Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (24 page)

Steward had decided to go to San Francisco instead of Paris because of time limitations: he had only a month of vacation, and a transatlantic crossing (with transfers through New York) would have taken him nearly a week. Moreover, he was curious about the Embarcadero YMCA, which was said to be inhabited primarily by men freshly returned from the armed forces and merchant marine, and desperate for sexual release. Nonetheless he regretted that he would not get to see Alice Toklas, who wrote in late June to explain that her silence had been due to a long bout of hepatitis “and to the equally bothersome writing (?) of a 75,000 word cook book—the latter to earn the pennies to pay for the former.”
^*
After thanking him for a recent gift, she added, “In return for all your news there is little to offer. Francis has changed his mind about making his son a Spanish duke—Luis is to learn English and go into the British army—first having taken British nationality. They spent the spring in Minarco (the winter on the coast near Toulon) and are now in Madrid. A visit from Luis is announced for early next month. All through this turmoil and restless moving about Francis has done a great deal of work…Is he not incredible.”

•

After arriving at the Embarcadero YMCA, Steward began a journal using code numbers to describe his sexual activities, and describing those activities circumspectly (and largely in French) just in case the document should be seized by the police. In its opening pages he described his initial disappointment with the Y, for his room was merely “a front cubicle on the 4th floor, very noisy.” The elevated Embarcadero Freeway ran right past his only window.

After a few days Steward began to note the many sexual goings-on. “A
choice
motorcyclist in [room] 633,” he noted in his diary. “Sailors everywhere! All branches [of the service]!” But with so many other older men camped out in various rooms, the competition for young sailors was keen. Experiencing only a minimum of sexual success, Steward began instead to explore the nearby nightlife: “356 Taylor, [a] club [full] of queens…then to Keeno’s, a fantastic queer joint, and after [that I] walk[ed] the long way home down Market, to see the doorways filled with young toughs, available for $$, dangerous—very like Rome…very exciting.”

In an effort to secure the favors of younger men, he helped several with small loans and in one case paid a week’s rent for one named Jeff Brash. Brash then promised to join him that evening at “Chilli’s, [a] queer low level joint on Embarcadero.” But Brash never showed, “and in the agony ridden hour from 12 to 1, a Gesthsemane like some of Paris,” Steward wrote, “my adoration changed from love to hate in one of those dreadful incomplete catharses that only belles can have.” His night ended, however, with a pleasant surprise: at 3 a.m., he looked out his window and saw a nude man in a window across the courtyard. Steward made a sign, and the man came down to Steward’s room in a towel to have sex.

“A week here,” Steward reflected several days later in the hours following a sexual three-way, “seems like a month…At [our sunbath] this PM Jeff [Brash] showed [up] with a cute little ventriloquist…I took him back to my room (not too willingly) for a tongue bath.” That evening, however, Steward’s mood darkened after “a
pédé
was arrested this afternoon at the Y—I’m sure it was the one in room 733, a real auntie.”

As the days passed Steward learned that another Y resident who had been arrested “got 3–5 years [in prison] for sodomy, poor guy.” He then added, “This place is like a disease…The same old round of the chase, the orgasm, the farewell. I found nothing tonight, being always so slow and timid in my cruising…It’s unthinkable that I may be here until Aug 1st and never get one sailor.”

Despite the cold and damp of the San Francisco summer, he slowly settled into a routine of napping, sunbathing, and sketching between assignations. The twenty-ninth was particularly successful; he scored with an air force sergeant in the afternoon, then in the evening had sex with Johnny Clark, a handsome young man in room 730, and after that had sex again with a new arrival, Edgar Patterson. Since Clark and Patterson liked each other, the three subsequently met up for a night in the bars; the following day they hiked to an area under the Golden Gate Bridge, “a secluded wind-broken sandy stretch, [where] in a Whitman idyll [we all had sex together.]” Steward would later use the memory of this afternoon of sex
en plein air
in his first Phil Andros novel,
My Brother, the Hustler
.

Steward now began to notice the finer points of etiquette between the Y’s resident homosexuals. “In the hierarchy of
pédés
here,” he wrote on July 2, “the mark of friendship is ‘Do you go to dinner with him?’—Whereas the blow job means
rien
…and comes first.”

Just as in Paris, no sooner had Steward established intimacy with a man than he began to find the fellow tiresome. Patterson was the first to be crossed off his list. But when handsome Johnny Clark slipped out of Steward’s grasp, the loss caused him real anguish: “Of course, no one here can hold anyone,” he confided in his journal, “but this is awful.” Moreover, because the Y was full of uniformed sailors, Steward found himself in a state of permanent sexual arousal, and as the weeks passed, the condition left him exhausted. “Saw a fantastic thing down by the piers,” he noted one afternoon, “—two sailors standing watch for passersby while a third went down on a fourth. Wanted to bust in, but [was] afraid.” Needing to give expression to his state of sexual overstimulation, he went back to his room and painted a detailed watercolor of the scene.

Seeking new thrills, he convinced a friend named Fritz Christenson to pimp for him, for the idea of being a whore in the service of another man was a fantasy that had captivated him for years. On the Fourth of July, Christenson delighted Steward by sending up “a sailor, a little pudgy one…But at any rate, a sailor. [I had him] twice.” After another unsuccessful night out cruising the Paper Doll, the 356, Keeno’s, the Black Cat, and Chilli’s, Steward had Christenson pimp for him again, and was “wakened ungodly early to go to Fritz’ room to do a bald mechanic.” That evening, over dinner with Edgar Patterson, Steward found himself growing weary and disgusted with himself, and noted that he “grew teary over the prospect of our life…[It may have been] very adolescent, but I’m happy I can still feel about something.”

Cruising, Steward found, made him increasingly anxious and lonely, for there was very little tenderness in the encounters and absolutely no continuity. He was therefore delighted two nights later to note in his diary that “at 12:30 Tommy Tomlin (real name: Emmet) called, to stay all night…It was a very Whitman thing, ‘his arm around me—that night I was happy.’”
^*
Tomlin proved a charming dinner companion as well as bedmate, and in the days that followed, Steward took a great liking to him. Apart from having sex with him and dinner with him, Steward sketched him repeatedly, and described him in his diary as a “charming elfboy.”

Even as yet another man was arrested at the YMCA for homosexual activity, Steward could not help writing in his diary about the elation he felt in being there. “SF induces a lyric mood in me,” he wrote, “a feeling of high destinies working out. My perceptions, reactions increased. Sense of wonder and freedom.” That feeling of exhilaration reached a high point on the fourteenth, which he described as “one of the really perfect days of my life…Johnny Clark took me in his car to Twin Peaks, Sea Cliff, Cliff House, Gold[en] Gate Park, [the] de Young Museum, Sausalito, Stinson Beach (for a wonderful hour in the sun)—radio music, the mountains, vistas, the sea, Coit Tower—everything. I had a feeling of climax, riding along nearly naked in the car with him. Superb.”

One trick now followed another, and in the journal Steward did little to distinguish among them. There were, however, some emotional ups and downs: on the eighteenth, he watched two young air force recruits horse around affectionately, and was moved almost to tears; on the nineteenth, he took a day trip to Lake Temescal with two buddies and gave way to melancholy; on the twentieth, it was “dinner alone (Trocadero [restaurant])…In the evening, befuddled by poor lighting, went to [room] 643 to bring succor to some poor old ex-seaman, and I
do
mean
old
.” July 21 brought “good mail from Kinsey…asking about [my] Emb[arcadero] record…and one from Julien Green, [and] also [one from] Jorge da Silva with porny excerpts from his journal.” The letters cheered him up—even though Kinsey had taken Steward to task for his lax record-keeping at the YMCA, writing,

Steward wrote back that he would be pleased and flattered to make such a contribution to the Institute for Sex Research, and added by way of explanation that “this time—largely because I really had the intention of gathering material for another novel, a kind of h[omosexual] ‘Grand Hotel,’
^*
I’ve been typing up voluminous notes on the various
modi operandi
and the personalities here. I have about ten pages already typed, and some five or six thousand words…I’ve also done about twelve or thirteen sketches, all ‘inspired’ by Embarcadero events, and some accomplished with the assistance of willing posers (or
poseurs
?) that you may be interested in seeing.” He went on to note that, out of frustration with Morihien,

Steward had no intention of actually publishing a bootleg
Querelle
, but Kinsey, deeply alarmed by the idea, responded, “May I save you the prospect of considerable difficulty by advising you not to have business dealings with Ben Abrahamsen [
sic
]. We can talk that over when I come to Chicago.”

On the twenty-second, Steward put on his leather jacket and went out for another night of cruising at the Paper Doll and the Black Cat, but no one was interested in him, and he came home alone. The twenty-third was his forty-fourth birthday, and he sank into his usual birthday depression. On the twenty-fourth, he tricked with a straight-looking railroad worker who turned out to have a male lover; on the twenty-fifth he participated in two three-ways. On the twenty-seventh, just a few days before the end of his vacation, he got up “bright and early, finding my way to SF State College (both branches) and arrang[ing] an interview [there] tomorrow. A brand new campus—new, modern, colorful buildings—sunlight—my God, that’s where I should be teaching!”

Upon his return to the YMCA he wrote: “I find my mood changing…For a while I thought it would be amusing to have two [men] a day in July…[But] that no longer seems important…[I have undergone] a psychic shift [away from sex].”

On his last day in San Francisco, Steward received a note from his former army lover, Bill Collins, inviting him down to La Jolla—but it was too late: the man who had once meant so much to him was simply too far away to visit. Similarly, he had never gotten around to seriously interviewing in the Bay Area for a teaching job. Steward’s sex vacation was over, and he was heading back to Chicago with very little to show for it apart from a diary full of sex records and the outline for a sex novel based on all he had seen and heard and done.

The San Francisco journal ends abruptly. In his later tally for Kinsey, Steward noted that in his forty-two days there, he had had sex sixty-three times with thirty-eight new people. In the months that followed, he would attempt to draft up the many small dramas and cruising rituals he had witnessed at the Embarcadero YMCA into a novel, but it never got further than an outline—one he later donated to the Institute for Sex Research. Such a novel would of course have been unpublishable, and Steward knew it, so he abandoned it.

Even so, the story of his summer was not over, for Steward received two substantial letters that autumn. He sent them on to Kinsey in late November of 1953, and Kinsey, after reading them, placed them into Steward’s Embarcadero journal as an addendum. The first of the letters had been dictated by Emmet “Tommy” Tomlin, the “charming elfboy” in whose arms Steward had passed the night in a Whitmanesque idyll, to his friend Bob Newton. The second came from Newton himself. Newton’s letter explained that shortly after Steward’s departure, Tomlin had been arrested and charged with section 288-a of the California penal code—Newton’s discreet way of noting that Tomlin had been arrested for having sex with a minor. It went on to explain that when Tomlin had been unable to raise the five hundred dollars bail money, he had been thrown in jail. He then spent seven weeks waiting for his case to come up. The trial was to take place sixty days later and last three weeks; as a result, Tomlin would have spent four months in jail even before the case against him was decided.

The letter from Tomlin pleaded with Steward to help in any way he could, for Tomlin had neither money nor legal contacts. Since Tomlin himself was not much older than a minor, he was presumably being threatened with rape and brutalization by his fellow inmates on a day-today basis. Unable to send a letter directly to Steward from prison, he had dictated it instead to Newton, who had sent it from outside.