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Written by Louis Weisberg, Staff writer
Nov 17, 2010
Justin Spring reads at 4 p.m. Nov. 30 at The Pyle Center (Room 313) on the UWM campus, 702 Langdon St., in Madison.
“Do I contradict myself?” poet Walt Whitman asked in “Song of Myself.”
“Very well, then I contradict myself,” he answered. “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Those words proved prophetic for Sam Steward, who was inspired by Whitman from an early age, both as a literary figure and a gay role model. Steward, the subject of Justin Spring’s absorbing biography “Secret Historian” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a 2010 National Book Award finalist, contained many selves – and some of them contradicted others with dangerous force.
Spring hints at the breadth of Steward’s personae in the book’s subtitle: “The life and times of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artist and sexual renegade.” But not even that lengthy descriptor does service to the range of life experiences covered by this detailed and meticulously crafted chronicle of one of the most fascinating and, until now, forgotten lives of the 20th century.
Steward, who lived from 1909 to 1993, lost his mother and was abandoned by his father at a young age. Reared by two single aunts who owned a boarding house in small-town Ohio, Steward turned to literature and sex for solace – for, as Spring explained during a recent visit to Milwaukee, “Sam realized his sexuality early and often.”
Although both interests defined his life, the latter would eventually overwhelm the former.
Steward began adulthood as a brilliant academic and promising novelist, with aspirations of living a literary life in Paris. He developed close (and, when possible, sexual) friendships with some of the most prominent writers of his day, including Thornton Wilder and Gertrude Stein.
Steward lived with at least one foot out of the closet at a time when homosexuality was not only a career-killer but also a prosecutable offense. But he was hardly a gay rights champion. In fact, his self-loathing, as well as his disdain for other “homosexuals,” led Steward down a psychic rabbit hole into a wonderland of masochism so violent that it’s a miracle he survived it.
“He didn’t know if he was going to get killed or have the orgasm of his life,” Spring said of Steward’s rough-trade experiences, which grew more brutal as the hunger for novelty drove him to ever-greater extremes. Among his stable of regular S/M partners was Chicago leather icon Chuck Renslow, who as a young man treated the smitten Steward rather shabbily.
Fortunately, Steward kept a meticulous and witty record of his encounters in the “Stud File,” as he called it, which provides a deeply personal history of pre-Stonewall gay male subculture in all of its determination, creativity and peril. A diary written with the insight and craft of an accomplished novelist, the Stud File became an essential part of the sex research of Steward’s close friend Alfred Kinsey. It also was an outlet for Steward to validate his sexuality and revel in his conquests, particularly those of heterosexual males – instances of “conquering the bullies” in Steward’s mind, Spring said.
“The Stud File is kind of a trophy case, a way of gloating,” Spring said. “Sam got more tail in his lifetime than any other man he knew and that made him quite pleased.”
For Steward, sex was largely a way of venting anger over the abandonment of his father and the fate of being homosexual in a deeply homophobic world. “It was not happy, fulfilling, emotionally connecting sex, but it was exuberant,” Spring said.
Steward’s obsession with sex ultimately derailed his literary aspirations by exhausting his time as well as his creative energy. Spring, who believes Steward had the makings of an important novelist, has mixed feelings about this outcome. On the one hand, he laments the loss of Steward’s talent. But, “if he had been the literary success that he wanted to be, I wouldn’t have had a book to write,” Spring said.
In middle age, Steward left the literary world behind for good after developing a desire to learn tattooing, which combined his skill in drawing with his obsession for the sailors and thugs who wore tattoos in the 1950s. He learned the craft from Milwaukee master tattoo artist Amund Dietzel and left his position as a DePaul University professor to establish a tattoo parlor on Chicago’s South State Street, one of the city’s most crime-ridden areas in those days.
Steward gained a national reputation as a tattoo artist and ultimately wound up in Oakland, Calif., where he was the official tattooist for the Hell’s Angels. As with all of his experiences, this one too had paradoxical dimensions: Inserting his tattoo needle into hardened criminals who’d committed heinous offenses was an act of intimacy that both horrified and titillated Steward.
But Steward didn’t toss out his typewriter completely. In yet another example of joining together his divergent sub-personalities, Steward turned to penning pornography under the name Phil Andros.
Spring, who spent nine years writing “Secret Historian,” said the book’s success has vindicated Steward’s life by bringing mainstream acceptance to his life’s story and the attention of the literati to his work as a writer. The book is already in its second printing.
“Sam made his life entirely transparent on my behalf, although he didn’t know, of course, who it was for,” Spring said. “But the narcissist in him hoped that someone would come along and discover his story.”
