Author Justin Spring was on hand recently at the Chicago History Museum to discuss his book on the life of Samuel Steward. Steward's meticulous journals and artwork relating to his adventurous sexual life were the foundation of Spring's biography Secret Historian. Steward's work was also featured in an ongoing exhibition at the New York Museum of Sex entitled "Obscene Diary: The Secret Archive of Samuel Steward: Professor, Tattoo Artist and Pornographer."
Spring said that one factor in writing this biography and taking ten years of his life to research the life of Steward was because "people who bear witness to their sexuality make it possible for the rest of us to live as 'us.'" He said that work focusing on gay artists or writers from Steward's time is typically challenging to research since many artists living in the pre-Stonewall era of gay culture were looked down on like "leprosy or communism. Many artists destroyed all of their records."
Steward was an anomaly in the back-alley and heavily closeted '50s. He collected data and in some cases "souvenirs" of his sexual liaisons from very early on. Spring found records and photographs of a gold monstrance holding the pubic hair of Rudolph Valentino, with whom Steward had sex. Steward also recorded an experience with Rock Hudson in an elevator of the Marshall Field's Store on State Street.
Steward kept what he named the "Stud File." This was a catalog of every single man that Steward had had sex with, including names, availability, physical descriptions, penile measurements, dates of the encounter and what sex acts were actually performed. It was no surprise that Dr. Alfred Kinsey became interested in Steward's sex life from a research standpoint. Kinsey was fascinated with the breadth of Stewards records and asked him to be an unofficial associate in Kinsey's famous study on sex and sexuality, which lead to the development of the "Kinsey Scale."
A former professor at DePaul University, Steward left his work as an educator and devoted his time to the art of tattooing. Spring explained that Steward earned more than twice as much from his work as a tattoo artist as he did as a professor. Phil Sparrow Tattoos opened at 655 S. State St., here in Chicago. Even while tattooing, Steward continued to keep a more than 1,000-page diary of his sex life in the tattoo parlor. For Steward, the act of tattooingthe intimacy of the art itselfwas a sexual high. Later, Steward taught Chuck Renslow of IML (International Mr. Leather) fame to tattoo.
In 1965, Steward left Chicago and moved to Oakland, Calif., where he continued to tattoo. In fact, he became the tattoo artist of the Hell's Angels bike gang, who actually became quite close to Steward. Steward eventually shut down the tattoo parlor due to increasing neighborhood violence. At one point, he watched his neighbor bleed to death in front of his shop after a violent attack.
Steward also wrote gay erotica under the pseudonym, Phil Andros. Originally written as pulp fiction during the '40s and '50s, the work was a follow up with his work for "The Circle" magazine in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, Steward's work was republished using cover art from his friend, Tom of Finland.
Towards the end of his life in the 1980s, Steward became very melancholy. He died in obscurity, but as Spring put it, "He lived his life as he saw fit."