His Phil Andross novels portraying gay men as open, healthy and natural got the attention of Christopher Isherwood and Tom Gunn-one was the basis for the first gay porno movie with sound and color.Īlong with Dirk Varden and Richard Amory, author of Song of the Loon, Steward formed the Renaissance His collection of Polaroids is now part of the Kinsey Institute’s collection. Working closely with Alfred Kinsey, Steward shared detailed information about gay life as well as his motivations and fantasies. There he had sex with European and American writers of gay prose. He was also part of the leather community in Chicago with Chuck Renslow’s various publications and “models.” Steward provided him with stories and Renslow provided Steward with a steady supply of models. Part of a community of gay and lesbian artists in Paris Steward idolized André Gide and shared his writing with Gertrude Stein, who encouraged him. With frequent visits to Paris and an active few months at the Embarcadero Y in San Francisco, his early life centered on his life as a professor at DePaul in Chicago.Īs he aged with more rejections in the bars he kept active paying straight men $5.00 for a blow job as well as continuing a sexual relationship with Thorton Wilder. His sexual relationships with a few hustlers continued for years. Justin Spring has captured his complexity and quirkiness in his biography Secret Historian. He led a tortured life abusing alcohol and later barbiturates. Active sexually from the beginning, he was fascinated by young sailors and their uniforms. Unfortunately, they are no longer available. Fortunately, copies of his works are preserved in library archives. His homes were virtual museums of homoerotic art that would have put him in jail if it had ever been raided, common among gay bars and bookstores. He wrote pornographic short stories and longer popular Phil Andross novels when such books were routinely banned. With a love hate relationship with the Catholic Church, he was sexually a masochist with encounters that often left him bruised and injured. Toklas until her death and a keeper of a stud file of all his sexual encounters.Īfter teaching popular English classes for twenty years, Steward became a tattoo artist in Chicago with a steady stream of sailors from the Great Lakes Training Center and later in Oakland, where he worked on most members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. While claiming that he never had “a love affair,” Steward’s “Stud File” meticulously cross-referenced approximately 5,000 sexual experiences with over 800 people during a 50-year period, including locations, coded descriptions of anatomy, and observations of his various activities.Samuel Steward is a little known ancestor but one worth knowing. Not as the crazy uncle in the attic but the strong headed gay cousin a friend of Alice B. The stress of alcoholism, drug use, and depression took their toll on what he called “My happily wasted life.” Steward died in poverty, leaving 80 boxes of letters, photographs, sexual paraphernalia, manuscripts, and a reliquary containing one of Rudolph Valentino’s pubic hairs. He befriended the Angels and became their “official” tattooist (1967–71). In 1964 Steward moved west, settling into a Berkeley cottage behind a house on Ninth Street near University Ave. Repelled by student activism, the “scruffy barrel-bottom scrapings of the ‘60s,” he called Berkeley the “Land That Time Forgot.” Steward opened a tattoo shop, near the Hells Angels motorcycle gang headquarters and the Oakland naval base, at 1727 San Pablo Avenue. His tattoo craftsmanship achieved such renown that he was chosen to secretly tattoo King Frederick IX of Denmark. In the ’50s, after nearly 20 years in academia, Steward reinvented himself under different aliases as a tattoo artist (Doc Sparrow) and gay pornographer (Phil Andros). He developed a close friendship and shared his notes and photos with sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. “Sammy” periodically visited them in France, shared artistic insights, and befriended many in their circle.įixated on his sexuality, Steward documented affairs with an lengthy train of lovers, including Rudolph Valentino, Rock Hudson, Thornton Wilder, Lord Alfred Douglas (Oscar Wilde’s lover), and Andre Gide’s nubile Arab lover. His admiring letters to Gertrude Stein in the early ’30s led to a close friendship with her and Alice B. Steward began his career as a novelist, professor of English at Chicago’s DePaul and other universities, and an editor of the World Book Encyclopedia.
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