Samuel
Steward was a college professor, tattoo artist, and author. While he
published extensively under his given name, he is perhaps best
remembered for the extraordinarily literate and explicit gay male
erotica he published under the pseudonym Phil Andros.

This is the fifty-third post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian
authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that period)
who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay people
telling what life is, and was, during an important time of history.

   



Steward, Samuel (1909-1993)


In
the words of Terence Kissack, the executive director of the GLBT
Historical Society, "Steward is among the most fascinating figures of
post-World War II queer culture."
Born Samuel Morris Steward on July
23, 1909, in Woodsfield, Ohio, he was the only son of an auditor and an
elementary school teacher.

   

Steward
lived in Woodsfield until the age of 18, when he moved to Columbus,
Ohio in 1927 to attend Ohio State University. After earning bachelor's
(cum laude; 1931), master's (1932), and doctoral (1934) degrees from
Ohio State University, he spent the next twenty years in academia.

   



Steward
was a professor of English at Carroll College, Helena, Montana from
1934 to 1935 and from 1935 to 1936 assistant professor of English at
State College of Washington (now Washington State University) in
Pullman, Washington. He was dismissed from that position in 1936,
however, due to the portrayal of prostitution in his novel Angels on the
Bough, published that same year.

Steward subsequently moved
to Chicago, where he taught as an associate professor of English at
Loyola University from 1936 to 1946 and at DePaul University from 1948
to 1954.

In the course of his lifetime, Steward became acquainted
with some of the greatest, and most notorious, names in
twentieth-century art and culture, including Gertrude Stein and Alice B.
Toklas, André Gide, Thomas Mann, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Alfred
Kinsey. For a brief time, he was the lover of the playwright and
novelist Thornton Wilder.

In 1932, while still a student at Ohio
State University, Steward began corresponding with Stein and Toklas. He
finally met them in person some five years later in France. In a 1993
interview with Owen Keehnen, Steward remembered Stein fondly, saying: "I
found her very warm and almost maternal towards me. My impression was
she was not quite sure of herself and wanted to have the admiration of
even a young squirt like myself."

After Stein's death in 1946,
Steward continued to visit Toklas annually in Paris, until Toklas's own
death in 1967. His friendship with both of them resulted in the memoir,
Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, which
Steward published in 1977, and two mysteries that cast Stein and Toklas
as detectives, Murder Is Murder Is Murder (1985) and The Caravaggio
Shawl (1989).

While on a European tour in 1937, Steward
apparently began a furtive sexual fling with Thornton Wilder in Zurich.
After several awkward encounters, however, their relationship cooled. In
the Keehnen interview, Steward reminisced about Wilder: "Thornton
always went about having sex as though it were something going on behind
his back and he didn't know anything about it. He was more than a
little afraid of it I think."

In 1949, Steward met Alfred Kinsey
and became an "unofficial collaborator" in his research on human
sexuality; the two remained friends until Kinsey's death in 1956.
Steward participated in a bondage and S/M scene in 1949 for Kinsey to
film, with a sadist that Kinsey flew in from New York.

Steward
left the academic world in the mid-1950s to make a living as a tattoo
artist under the name Phil Sparrow. As he explained in an interview,
Steward invented the trade name for his own protection. "I overlapped my
last two years of university teaching with my first two years of
tattooing. I used Phil Sparrow to keep that life hidden from my academic
life. They would not have looked very favorably on that method of
moonlighting."

As an advocate of the theories of Albert Parry,
author of the landmark 1933 book Tattoo, Secrets of a Strange Art as
Practiced by the Natives of the United States and a neo-Freudian who
looked upon tattooing as a sexual act because of the insertion of fluid,
Steward described tattooing as a "sensual experience."
He worked as a tattoo artist in Chicago and Oakland, California until 1970.





In
the 1960s, Steward began writing gay male erotica under the name Phil
Andros. As he explained: "I didn't use the pseudonym to hide anything.
It's a joke. In Greek 'Philos' is 'To Love' and 'Andros' means 'Man.'"
In
an interview given to Contemporary Authors, Steward commented: "I
consider erotica to be the purest form of entertainment, making the most
direct connection between reader and writer and material."



Beginning
with $tud, published in 1966, the Andros books are a series of graphic
and witty accounts in the first person of a fictional hustler. As
Steward explained, he made the narrator of his stories a male hustler
because of a prostitute's "easy entry into any level of society." "He
can go see a judge as easily as he could see a surfer," Steward noted.
While
most of the Andros books were originally published in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, they were revised a decade later to considerable
critical and commercial success.

In an introduction to the 1990
abridged edition of $tud published by Alyson Press, John Preston, the
author of such gay erotic landmarks as Mr. Benson and I Once Had a
Master and Other Tales of Erotic Love, wrote that Andros's works are
"true-to-life travelogues of gay life in America during the Fifties and
early Sixties. While some other writers of 'porn' were content with
one-dimensional characters and nuts-and-bolts sex, Phil Andros was a
pilgrim reporting on the multi-faceted mysteries and fantasies of a
sensual experience that contradicted the mass-market concepts of the
unhappy, guilt-ridden, tragicomic homosexual."

Under his given
name, Steward also published such books as Pan and the Firebird (1930), a
collection of short stories; the memoir, Chapters from an Autobiography
(1981); a historical novel, Parisian Lives (1984); Bad Boys and Tough
Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors, and
Street-Corner Punks, 1950-1965 (1990); Understanding the Male Hustler
(1991); and A Pair of Roses (1993).

Steward died on December 31, 1993, at age 84, of chronic pulmonary disease in Berkeley, California.
Craig Kaczorowski




Bibliography
As Phil Andros:
The Motorcyclist (1953)
$tud (1966)
The Joy Spot (1969)
My Brother, the Hustler (1970; later published as My Brother, My Self)
San Francisco Hustler (1970; later published as The Boys in Blue)
When in Rome (1971; later published as Roman Conquests)
Renegade Hustler (1972; later published as Shuttlecock)
Below the Belt and Other Stories (1975)
The Greek Way (1975; later published as Greek Ways)
Different Strokes: Stories (1984)
As Samuel M. Steward:
Pan and the fire-bird (1930; short stories)
Angels on the Bough (1936)
Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (1977, ed.)
Parisian Lives (1984; novel)
Chapters from an autobiography (1981; memoir)
Murder Is Murder Is Murder (1985; Gertrude Stein-Alice B. Toklas Mystery)
The Caravaggio Shawl (1989; Gertrude Stein-Alice B. Toklas Mystery)
Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: a Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors, and Street-Corner Punks, 1950-1965 (1990)
Understanding the Male Hustler (1991)
Pair of Roses (1993)