Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (52 page)

I wish there were some magic words that I could say [to ease your pain]…Out here in one of the centers where the plague rages without cease, a kind of numbness has descended on all of us; we seem to be unable any longer to react…You have your faith, which it is good to see has not deserted you, and it will help to bring you a measure of calm. My master’s thesis many years ago was written on the mutability cantos of Spenser, and it always rather comforted me to remember that the closing lines were those selected to be graven on the tombstone of Joseph Conrad: “Sleep after toyle, porte after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life doth greatlie please.”

I sensed a small note of apology in your saying that you were not sure I wanted to read about your loss. That of course was…nonsense…Friends are
there
and
are
to be counted on—and as long as I am around, I’ll expect to share in your sadness as well as your happiness. Just be yourself, old friend, and your love for Ken and your faith—and this old man—will see you through.

Sam called me at my dad’s on Christmas Day 1993 at about noon…He had felt poorly [and] the doctor had recommended he call 911 and go to the hospital…We spent hours in Emergency while the staff assessed his condition [and we] passed the time talking. Sam was himself and not in pain…When a doctor asked Sam to remove the top of the gown he had been given in order to take stethoscope readings, I saw for the only time in my life the chaplet of roses tattooed round Sam’s neck. It was quite faded, and of course his skin was loose, but it was clearly a beautiful tattoo. I remember feeling sorry that Sam had never volunteered to show it to me, presumably for reasons of vanity about the condition of his body.

[Sam’s sister] was alive and offered to come visit Sam, but she was frail and Sam asked her not to come…I think that she and Sam each knew that the other was likely to die at any time and had accepted the fact that they might never see each other in person again. I was aware of Don Allen visiting a number of times (daily?) and the couple from the house in front of his cottage [visited him as well]. Their little girl sent a hand-colored get-well card which touched Sam (uncharacteristically). Others may have visited, but I didn’t see them and don’t know of any. I do not remember if Jim [Kane] came. Sam was very afraid of dying and I know he didn’t want to have to cope with small talk and encouragement. [He] died [of heart failure] on 12/31/1993.

By the time Steward wrote his will, the world around him had changed so drastically that he doubted his lifelong sexual record-keeping remained of interest to anyone. And like many collectors, he so strongly identified with his various collections that he found the idea of parting with them impossible. As a result, nearly all of his books, papers, photos, artwork, and memorabilia remained in his bungalow at the time of his death,
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and even in his will he left the decision of what to do with the various collections to his executor. Jim Kane’s “slave” Ike Barnes was to have been that executor, but Barnes had developed AIDS and died just six months before Steward did. Without a sensitive executor, the contents of the bungalow might very easily have been thrown away, for the little house was a stinking, densely packed mess—and the new executor, Michael Williams, needed to sell the property relatively quickly in order to fulfill his immediate obligations to Steward’s beneficiaries. At the same time, the few libraries and archives around the country that were then collecting papers relating to homosexuality were facing a glut of sudden donations as a result of deaths caused by the AIDS epidemic. In any event, no library expressed an interest in acquiring Steward’s remaining papers.

Williams, however, was a trained librarian with a strong interest in gay culture, so he began sorting through Steward’s things with an almost fanatical diligence. He later recalled that “the task of clearing [out the] six-hundred-square-foot cottage was monumental and took me over seven months [working full, eight-hour days]…There were books, tapes, magazines, papers, and a huge quantity of things [piled three feet high throughout the house]. All of the rooms were threaded with pathways between the furniture and the walls. I took a leave of absence from my job and dedicate[d] all my time to [it].”

Since Steward’s own manuscripts, journals, photographs, letters, and papers had no financial value, Williams was eventually free to do with them as he liked. As he wrote to Don Allen six months after Steward’s death:

When Williams sold the bungalow property on Ninth Street, he removed approximately eighty boxes of material, much of it either moldy or soiled, or smelling of dog urine. Unable to face the enormous challenge of cataloging it, he simply placed the unsorted boxes in his attic along with Steward’s ashes—for while Steward had prepaid his cremation costs, he had made no specific request for the ashes’ dispersal, and Williams, being a man of sentiment, felt no immediate need to part with them.

In the eight years following Steward’s death, few people expressed an interest in either Steward or his writings. The small group of papers that Steward had donated to Boston University’s special collections library in the mid-1980s had never been requested by any researcher other than myself, nor looked at by anyone apart from the librarians who had received and cataloged them. His substantial contributions to the Institute for Sex Research, meanwhile, were closed even to sex researchers, for they were at that point considered a part of his sexual history. Only a month before my first visit to the Kinsey Institute (as the Institute for Sex Research is now known), its librarians finally generated a finding aid for the portions of the Steward papers it considered independent of his confidential sexual history, thereby opening them for reading by qualified researchers. But reading through those papers could take place only by appointment in Bloomington, Indiana. Appointments were granted only to qualified researchers (with the specific proviso that neither photocopying nor photographing would ever be permitted) for a maximum of seven hours per day, weekdays only. As a result, I was the first person outside of the institute ever to work with the Steward papers, and the first person permitted to read through the newly opened section of the papers in their entirety.

The Kinsey library was not the only one to pose significant challenges to my research. I faced a similar situation at the Beinecke Library at Yale, which had no online record of Thornton Wilder’s letters to Steward. The book of Thornton Wilder–Gertrude Stein correspondence that had been published by Yale University Press in collaboration with the Beinecke Library even went so far as to state that no correspondence from Wilder to Steward was known to exist. Only when I insisted upon the existence of those letters within the library—and demonstrated that their acquisition by the Beinecke had predated the publication of the Stein-Wilder book by many years—were the letters found for me among the library’s uncataloged holdings. Similarly, while the Yale library system is one of the best and most extensive in the world, it had none of Steward’s Phil Andros fiction, for it was pornography. And while the library did possess a copy of Steward’s
Chapters from an Autobiography
, it kept that memoir in “restricted access” off-site storage, far away from the library stacks. When I questioned a librarian about the restriction (the memoir, while risqué, is far from pornographic), I was told that books with strong sexual content were restricted because they were frequently either stolen or mutilated, and therefore were categorized as “restricted” for their own good.

I began then to realize that while some of Steward’s writings had entered various public institutions, many had nonetheless remained either hidden or kept under close guard simply because of the often difficult relationship of library collections to writing that features explicit sexual content. Even the Kinsey library, despite feelings of great goodwill toward my project, withheld from me nearly all of Steward’s photographic contributions to the Kinsey archive, its partial copy of Steward’s Stud File, all of Steward’s sexual history, his sex film with Miksche, and many of his various other contributions to its archive, including his sex calendars. (It had also lost the single remaining manuscript of Steward’s 1939 “Chicago” novel.) Had Steward not kept so many of his papers with him until the day of his death, and had Williams not subsequently kept them in his attic for the near decade that followed, I very well might never have known enough about Steward’s life, work, and record-keeping to write his life story. The vast, soiled, jumbled, and deeply disturbing collection of papers, photographs, drawings, and objects I found in Williams’s dusty attic was, paradoxically, the best possible starting point for the researching and writing of this book.

•

Samuel Steward began his life in a time and place in which nearly any public discussion of sexuality was discouraged, and in which the topic of homosexuality rarely entered public discourse. As a result, the various strategies by which men who had sex with men were able to function in society were essentially hidden from view. In Steward’s recollection, his early years were ones of relatively open sexual experimentation and activity (though also painful and lonely years as well); apparently, only as society became more conscious of the nature and statistical prevalence of homosexuality within the general population did it become more violently repressive of it. Steward’s lifelong documentation of his sexual activity before, during, and after that shift into both consciousness and repression tells the intimate story of one highly intelligent, exceptionally honest, and significantly troubled man whose life was decisively changed by his unwillingness to submit to a form of social oppression he knew to be unjust.

Academic and popular accounts of homosexual life during the 1940s, ’50s, early ’60s have generally been accounts of marginalization, trauma, and victimhood. Tales of persecution and internalized self-loathing are rarely inspiring; but prejudice, persecution, blackmail, and social ostracism were, in fact, the essential conditions of an entire generation of homosexual men who lived through a period of sexual intolerance and social opprobrium that is barely imaginable today. No wonder, then, that so few lively accounts of everyday homosexual experience survive from that time. But Steward was different: in quietly rejecting society’s notion that both he and his sexual nature were abhorrent, he had the presence of mind and the force of character to insist that society was wrong, not he. His various life records demonstrate, as few others have, just how difficult a set of circumstances and prejudices surrounded and shaped his everyday existence.

Steward suffered an enormous amount of artistic and professional rejection throughout his life. Though a writer and scholar of proven talent, he could find no comfortable place for himself in the literary or academic worlds. For nearly two decades the basically impossible situation in which he lived prompted him to escape into self-destructive alcoholism. But after achieving sobriety he followed Jean Genet’s strategy of resolutely rejecting the world that had rejected him. In dropping out of the “respectable” world of academe to become a skid-row tattoo artist, he found a place for himself in which, though still marginalized and looked down upon, he was nonetheless basically free to live, work, and have sex as he pleased. Steward was not unscarred by the various forms of rejection he had already faced in his old life (and would continue to face in his new one), nor by the enormous loss of prestige he suffered in the descent from university professor to tattoo artist. But it was Steward’s lifelong struggle with self-esteem—in other words, his lifelong search for pride, dignity, and self-respect, or what Gertrude Stein had once so plainly described to him as “the question of being important inside in one”—that was clearly his central life issue. That question of self-respect (or the lack of it) was, of course, intimately connected to his sexual identity. Only Steward’s extraordinary sense of humor, his abiding love of creative play, and his equally well developed ability for “detatchment” helped him to keep his lifelong psychic misery at bay. In doing so, he compiled a singular body of unique, fascinating, and highly transgressive work.

•

While Steward’s later life was particularly lonely, the major sorrow he lived with during his final years was not so much that of loneliness as of literary failure. He had made a brilliant start in life, and as a young man had had grand literary ambitions; but those ambitions had been sidetracked—at first by his teaching obligations, then by his alcoholism, and finally by his obsessive immersion in sex and tattooing, both of which had taken up enormous amounts of his time, energy, and attention. They were also, of course, sidetracked by his desire to write honestly and candidly about his sexual identity and sexual practices. As a result, he never managed to repeat even the modest critical success of his first novel, and he ended his days with only a couple of substantial literary works published in his own name.

As Steward aged, the detailed records he had kept of his sex life—records that had once seemed so valuable to Kinsey—became increasingly irrelevant to anyone but Steward himself. In turning away from his diaristic endeavors of the 1950s and early ’60s, Steward also unfortunately turned away from a project that might well have resulted in a groundbreaking work of literary confession, for his thousand-page sex-and-tattooing journal is perhaps the central and defining document of his life, and even in its unedited state it makes completely fascinating reading. Instead, at the age of fifty, he moved away from confession to try his hand at erotic short fiction and pornography.
$TUD
, the most literary of these efforts, might well have been taken seriously by critics if it had been published in a timely manner in 1966; but instead it was delayed indefinitely, and then simply remaindered. The Phil Andros novels that followed were works of significant merit, but they were part of a movement so far outside the canon of contemporary literature that they slipped by largely unnoticed at the time of their original publication. Don Allen reissued the Phil Andros novels in the early 1980s, but unwittingly did so at the height of the AIDS crisis, and as a result, critical response to the work was once again muted. Then Steward simply ran out of steam: discouraged by constant literary rejection, slowed by barbiturate use, traumatized by the AIDS epidemic, and weighed down by his own serious health concerns, he seems to have lacked the necessary stamina and ambition to persist. Accepting the fact of his literary failure during those final, isolated years, he repeatedly referred to his existence in letters to friends, only half jokingly, as “my happily wasted life.”

•

Each generation of writers reinvents its perception of sexuality through novels, poetry, and autobiographical writing, and in the process rebels against the perceptions and experiences of the generation before. For male homosexuals in the twentieth-century United States, these shifts in perception have up to now been largely described merely as “pre-Stonewall” and “post-Stonewall.” But clearly there have been other equally significant generational breaks: between pre–World War II and post–World War II; pre-Kinsey and post-Kinsey; pre-McCarthy and post-McCarthy; pre-AIDS and post-AIDS; and, most recently, pre-Internet and Internet. Miraculously, Steward passed through all but the last of these periods, diligently documenting his myriad sexual and social experiences as he went.

During the course of Steward’s lifetime, increasingly forthright descriptions of sex entered literary discourse, at first by being published overseas, then through the boom in pulp fiction, and then, later still, because of significant changes in American anti-obscenity laws. In retrospect Steward was, in his way, in the vanguard of all these cultural shifts, though certainly only a minor presence in any of them. During the 1930s he attempted to publish his erotic works in Paris; in the 1940s he created handmade “underground” pornography; in the 1950s he contributed to European homophile publications; in the 1960s and ’70s he published homosexual pornography. He had started out in the 1930s as a published poet and a literary novelist, and by 1940 he counted a number of significant literary figures as his friends; but by 1970 he was happy enough simply to publish erotic pulp fiction under the pseudonym of Phil Andros and to live in obscurity in the slums of Berkeley. He never expected his Phil Andros novels to be read as literature, and they probably never will be. Even so, their presentation of the nature of male homosexuality is remarkably well thought out, and today these pornographic novels can easily be seen as precursors to post-Stonewall gay literary writing, in which the worlds of homoerotic experience and everyday living are one and the same. Steward’s unpublished writings, meanwhile—his various journals, letters, and diaries—are even more compelling, particularly when combined with his impressively thorough visual and statistical documentation of his sex life. Through them, he has left behind an extraordinarily clear and direct record of the American homosexual experience in the middle of the twentieth century, as well as a fascinating account of how various extraordinary homosexual contemporaries—Stein, Toklas, Wilder, Rose, Wescott, Green, Lynes, and Amory, to name just a few—quietly reconciled their nonmainstream sexual orientations with their cultural and social ambitions, most of which required them to engage in various forms of hypocrisy and self-censorship in order to succeed.