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Sexual Outlaw on the Gay Frontier
By PATRICIA COHEN
When the author Justin Spring finally tracked down the executor of Samuel Steward’s estate , he had no idea what this sexual outlaw and little-known literary figure had left behind after his death in 1993.
So
he was taken unawares by the 80 boxes full of drawings, letters,
photographs, sexual paraphernalia, manuscripts and other items,
including an autograph and reliquary with pubic hair from Rudolph Valentino , a thousand-page confessional journal Steward created at the request
of the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and a green metal card catalog
labeled “Stud File,” which contained a meticulously documented record on
index cards of every sexual experience and partner — Rock Hudson , Thornton Wilder , “One-eyed Sadist” — that Stewardsaid he had had over 50 years.
An
attic full of items contained a secret history of a little-documented
strand of gay life in the middle decades of the 20th century. Steward’s
experience stands in stark contrast to the familiar story of furtive
concealment and persecution in the period before gay liberation. As new
biographies of artists and writers like E.M. Forster detail the effects of sexual repression on their work, Steward’s
history shows what a life of openness, when embraced, entailed day to
day.
Mr. Spring, who has written biographies of the American
artists Fairfield Porter and Paul Cadmus, became intrigued by Steward
after coming across some of his witty and ribald letters. He managed to
find the executor, Michael Williams, who was almost as much of an
obsessive hoarder as Steward and had squirreled away the artifacts in
his San Francisco home after rescuing them from the floor-to-ceiling
squalor that the enfeebled Steward had built up in his final years. For
nearly a decade Mr. Williams doggedly eluded rare manuscript dealers
while he pondered what to do with Steward’s legacy.
“It was an
Aladdin’s cave of gay paraphernalia and record keeping that was covered
with dust and smelled like dog,” said Mr. Spring, whose biography “Secret Historian : The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and
Sexual Renegade” is due out next month. (At the moment Mr. Spring is
storing the collection.)
This unusual cache is significant because
source material from this period is rare, said Martin Duberman, a
professor emeritus and founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . “It’s a real treasure trove he stumbled upon.”
Many
of Steward’s contemporaries — and their heirs — destroyed or hid
evidence of their homosexuality. Mr. Spring said, for example, that
Donald C. Gallup, a curator at Yale University ’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, bought 24 of Wilder’s
notes to Steward, but did not catalog them, and they remained on a back
shelf until Mr. Spring traced them.
Jason Baumann, curator of the lesbian and gay collection for the New York Public Library , said, “It’s exactly the kind of material that I constantly have historians and the general public wanting to have.”
Reconstructing
Steward’s life was not easy, Mr. Spring recently explained from his
sunny studio apartment in Midtown Manhattan. At first he didn’t realize
that some of the odd puzzle pieces he happened upon even belonged to the
same jigsaw because Steward had so many identities in an era when
homosexuality could land a person in jail.
The novelist and
professor at a Roman Catholic university who was born in 1909 into an
austere and puritanical Methodist household in Ohio was Samuel M.
Steward. But as the author of gay pulp fiction, he went by Phil Andros
and a half-dozen other pseudonyms; Hells Angels in Oakland, Calif., who
used him as their official tattoo artist, called him Doc Sparrow;
readers of his articles in underground newspapers and magazines knew him
as Ward Stames. To a close circle of artistic friends like Wilder,
Cadmus, Gertrude Stein , Alice B. Toklas, Christopher Isherwood, the photographer George Platt Lynes and others, he was simply Sammy.
Steward was able to take a step toward joining these compartmentalized aspects of his life after reading Kinsey’s landmark report on human sexuality in 1948. The study, which presented
homosexuality as natural and legitimate, inspired Steward to see himself
as a sex researcher and gave his life a new focus and meaning.
A
colleague urged Steward to talk to Kinsey and the two met in late 1949.
Kinsey quickly enlisted him as what Steward called an “unofficial
collaborator,” prompting Steward to become an even more compulsive
chronicler. On each of the 746 cards that ultimately made up his
alphabetized Stud File, Steward listed his sexual partner’s name, his
place in the lineup (i.e., the 354th person Steward had sex with), the
dates and locations of every encounter, a coded description of penis
size and of every specific sexual activity, and a brief comment. Of
Valentino, filed under the actor’s real name, Guglielmi, R., he wrote:
“Nuf sed.”
In Kinsey, Steward found a kindred spirit, a close
friend and an ideal father figure. “I suppose that to a degree I fell in
love with him,” he wrote in a published memoir. (The two never had any
sexual contact.)
Steward’s tales of frequent sexual encounters as a
teenager and undergraduate in Woodsfield and Columbus, Ohio, in the
1920s and ’30s are a counterpoint to the aggressive persecution of
homosexuals during the 1950s McCarthy scare. As Mr. Baumann and other
historians have noted, there was no homosexual panic in those earlier
years because of a reluctance to discuss sex in any detail and the
resulting widespread ignorance.
Mr. Spring said: “It’s all about
language. If there are no culturally accepted words to describe an
experience, it remains off the radar.”
According to Mr. Spring’s
book, Steward came to understand himself only when he was a teenager and
found a copy of Havelock Ellis’s “Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume II : Sexual Inversion,” which had been pinched from the restricted section of an Ohio library.
As a student at Ohio State University in Columbus, Steward said he had many sexual encounters with “straight
young men.” As quoted in the biography, he recounts the atmosphere in
one of his pulp fiction stories: “None of us was coy in those days. ...
We all liked to experiment [and] we found the direct approach daring.”
According to Mr. Spring, only those who performed oral sex were then
considered homosexual.
Ultimately Steward abandoned university
life and entered the tattoo artist’s demimonde full time, but his
determination to indulge his sexual identity fully came with enormous
physical, professional and psychological costs. In Mr. Spring’s telling,
the frustrations of living in this closeted era combined with his
obsession drove Steward to alcoholism and prevented him from living up
to the early promise he showed as a novelist. He suffered through long
periods of dark depression, loneliness and self-destructive behavior.
Dangerously violent characters and sex fascinated Steward, and his
overtures and adventures frequently landed him in the hospital.
“He paid the price for being himself,” Mr. Spring said, “but at least he got to be himself.”