Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (3 page)

Even so, these new activities made Steward ever more clearly an outsider. To his teachers and his aunts he may well have seemed a handsome young man of great academic promise, but to himself—and among the boys with whom he was active—he was not only a rebel (a boy who stole from the cash register in his uncle’s store, got drunk on stolen wine, and once even threw a pumpkin through the window of the high school principal’s house), but also an oddity (because he was a boy who enjoyed pleasuring other boys sexually, and seemed to have no shame about doing so). To Steward, who had basically already accepted that he would never quite “fit in,” his sexual activities were just another aspect of his teenage rebellion. With puberty, he later observed, “the birth of desire had taken place in me, and the patterns that I needed to survive were firmly imprinted by the time I left the town [of Woodsfield]: concealment and pretense, duplicity, a guise of wide-eyed innocence—and a kind of ‘passive aggression’ [unusual] in such a shy-seeming young man.”

Of course, Steward was hardly alone in adopting such a strategy; most homosexual young men of his generation found themselves facing a similar crisis of disconnection from the society around them as they became sexually active. Just as the orphaned and rejected Jean Genet (Steward’s exact contemporary) would note that through homosexuality, violent crime, and thievery he had “resolutely rejected a world which had rejected me,” Steward took a similar view of his departure from the upstanding life into which he had been born, and toward which his aunts had so earnestly propelled him:

Steward’s ability to think clearly and without too much anxiety or self-blame about his sexual activities (or at least to view them with a certain degree of humorous detachment, and to recognize them not as aberrant behaviors, but rather as aspects of an essential self that absolutely
had
to find expression) is something he later credited to an extraordinary boyhood find: a copy of Havelock Ellis’s
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume II: Sexual Inversion
. Steward had serendipitiously discovered the book under a bed in the boardinghouse, where a traveling salesman, after stealing it from the “restricted” section of an Ohio library, had subsequently left it behind.

A voracious reader even in his early teens, Steward had already special-ordered Freud’s
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
and
The Interpretation of Dreams
through the Woodsfield confectioner by the time he found the Ellis volume. But the latter book was a unique godsend, for this landmark of early-twentieth-century sex research was particularly sympathetic toward “sexual inverts” and “sexual inversion”—that is, to homosexuals and to homosexuality. The book immediately set Steward’s mind at ease about just who and what he was, and proved a welcome alternative to the vague but terrifying sermons he had heard all through childhood about “sexual sin.” Thanks to Ellis, “not only did I discover that I was not insane or alone in a world of heteros—but I [also] learned many new things to do. I made a secret hiding place for the book under the attic stairs, and read and read and read. Thus I became an expert in the field of [sex] theory (by the time I finished the book I probably knew more about sex than anyone else in the county) and then began to make practical applications of this vast storehouse of material.”

Steward affects nonchalance about his sexual identity in his memoirs, and doubtless he was nonchalant about it for much of the time. But he also faced a very difficult moment of self-recognition in mid-adolescence, as he realized that what he was getting up to with other boys was simply not acceptable. The realization became manifest in an incident involving, of all people, his father.

Steward’s father had been largely absent throughout his childhood; during that time, Samuel Vernon Steward’s brief, rare visits to the boardinghouse were almost always painful ones, for his inability (or unwillingness) to provide for his children had complicated the lives of Steward’s aunts considerably, and they resented him. They also resented his involvement with other women, since they felt he ought to have remained faithful to the memory of their sister. His ongoing dependence on drugs and alcohol, meanwhile, had led him to ignore both the emotional and the financial needs of his children.

The son of a country doctor, he had dabbled with drugs since boyhood. He had obtained virtually unlimited access to drugs as a young adult by securing a pharmacist’s license through the study of pharmacy in college. His subsequent experiments had led him to become a frequently relapsing opium addict
^*
who also “dabbled largely in [other] drugs, especially laudanum and morphine.” Though in many ways a weak man, he was capable of unexpected violence; one of Steward’s few early childhood memories was of watching his father hit his mother hard across the face, merely for having dropped and broken his bottle of ketchup.

In later life, Steward kept no photographs of his father, only a couple of inconsequential letters and a small book of occasional speeches. The contents of these documents suggest he was a man inclined to sanctimony. The fact that he went on to spend twenty years teaching a Sunday Bible class at the church across the street from the boardinghouse where his children were growing up without his financial support suggests that there was much about him that Steward might justifiably have disliked.

According to Steward, his relationship with his father worsened after the two were tested for their IQ:

The final break between father and son came after. Steward wrote a sexually suggestive note to a handsome young traveling salesman at the boardinghouse, and the salesman, outraged, subsequently gave the note to the proprietor of the town’s only restaurant, thereby making the proposition—and the proof of it—town-wide public knowledge. Publicly shamed by his son, Samuel Vernon Steward drove the boy out to the countryside to discuss the matter in the privacy of his car. There, as Steward later recalled, his father had bawled him out:

And Steward did go to the professional whore, too—using his own five dollars, since his father declined to pay for it. He described the encounter with the girl in the neighboring town as “a sad little experience…[which] took me a long time—and finally the girl herself had an orgasm. My own was brought about by thinking of [my friend] Carl.”

The matter might have ended there, but Steward sneaked a look at his father’s diary a couple of weeks later. There, to his enormous shame, he read his father’s account of the situation, one which noted that the experience had, in his father’s words, “cut my heart out.” Much as Steward would have liked to discount both his father and his opinions, he could not deny his father’s great sorrow, shame, and embarrassment at the public revelation of his son’s homosexuality, for the facts were all too plain upon the page.

In a letter Steward wrote to Alfred Kinsey shortly after their first meeting in 1950—a year and a half after his father’s death by an overdose of amphetamines mixed with alcohol, and more than twenty-five years after being confronted by his father with the note to the traveling salesman—Steward wrote Kinsey, “I guess the psychic trauma of my father’s rejection of me went much deeper than I realized.”

He then added,

The note is telling, for it suggests that with the public revelation of his homosexuality, Steward felt that he had been cast off not only by his father, but also from his father’s religion—and with it, all that had up to that point made him secure in the world. But apart from Steward’s disconnection from both his father and his religion, there was a loss of something even more important: a loss of connection to truthfulness. Steward was, despite his playful love of duplicity, a person for whom truth was of primary importance. Even if he had felt no shame about his homosexuality, Steward must at least have been shamed by his own dishonesty. And of course, Steward had no one to blame for this dishonesty but himself. He lived in a world where the truth about his sexuality was simply not acceptable, and so, when pressed, he had done the only thing he could do: he lied.

•

Two of Steward’s aunts moved to Columbus in 1926, selling their share of the Woodsfield boardinghouse in order to buy and run a boardinghouse that was just a short walk from the Ohio State University campus. They did so for the express purpose of seeing Steward and his little sister, Virginia, through their college years at OSU, for they had resolved to provide their children with the best possible university education despite their extremely limited income. Taking his last year at a public high school in Columbus rather than in Woodsfield, Steward helped out at the new boardinghouse in whatever way he could; he also continued to write poetry and fiction, play jazz piano, and collect celebrity autographs and letters. Since many entertainers passed through Columbus on whistle-stop tours, he was now able to pursue them in person, simply by waiting outside their theater or else in the lobby of the town’s best hotel.

Steward was by now also having a good deal of casual sex, mostly with the undergraduate males with whom he shared his home. “My aunts’ house on Seventeenth Avenue had about eleven rooms,” Steward later recalled. “Six of the bedrooms were rented to two boys each, making a full house of a dozen young men. Over the years I managed to have about half the population of the place—some reluctant, some returning again and again.” Steward’s most remarkable sexual experience, however, happened as a result of his autograph-collecting
^*
adventures, and took place in downtown Columbus.

Although Steward never mentioned the encounter in his published memoirs, he detailed its specifics in an interview he granted to a friend just four years before his death:

The great silent-film actor Rudolph Valentino was always assumed to be forcefully heterosexual, even while under attack by the popular press as a promoter of male effeminacy. Steward had long been in awe of him, for throughout the 1920s Valentino had been a top Hollywood star worshipped as a paragon of virility. Just six days before coming to Columbus, however, Valentino had been lambasted for his mannerisms in the
Chicago Tribune
, in what later became known as the “Pink Powder Puffs” incident. Steward later described it in his account of their meeting: