Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (74 page)

^*
Steward’s reference is to the obsolete word
philander
(dating to 1731), meaning “lover.”

^*
As a result of this hepatitis scare, tattooing remained illegal in New York City until 1997.

^*
The stories are “Baby Tiger” and “Little Lamb, Who Made Thee?”

^*
In February of 1967, Rose had married Mrs. Beryl Montefiore Davis (née Norris), who thereby became Lady Rose; but in autumn of 1968, Lady Beryl had her husband forcibly removed from her home and committed to a mental hospital. She subsequently ceased supporting him.

^*
Cyril Connolly observed in his review that “Francis Rose can say life but not spell it.”

^*
Steward is employing a French word, taken from the verb
bailler
, “to hand over”: in other words, key money.

^*
The Brashin portrait is owned by a private collector, the Reyes portrait remains with the Sam Steward papers, and the Orejudos portrait is on permanent display at the Leather Archives and Museum.

^*
In that final instance (on March 8, 1965) Steward had sex with both Danny and his triplet brother Donny, but apart from noting it in the Stud File, Steward never wrote about the experience.

^*
The stories are “A Trap for Tigers” and “The Pool Cue.”

^*
Paul Welch, “Homosexuality in America,”
Life
, vol. 56, no. 26 (June 26, 1964), p. 66.

^*
The
Drummer
magazine editor Jack Fritscher claimed to the scholar Gayle Rubin that the classic Tool Box issue of
Life
had started the migration to San Francisco that caused both South of Market and the Castro to happen. Rubin in turn would note that while this statement was clearly hyperbole, the image certainly did have an impact. She herself felt that aside from the movie
The Wild One
, the issue of
Life
with the picture of the Tool Box was the piece of popular culture most often mentioned by the San Francisco leathermen with whom she had spoken. (Gayle Rubin, “The Valley of the Kings: Leathermen in San Francisco [1960–1990],” dissertation, University of Michigan, 1994, p. 164.) In the same essay, Rubin noted that the mural eventually became a venerated relic of the leather community (p. 159).

^*
Begun in 1964, Womack’s Guild Book Service offered subscribers a wide array of articles as well as a list of nearly eighty books that included not only clothbound editions of homosexually themed works previously released by mainstream publishers, but also pulp paperbacks with significant homosexual themes or subtexts. Guild Press, meanwhile, was the publisher of several “physique” magazines and a series of pornographic novels entitled
Classics of the Homosexual Underground
, based on the many anonymously written pornographic stories that had circulated illegally during the 1940s and ’50s.

^*
The poem, though Steward did not give its title, is “He Swears,” written in 1915. His translation is a considerable improvement over that of Rae Dalven, whose
Complete Poems of Cavafy
had been published in New York in 1961.

^*
This story in particular meditates on Steward’s own troubled feelings about his involvement with minors. Of Dahm’s character, Steward (as the hustler Phil Andros) noted, “I have never seen such total ethical and moral blindness as in that stupid, silly H squared from Milwaukee. Beside him, even I was ethical and moral.”

^*
This known treatment for psoriasis does in fact have the side effect of tinting the skin a dark yellow color.

^*
Maclendon described this experience—and how it ended, when white racists threatened to murder him if he continued to dance in a black revue, in David Leddick’s
Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes (1935–1955)
(New York: Universe, 1997). Lynes knew Maclendon and had photographed him extensively in Hollywood in 1947, not long before he first met Steward.

^*
The BART transbay tube began service only nine years after Steward had moved to Berkeley.

^*
An ostler is a stable boy, but Steward is using the word as a homonym for “hustler,” probably out of fear that an interception of the letter might result in his harassment or prosecution.

^*
Stein,
Everybody’s Autobiography
, chapter 4, p. 289 (1937, reprinted 1971).

^*
While Steward was conscientious in chronicling his sexual activities throughout his life, and was also relatively open in his descriptions of his drinking, he was not equally candid about his later-life drug use. However, a number of letters in his papers, including letters to and from his doctor, demonstrate that his barbiturate habit intensified in the period following his arrival in Berkeley, as he attempted to cope with a strong sense of dislocation, disconnection, and depression. A number of friends and acquaintances (McHenry, Kane, Barnes, Baldwin) also witnessed and described Steward’s addiction.

^*
For a revised, fantasy version of this encounter, see the opening chapter of
The Boys in Blue
, in which Phil Andros, while visiting his sister and brother-in-law in Santa Monica, “scores” with California Highway Patrolman Greg Wolfson, whom he has similarly picked up in a parking lot.

^*
Walter Wilson Jenkins (1918–1985) was a longtime aide to Lyndon B. Johnson whose political career was destroyed in 1964 when he was arrested by Washington, D.C., police while engaging in a homosexual liaison in a YMCA toilet and an account of the incident was reported in the
Washington Star
. Jenkins was married with children at the time.

^*
The quotation is from Aristotle (
Ethica Magna
, II, 15, 8.), not Menander. The misattribution was most probably Tellman’s, for the brief memoir in which he recounts the story contains several significant factual errors.

^*
Hardin (also spelled Harden) modeled for
Mandate
,
Blueboy
,
Playgirl
,
Jock
,
Playguy
,
All Man
,
Inches
,
Just Men
,
Honcho
, and
Hustler
between 1979 and 1990, and appeared in a large number of films by the Colt and Falcon studios, as well as in films by Panther, Le Salon, and HIS Video. As a model for
Playgirl
, and also in his later modeling career, he sometimes went by the name of Gene Carrier.

^*
Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879–1962), a wealthy American arts patron who lived variously in New York, Florence, Provincetown, and Taos, and was notorious for her sexual indiscretions.

^*
Steward is referring to the Kinsey sex survey, results of which were kept in strictest confidence.

^*
The book would not be published in the United States until 1974, for it was laden with actionable scandal.

^*
The remainder would be cobbled together to create
Invocation of My Demon Brother
, a psychedelic montage of naked young men and occultist practices set largely in Anger’s Haight-Ashbury apartment.

^*
The introduction of Anger to Rose probably came about through Steward, but since most of Steward’s contact with Anger took place either via telephone or in person, the connection is so far undocumented.

^*
The two dates indicate that Steward had sex with Dan twice.

^*
The Hells Angels Ralph “Sonny” Barger and “Saint” John Morton confirmed that Steward had been their official tattoo artist during this period. (Barger, interview with author; Morton, e-mail to author.)

^*
The quotation (“I would rather that I died in yearning and longing than that I lived weary and despairing”) is drawn from the Gibran poem “Tears and a Smile.”

^*
J. Brian’s first name is reported as Jeremiah (“Director J. Brian charged in second film ‘conspiracy,’”
The Advocate
, March 27, 1974), but his friend Jack Fritscher remembers his first name as James. (Fritscher, e-mail to author.)

^*
For a dollar, J. Brian Enterprises would send out a photographic portfolio of its current “models” within the larger brochure that gave details about the agency, its policies, and its pricing structure. (One of these brochures is now in the Steward Papers, a gift of Douglas Martin.)

^*
A Very Natural Thing
(1973), directed by Christopher Larkin, was the first mainstream commercial film to portray a loving, committed sexual relationship between two men. (For more on the film, see Russo,
Celluloid Closet
, p. 208.)

^*
The murder is captured in the Rolling Stones documentary
Gimme Shelter
(1970), directed by Peter and David Maysles.

^*
From the drinking song and school anthem “De Brevitatae Vitae,” the first stanza of which roughly translates to: “Let us rejoice therefore while we are young / After our pleasant youth and troublesome old age / The ground will have us.”

^*
Steward wrote cleanly and concisely, and while his publishers occasionally demanded more sexual descriptions from him, they never altered or rewrote his manuscripts. (His original, minimally altered manuscripts and page proofs remain with his archive.)

^*
Later republished as
My Brother, My Self
.

^*
The novel begins, “It was an afternoon that Walt Whitman himself would have loved—all sun and wind and the salt spray from the Pacific in the air.” (
My Brother, My Self
, p. 1.)

^*
Pound’s poem concludes, “We are one root and one sap / Let there be commerce between us.”

^*
The interlinked apartment complex with its dungeon play space had first been described as “the black castle” by a drag queen comedian working in one of Renslow’s clubs who had noticed the crenellated roof of the building in which it was located.

^*
Located at 5220 North Sheridan Road, Sparrow’s opened in 1971 and closed in 1972—but during its brief life, the restaurant sponsored the first and only float in Chicago’s first gay pride parade. According to Renslow, the 1972 parade “wasn’t the first gay pride [demonstration] but it was the first one that was really a parade. Before that they were really marching demonstrations.”