcohol—a helluva thing for a pharmacist to be.”
•
The last significant hustler-friend Steward included in his Stud File was an easygoing former sailor turned masseur named Ervin Chance. Steward never memorialized Chance in writing, apart from mentioning him in passing in a final, unpublished revision of memoirs. On Chance’s Stud File card, Steward merely noted that he had first hired the twenty-three-year-old as a ten-dollar hustler in May 1971, describing him as a “Sothron boy…not too smart, but…W[oul]dnt be ashamed to take him anywhere.” In fact, by the early 1980s Steward had ceased making any new entries into the Stud File, for his sexual adventures were few, and even fewer of them seemed to him worth memorializing.
Steward wrote one last Phil Andros story, “Death and the Tattoo,” for an anthology of gay mystery and suspense in early 1990. “The story in
Finale
*
was absolutely [Phil Andros’s] last appearance. R.I.P.,” Steward wrote John Preston. In the same letter he wrote of finally putting to bed his long-unpublished tattoo manuscript; now severely edited down, it would be published by a small academic press in Binghamton, New York, and it seemed to Steward destined for oblivion. “It’s going to be called
Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos
and I’m on my way to the vomitorium right now,” he confided to Preston. “My fairly dignified title of
The Tattoo Jungle
was consigned to the dumpster by the marketing expert boys.”
While Steward’s home had always been extremely cluttered, untidy, and filled with books, papers, and reading materials, it became almost horrifyingly dirty in his last years—partly because in his eccentric old age Steward became a compulsive hoarder, and partly because Cranford and Blackstone, the two dachshunds he had acquired after Fritz’s death, had never been properly housebroken. As Steward lost the energy to walk the dogs, they had taken to soiling the house. Living on bottled oxygen, and without anyone to help him with housework, Steward seems to have been indifferent to the stench that so repulsed his occasional guests, for he had little remaining sense of smell. But these visitors were few, since the bungalow had become so severely congested with books, papers, ephemera, and household garbage that there was little room for anyone apart from Steward to sit. Only three narrow pathways allowed one to navigate through the clutter: one from front door to armchair, one from armchair to bed, and one from bed to bathroom.
A former schoolteacher turned librarian named Michael Williams began stopping over at the bungalow in the mid-1980s, hoping to assist Steward in whatever way he could, for he admired Steward’s writing and he knew Steward was pretty much alone in the world. He described the bungalow interior during Steward’s last years:
There were files and pigeon-holes and boxes and shelves everywhere and all were over flowing with supplies, letters to answer, manuscripts, photographs and books. I [later] found chairs buried under the mass of things which I had not realized were there…[Sam] had a huge TV set opposite his recliner chair and several bookcases filled with video copies of TV shows he had watched or films he had rented from adult bookstores…I think he spent most of his days in this chair—on the phone, reading, watching the TV, or occasionally entertaining…no daylight came in [because he kept the blinds down and curtains shut at all times]…The couch…had [only] one [sitting] place…[it was] covered in books and papers…At the other end of the couch was a mass of things piled up on undiscernable pieces of furniture. I never discovered what was here until after Sam died…The dogs would of course always be scurrying round the room and jumping up into Sam’s lap…
It would have been impossible to cook in the kitchen…There was [only] a very narrow path [through it] to the back door. At the top of the kitchen shelves were folios of pornographic drawings. There were tins of coins, boxes of can openers, bottle openers, and salt dispensers, piles of papers and lots of rinsed, empty dog-food cans which hadn’t made it to the garbage pail…clutter everywhere…
I suppose Sam’s bedroom…was most representative of his life in his later years. There was a single bed [and] all around it was a heap maybe a foot high of discarded magazines, paperbacks, used Kleenex, support hose, and other items of clothing. It was like here Sam had really given up any attempt to keep a presentable appearance. I knew that he had suffered from insomnia…and here was proof of an endless succession of sleepless nights and the morbid thoughts which afflicted him. There must have been hundreds of fantasy, science fiction, and mystery paperbacks, dating back to the ’sixties scattered on the floor. Most were in very poor condition as the dogs had been running around and over them for years.
The glory of the bedroom were the three nine foot high bookcases covering the wall opposite Sam’s bed…[which] contained a wonderful [collection of books.] On another wall were some mementoes of Sam’s sexual escapades, including some lingerie and gags, and a few small hand-printed labels which he had worn when serving as a masochist and [which] posed invitations to be abused. Here also was the collection of whips, brushes, and even a mace which were suggestive of punishment sessions. There were more paintings on the wall, notably the two he had painted in Chicago; one of Johnny Reyes, the other of the Milwaukee policeman [Jim Brashin].
V. K. McCarty, who wrote as “Mam’selle Victoire” for
Penthouse Forum
, also visited the bungalow during that time, and she particularly remembered how Steward had prepared for his own death:
Sammy’s house was a sweet wonder and a special cautionary tale for me, since it was piled up as mine is with books and photographs and letters…When you went in during the last few years, there was a note pinned to the side of the first bookshelf as you opened the screen, telling you who to callif Sam had passed away in the night. It was, of course, those two wonderful friends [Jim Kane and Ike Barnes]…[Jim] would call [Sam] every morning and start off by saying, “Good morning, you old sport, are you still alive?”
Ike Barnes came over to Steward’s place weekly to help him with his shopping, his laundry, and his medical appointments. The fragile old man and the bald, burly leather slave made a striking pair as they puttered through Berkeley in Barnes’s old VW beetle.
•
Though much of his eighty-first year was taken up with severe medical problems, Steward received some unexpected attention that summer that did his spirits good. As he wrote to John Preston, “[I’ve met] a handsome literate cop, a fan, who’s gonna invite me to a function so’s I can mingle with all the gay cops in the Bay Area. I hope there’ll be paramedics available, for I shall prolly faint dead away on seeing all those uniforms together in one place.” Steward gave an account of the gay policemen’s party in a final addendum to his never-published autobiography. He began by describing the unexpected arrival on his doorstep of “a tall good-looking man about fifty with a touch of grey at the temples” who had been hoping for some time to meet the real Phil Andros:
And that was how I met Matthew, a real honest-to-gawd cop, who said he’d actually been launched on a peace officer’s career by reading [the] Phil Andros novel about [San Francisco] cops…We had a dandy afternoon of talk [which] ended by his inviting me to a dinner of the organization of gay cops. And they were the Real Thing—with power to arrest, give drunk tests, handcuff bad people, and…order you to do all sorts of things.
On that dinner night I sat benumbed and sweating among thirty-two young cops, overwhelmed by the presence of so many examples of my longtime obsession. I
think
they were all good-looking; I was really not too able to be critical that evening.
“Did you enjoy yourself?” Matt asked as we were driving back across the Bay Bridge.
“Sensory overload,” I said, stretching my legs…“I was just a little disappointed, however.”
“How come?”
“No uniforms,” I said.
“Ah,” he said, and paused a moment. Then, “I think something can be done about that.”
And that’s the reason that he and I were headed north on a sunny afternoon to a brunch being held—in my “honor” no less—at the country home of a gay cop, where all those invited were going to come in uniform…
Twenty-odd young gentlemen…were already assembled there. The rooms were overflowing with uniforms—all kinds and colors, from the distinguished khaki of the highway patrol to the sleek dark blue of metropolitan, the gray and black of a few towns, even the baby-shit yellow-brown of a couple of rural communities. And the haircuts and mustaches ran the whole range from neat and trim to a little shaggy and long.
The smell was everywhere—of young male bodies and soap and leather with its sharp overtone of polish—for it seemed that more than half of the crowd wore jackboots to the knee, polished until you could see your shadow moving in their lengths…I was continually surrounded by three or four of these paragons. I signed a lot of Phil Andros books, especially the one about cops…
[In the months that followed] two or three of the guys would drop in occasionally at my Berkeley home, to talk of police things, and other stuff as well—and they were very understanding about my obsession—they always came in uniform. Perhaps the most regular visitor was [the host of the brunch] Danny, who had to commute to San Francisco every evening for his night work in the City, and I got to know him better than the others. In many ways he fit my image of the ideal cop—masculine, without any sissy ways, firm enough in his take-charge manner to seem almost delightfully bossy.
Steward had been hosted that afternoon by the Golden State Peace Officers Association;
*
he later recalled that four of its officer-members had “let me know that one of my novels [was] responsible for their joining the force.” Danny, Steward’s “ideal cop,” later confided to Steward that he hoped to develop a loving relationship with him, for Danny felt he had found in Steward a sort of “ideal father.” Racked by both emphysema and late-life depression, Steward told Danny that he would regretfully be unable to reciprocate either sexually or emotionally. Though disappointed, Danny eventually expressed his gratitude and warm feelings toward Steward by doing chores for him down at the bungalow.
Steward’s
Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors and Street-Corner Punks (1950–1965)
was published with little fanfare in 1990. The reviews were mixed, for no one outside the small world of American tattoo artists knew who Steward was or why he had written his book, and his academic publisher—which specialized in gay subjects rather than topics of general interest—did little to promote it in the larger world. Though Steward had told his story with a scholar’s thoroughness, he had also done so in the gently comic manner of a novelist and storyteller, and in doing so created an odd, hybrid work that apparently pleased no one. Moreover, he had intended the book primarily as a social history of the tattooing world of the 1950s and ’60s, and as a result, nearly all the extraordinary activities and observations relating to male sexuality that had enlivened his original journal entries for Kinsey were now absent. Of what remained, a sympathetic anthropologist noted that Steward had provided “a precious link with the gay men of the pre–gay liberation era, and their general suspicion of mainstream culture,” and further noted that Steward’s writings “have value as an ethnographic record of the homosocial and homosexual element in the culture of the underclass as he observed this [group] in the ‘pre-Stonewall era.’ Steward and other writers who describe what they saw and felt at that time will in the end allow us to see in fact just how an above-ground gay community…came into existence.” Other reviewers were less kind, one going so far as to suggest that “the author, the topic, and the book…all seem to be located in a semicultural limboland between polite society and the gutter.” But Steward’s former pupil Don Ed Hardy later noted simply, “Phil’s contribution to tattooing was in bringing a voracious intellect and multifaceted talent to a…field that was, in fact, largely moribund at the time. The book was a real revelation [to me and] it is still my favorite book on tattooing…As trenchant observation by someone with a classical education on the life on the streets and its strange markings, it is a great document.”