Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (19 page)
Authors: justin spring
Tags: #Gay & Lesbian, #Social Science, #College teachers - Illinois - Chicago, #Gay authors, #Literary, #Human Sexuality, #Novelists; American - 20th century, #General, #Sexology - Research - United States - History - 20th century, #Psychology, #Artists; Architects; Photographers, #Body Art & Tattooing, #Authors; American, #College teachers, #Gay authors - United States, #Steward; Samuel M, #Tattoo artists, #Pornography - United States - History - 20th century, #Novelists; American, #Gay Studies, #Authors; American - 20th century, #Education, #Art, #Educators, #Pornography, #20th century, #Tattoo artists - New York (State) - New York, #Sexology, #Poets; American, #Literary Criticism, #Poets; American - 20th century, #Biography & Autobiography, #Teaching Methods & Materials, #Biography
None of Steward’s journals, letters, or statistical compilations of his sexual activities hints even remotely at his great success as a teacher. And yet during the fall of 1951, Steward found himself so wildly popular with the DePaul student body that he was extensively interviewed and photographed for the school newspaper. When he sent Toklas a copy of the glowing profile—one in which Steward’s erudition and dry sense of humor are both very much in evidence—she wrote back, “It was a pleasure to have a glimpse of you in your professional role and a delightful surprise to find you more yourself than ever…Are you getting some of that into your writing—you should. Impish is altogether too easy for you—your writing should be quite new and fresh as you are.”
Steward had in fact returned to writing, but had done so this time as a translator, for since purchasing Morihien’s deluxe edition of
Querelle de Brest
, he had remained enthralled by both the novel and its illustrations. As a way of somehow inserting himself into Genet’s fantasy world, he had decided to translate the novel into English, intending to present it to both Genet and Morihien in Paris the following summer. Since the book could not have been distributed in the United States or the United Kingdom, Steward seems to have hoped that Morihien might publish and sell the English translation in Paris.
Querelle de Brest
surely appealed to Steward for its sexual glorification of the sailor, as well as its descriptions of rough, often violent sex between working-class heterosexually identifying men. But the novel also spoke to Steward’s own troubled perception of his sexual nature, for Genet equates homosexual acts with criminal acts throughout the novel, and Genet’s perception of homosexual identity (whether in describing the desires of Querelle, Lieutenant Seblon, or the other sexually “passive” characters) is always of something monstrous and criminal. And indeed the pleasure Steward took in his own sexual adventures seems to have been darkened and intensified, throughout his life, by a similar psychic conflict. His response to the tortured sexual fantasies of
Querelle
was therefore a response of immediate psychological recognition: Genet’s dreamlike, erotic tale of crime and punishment among sailors and thugs in Brittany was no mere fantasy to him, but rather a vivid evocation of the secret, tortured, highly sexual world in which Steward had lived for the better part of his life.
•
After an introductory visit to the Institute for Sex Research in Bloomington, Steward contacted Kinsey over the summer of 1951 to arrange a number of book and magazine donations. Knowing of Kinsey’s pleasure in nudity and near nudity (Kinsey’s Bloomington neighbors were often scandalized by his outrageously skimpy clothing as he puttered among the irises in his backyard), Steward included a special present in the package, “a pair of Bikinis [from France] which I think will fit you…this very fancy pair has a
coquille
inside to hold your
couilles
, prov[id]ed
que vous n’avez pas plus que deux
.”
*
In November, Steward shipped Kinsey yet more documentation of his sexual activities and interests, and also included a copy of his Ph.D. dissertation, specifically pointing out the chapter that had described the probable homosexuality of Cardinal Newman. Kinsey wrote back, “I am very much impressed with your [dissertation’s] chapter on Cardinal Neuman [
sic
] and Froude. It is very important material…You have a great mind…I wish there were more of these things that we could look forward to.” In the months that followed, Kinsey in turn provided Steward introductions to the artist Paul Cadmus, the novelist Glenway Wescott, and the former book publisher Monroe Wheeler, noting that the last two “had a great deal to do with setting him [Morihien] up in business…and both of them are long-time friends of Genet…They could get Genet’s interest and approval of a translation if it is worthwhile.”
•
In his next letter to Kinsey, Steward suggested that if Kinsey and Dellenback cared to photograph him engaging in sadomasochistic activities, they might consider visiting him in Chicago while the ballet dancer Fernand Nault was in town, for Steward and Nault had already engaged in highly satisfying S/M play on a number of occasions, and he sensed they would probably be doing so again. He also noted, “My contacts still keep apace with my periodicity,
*
and I’ll be sending you the 1951 statistics very soon.”
When Glenway Wescott wrote back to Steward from New York that he would be pleased to read some of the
Querelle
translation, Steward responded:
Querelle seems one of the most fascinating character creations in print [and] has come to be a kind of
Dopplegänger
for me…I began the translation out of a kind of fascinated love…Translating it was, then, a kind of philanthropic work (in the extreme semantic sense
*
of the term). So whatever trickiness may transpire [with Morihien and Genet] is of not much concern to me. I had originally planned merely to put the finished thing in a snap-binder and merely let my friends read it…the idea of possible publication was a very late development.
Upon hearing that Steward was hoping for Wescott’s assistance, Alice Toklas cautioned Steward that Wescott was well known in the literary world as a malicious and self-serving gossip, noting specifically, “If Glenway Wescott could have been useful
bien
but as a judge of literature—hell. He writes pretentious unreal stilted letters to any and every body. I’ve seen a couple and it’s my idea that he hopes that they are being kept and published—in his lifetime. He has by untiring effort over some thirty years become what he believes to be an ultimate man of the world.”
This sharp warning from Toklas (which she sent on January 30, 1952) may explain the uncharacteristically formal tone of Steward’s subsequent letters to Wescott. And indeed he was someone of whom to be wary, for although Wescott’s 1927 novel
The Grandmothers
had achieved critical success, and although he had moved easily among Cocteau’s circle while a handsome adolescent living abroad, he had suffered increasingly from writer’s block as he aged. With that writer’s block had come a tendency to meddle in and gossip about the private lives of others. In 1940 he had published an impressive novella,
The Pilgrim Hawk
, in
Harper’s Magazine
, and subsequently republished it in an elegant small hardcover edition.
*
Since its appearance, however, he had published only one more short novel (
Apartment in Athens
, 1945), which was a commercial failure; moreover, during the period that followed, 1946 to 1949, he had abandoned five different starts at novels. During the same period he had kept detailed diaries of his sex life, for, like Steward, he frequently initiated group sexual activities with younger men, despite the great and inhibiting shame that he felt at having but a single testicle and, in his own words, a “horrid little penis.”
Wescott’s ambivalence to Steward’s
Querelle
project may have been based in part on jealousy (sexual, literary, or otherwise); but it was also based upon a class distinction—for though he came from a modest Wisconsin background, Wescott had achieved financial independence by introducing his brother, Lloyd Wescott, to the heiress Barbara Harrison; after the two were married in 1937, Harrison had then settled an income on her new brother-in-law and given him the tenancy of a small house on her New Jersey estate. As a result, Wescott now considered himself a gentleman as well as a man of letters, and made a point of dressing in fine clothes and affecting an English accent. Steward, who had no such pretensions, would ultimately seem to Wescott very common and “Irish-looking.”
Wescott’s ambivalence to Steward may also have had something to do with the
Querelle
project, for Wescott both disliked Genet and envied his success, describing him to a friend as “that horrid author” and further noting that “my [own] preference in erotica is lower-class, simpler.” Certainly Wescott was jealous of Steward’s close, easy friendship with Kinsey, for during the years 1949 through 1951 Wescott had assisted Kinsey with various projects in Bloomington, and in July 1951 he had initiated a brief sexual affair with the professor—much to the alarm of Kinsey’s associates, who sensed Wescott’s gossiping ways might permanently damage the reputations of both Kinsey and the institute.
On April 5, Steward wrote Kinsey his latest news:
[I] sent [the manuscript] off to Morihien by air-express…and it should be in Paris by now…Even if [Morihien] turns it down, I [might try] the Obelisk Press, though it would be a little strong for them, I reckon. Whatever happens, there will eventually be a copy of the typescript for your collection…
when I get to France, where do you think I’m going first? To Brest of course, looking for the bar-brothel with the iron spikes on the door, haunting the streets and looking for Querelle, and sleeping down there on the slope of [La] Recouvrance amidst the piles of
merde
and snoring sailors just for the hell of it. I may never get to Paris at all…
He concluded by noting, “Present contacts continue to surpass periodicity,
*
an unusually satisfying occurrence.”
Before Steward left for Paris, however, he took a trip to Bloomington to assist in the documentation of a sexual encounter. He did so by “starring” in a Kinsey sex-research film of sadomasochistic sex between men. Kinsey—who was intent on documenting all aspects of human sexual response, and knew that Steward had now been enjoying rough sex for years—had accordingly arranged to film him in an encounter with Mike Miksche, a former air force officer originally from Texas whom Kinsey had first met through Wescott.
Miksche came from a Czech background and stood six foot three. Wescott later described him as “a giant Paul Bunyan type, very strong, with a magnificent physique [and a] tyrannous, psychological sadism…He wanted to dominate everybody…[He] was [also] a terrific performer [and]…a showoff.” Since leaving the air force Miksche had gone into fashion illustration in New York and simultaneously established himself as the erotic artist Steve (or Scott
*
) Masters, whose pseudonymous initials (“SM”) were a coded indication of his sexual interests.
Kinsey had sensed upon meeting Miksche that he might be dangerous or unbalanced. Wescott had gloatingly agreed with him, noting that “a good many of the young masochists express fear of him. They fancy he will murder someone someday.” Miksche had, in fact, recently broken a lover’s ribs. As a result, there was apprehension all around when Steward and Miksche first met in Kinsey’s Bloomington backyard.
Only in 1972, in a biography by Wardell Pomeroy, would anyone from the Institute for Sex Research publicly acknowledge that Kinsey had created film studies of human sexual activity.
*
Funding for the film purchases had come out of monies earmarked for “mammalian studies.” The Kinsey team shot the films in Kinsey’s own home on First Street in Bloomington, in a gabled bedroom featuring only a single small window, a plain board floor, and a mattress.
The film of Miksche dominating Steward was the first homosexual film the team had ever shot. In the three years that followed, Kinsey would film eighteen more homosexual encounters, matching participants that had been suggested by Wescott with partners taken either from a pool of willing Kinsey interviewees or else from the institute’s staff. Steward himself described the experience many years later in an article for
The Advocate
:
Kinsey and I had known each other about a year when he proposed an “arrangement” to me. He was extremely scrupulous about the confidentiality of his “subjects” and never set up assignations of any kind—but his interest in sadomasochism had reached a point of intolerable tension. He knew that I had experimented in that arena and he wanted to find out more.
He therefore asked me to fly down from Chicago, and from New York he invited a tall mean-looking sadist, Mike Miksche, with a crewcut and a great personality…We were to be filmed in an encounter.
It was quite an experience. For two afternoons at Bloomington the camera whirred away. Kinsey prepared Mike by getting him half-drunk on gin—an advantage for him but a disadvantage for me, since I had stopped drinking and could no longer join him in his happy euphoria. Sitting under an apple tree in Kinsey’s garden before the festivities began, the Imp of the Perverse made me look down at Miksche’s stylish brown English riding-boots (black had not yet become the leather-boys standard color) that had a bit of lacing at the instep. I plucked at one end of the lace and untied it, saying, “Humph—you don’t look so tough to me.”
That was a deliberate challenge, of course, for which I paid dearly again and again during the next two afternoons. Mike was quite a ham actor; every time he heard Bill Dellenback’s camera start to turn, he renewed his vigor…at the end of the second afternoon I was exhausted, marked and marred, all muscles weakened. During the sessions I was vaguely conscious of people dropping in now and then to observe, while Mrs. Kinsey—a true scientist to the end—sat by, and once in a while calmly changed the sheets upon the workbench.
At the end of the last session, when my jaws were so tired and unhinged I could scarcely close my mouth, let alone hold a cigarette between my lips, Mike got really angry and slapped me hard on each cheek, saying that I was the lousiest cocksucker he had ever seen.
*
I could have killed him at that moment. I sprang from the bed and ran to the shower; he followed me, but I was still seething. Later that evening Kinsey left Mike and me in separate parts of the library to do some reading; and suddenly Mike appeared, wild-fire-eyed and excited—having stimulated himself with some typewritten s/m stories—and had his way with me on the cold cement floor of the library stacks.
When Kinsey heard of the encounter, he laughed and said, “I hope the blinds were closed.”
Mike Miksche later bore out the theorizing of Theodore Reik, Wilhelm Stekel, and Kinsey himself that sadists were perhaps not as well balanced as masochists, for Mike—after attempting and failing to turn his directions to heterosexuality by getting married—jumped into the Hudson River one day and committed suicide.
*
