Upon quitting alcohol, Steward found himself much more interested in sex, and much more conscious of his sexual interests as well, for sobriety brought with it a greater day-to-day self-awareness. With the great increase in physical vitality that came with giving up drinking (not to mention the great increase in his free time), Steward began engaging in various forms of creative sex play on a regular basis, including a form that involved writing erotic fiction.
The activity developed out of a chance discovery. During his last months at The World Book Encyclopedia, Steward came across an anonymous note that had been left in a hidden nook in his office building’s hall toilet. Interested, he answered it with a note of his own—so beginning a secret, anonymous sexual correspondence with a man who worked in the same building. Leaving a note every day at the “back of [the] top of [the] toilet bowl, in [a] hole where [the] mortar had fallen out,” Steward wrote explicitly and enthusiastically about his various sexual adventures involving both men and women, and his reward for doing so was a note returned later the same day detailing similar adventures. Steward based his stories on anything that interested him—and they were, in a sense, the beginning of his life as a pornographer. The collected correspondence (his own, combined with that of his correspondent) would also serve as a calling card for the next great mentor to enter Steward’s life, the sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey.*
Steward’s “toilet correspondence” took place from March through June of 1947, and ultimately consisted of 126 pages of single-spaced, typed transcriptions of letters written by Steward to a man named “Bob,” along with Bob’s handwritten responses. The two never saw each other picking up notes, but they did meet briefly to take a look at each other during the first week of the correspondence, and later met once for oral sex. Steward’s letters to “Bob” describing heterosexual sex were, by his own reckoning, 80 percent fictional, with the remaining 20 percent based on his own experiences. His descriptions of homosexual sex, meanwhile, were 30 percent fictional, with the remaining 70 percent based on actual experiences that he had “dressed up” to make better reading. Steward conjectured that “Bob’s” letters, by comparison, were based mostly on fantasies, since many of the things he described were (as he later noted to Kinsey) “quite impossible…[He is] not married, lives with mother, advertises his interest in females but [this] may be only voyeurism or day dreams without experience…[He] spends much time at noon hour in Marshall Fields [sic] in [the] toilets.”
The toilet correspondence offers a funhouse glimpse of Steward’s otherwise underdescribed sexual experiences of the 1930s and ’40s, for they feature a number of highly plausible scenarios that are corroborated by Steward’s Stud File entries. They include an account of his experiences with the two soldiers in Morocco in 1939; another of an orgy of thirty-five men in the navy barracks at Great Lakes Naval Training Station (of whom Steward “had” seven*); and of a sailor and paratrooper duo whom Steward had hosted in his home for a threesome. They also describe Steward’s frequent three-day-long sex-and-drinking benders with Bill Collins. The correspondence also provides “Bob” with the current reckonings of Steward’s Stud File, which in spring of 1947 consisted of “902 parties* with 287 different people.” “I hope you don’t mind being 288,” Steward writes in one note. “Soon as I hit 1000 I’ll consider myself a whore.” In another note Steward recalls being pimped out to six different men in a Columbus hotel room by his black friend Leo, who then concluded the experience by being the seventh man to “take” him—an experience that, according to the Stud File, had taken place in 1942, not in Columbus but on the South Side of Chicago.
In his growing boredom and irritation with “Bob” (who prudishly insisted throughout the correspondence on his preference for sex with women), Steward undertook to educate him on the nature of sex between men, in one instance recommending that Bob read Havelock Ellis. In another Steward mentions his sex story Bell-Bottom Trousers, “about a sailor on a weekend liberty being entertained by a bunch of North Shore gals, along with some other young men.” He also revisited his pickup of a street tough on Rue de Lappe, making no mention of the robbery and assault that had followed it in real life.
Like Scheherazade, Steward had to imagine more outrageous things with each new story to keep “Bob” entertained. As the correspondence neared its conclusion, he began to describe rough sex:
Sure, once in a while the “rough trade” (that means sailors, truck drivers, taxi drivers, and others who won’t do anything with you, who are tough, and whom you take an awful chance with) get rough but I love it…I love to be whipped, too, and there was one guy last summer who left such scars on me I couldn’t go swimming for two weeks. As I say, the old usual ordinary fucking and sucking holds little pleasure for me any more—I’ve had too damned much of it and like the unusual things.
Steward’s final fantasy for Bob was an elaborate one. In it, he announced that he had gone into business with a cab driver who was now acting as his pimp, delivering clients to his apartment and taking 40 percent of his earnings. In describing this scenario, Steward mentioned a mural he had painted in his apartment, in order to arouse visiting clients: “a ‘tantalizer’ about 6' x 4' of a sailor fucking a whore.”* After growing tired of Bob’s repeated dismissals of homosexual sex, as well as bored with Bob’s own barely literate tales, Steward decided to bring the correspondence to a conclusion. He did so by describing how Jimmy, the cabbie and pimp, being “more than wise to all the ways of the world,” had been outraged to learn about Bob. “With typical Italian jealousy and quick reactions, he insisted I put myself completely in his hands and not have anything to do with anybody while he was ‘managing’ me,” Steward wrote Bob. “So this is the last from me, as I sort of like being bossed and having the private whore feeling.”
Bob’s response was conclusive: “Good whoring to you and please forget me entirely. Hope that you destroyed all these as I have being [sic] too dangerous. The pimp need not worry as I go for the babes and [am] not much on fruits. So long!”
Steward, however, would have the last word. As he later explained to Kinsey, “I left no more under the name of ‘Phil’ but discovered that B[ob had] started to leave preliminary notes all over again. I thereupon adopted a different personality (‘Art,’ 19, normal) and after a few illiterate exchanges, I ended it with a blast.”
Steward’s last note to Bob came from his new nineteen-year-old persona, “Art,” who wrote, “I was disgusted with what you wrote…and have decided you’re no good for me…So I am going to put my sign back here and hope for someone that seems to be less mixed up than you are and just wants a good old fashioned suck. You sound even queerer than I am. What do you do, jack off when you read shithouse messages?”
•
The toilet correspondence was but one of several new diversions Steward engaged in as he created a new life away from alcohol. Since he had always loved to draw, he signed up for classes at the Art Institute of Chicago with Salcia Bahnc, an accomplished Polish-born printmaker and illustrator, and there discovered he had a natural flair for line illustration. He simultaneously took up painting, clay modeling, and various other media, in each case working almost exclusively with the male nude as his subject. Over the next five years he would create murals, oil paintings, watercolors, scratchboard illustrations, wire sculptures, photography, incised metalwork, glass etchings, small clay sculptures, painted screens, and painted lampshades, all of them featuring homoerotic themes, and he would install all these various works of erotic art in his apartment. He also experimented with “small tempera portrait drawings with semen as a binder instead of egg white, the fluid being furnished by the subject of the drawing,” thereby creating macabre souvenirs of specific dalliances with men he found particularly attractive.* In his free time he collected homoerotic fetish objects, objets d’art, curios, books, photographs, and prints. The collective result was an apartment Gesamtkunstwerk that made so bold an assertion of the homoerotic self that Alfred Kinsey, who first met Steward in late 1948 or early 1949, had the place photodocumented in its entirety for the Institute for Sex Research.
As Steward became ever more creative in his sobriety, he also became ever more diligent in his research into the nature of his sexual desires. Over the coming decade he would read extensively and in depth on the topic of human sexuality. Moved and inspired by the landmark statistical studies published by Kinsey in 1948, he also became ever more detailed in his own statistics keeping, journal writing, letter writing, and fiction writing about his sexual experiences. In alcohol Steward had sought only oblivion; but now, in sex, he was mindfully pursuing an activity that gave a new focus, meaning, and center to his life. Sexual activity, however much it might have limited or complicated his existence, was also becoming his vocation. Not content with being merely a sex enthusiast, he now sought to become a sex expert.
One of Steward’s greatest interests during this period was exploring the nexus between sexual pleasure and physical pain through spanking, paddling, caning, whipping, and various other forms of physical punishment. Steward had enjoyed such activities since the mid-1930s, but only when he could find someone to engage in them with him, which was rare. While no networks then existed for people with such interests to meet one another, he responded to a carefully worded classified ad in The Saturday Review of Literature of August 1947 requesting correspondence from men interested in whips. In doing so, he met an educated man from New York who worked in magazine publishing whose name was Hal Baron.
While Baron wrote that he had read all about the desire to be beaten in studies of abnormal psychology, he quickly confessed to Steward that he was “much more interested in the experience than in sublimating my desires into reading.” Starting in 1935, at age twenty-one, he had shipped around the world as an ordinary seaman, and during the war he had received a commission as a junior grade lieutenant. “Flogging was not something I ever ran into either in the Navy or the merchant marine,” he wrote Steward; “however I now have a strong suspicion that was because it was not something I looked for.” When Steward mentioned that he, too, was a writer, Baron responded,
While I regard my writing as a craft, not an art, still there are certainly artistic elements in my craft…[I feel that the] same elements of suspense, rhythm, crescendo, climax and satisfying conclusion…apply [both to writing and] to whipping. Never hit in the same place twice, for example, just [as you] don’t repeat the same phrase constantly in a story—unless you’re striving for a certain effect or working in some special way with words as [Gertrude] Stein did. (…I have great respect for that gal.) And there should be an alternation of cruelty and tenderness, the sting of the whip and affection. Or don’t you agree?
Baron then introduced Steward to a professor from Ann Arbor named Hal Stevens, and according to the Stud File, Steward subsequently met and “beat the hell out of him.” Stevens liked his beating enough to return to Chicago later in 1948 and 1949 for more of the same, and more than a decade later he arranged for Steward and two other men to abduct him, beat him, whip him, and “rape”* him.
After Steward’s successful meeting with Stevens, Baron put him in touch with several other Midwesterners who had responded to his Saturday Review ad in search of a good erotic whipping. The fact that both Steward and Baron were willing to take the dominant as well as submissive roles in such activity (combined with their shared literary interests) resulted in a growing epistolary friendship. But when they met several months later, they felt no sexual attraction whatsoever, and no further relationship (apart from a cordial friendship) would ever develop between them.
•
In early 1948, Steward came to the end of his work on the encyclopedia. Though given a warm letter of recommendation, he had no luck finding another editorial position in Chicago, and his misery at the prospect of returning to teaching triggered a major alcoholic relapse. As he wrote Hal Baron in April:
I’m in a comparatively lucid interval at present because I haven’t had a drink in four weeks; it probably won’t last much longer. But when I wakened one Sunday afternoon and found a small quarter-sized anchor tattooed on my left shoulder, and heard later in the day I’d broken a woman’s finger the night before,* I decided that maybe it was time to ease off a little. I don’t recommend sobriety, however, to anyone; and as soon as a little more passing time erases the shame I feel…I’ll probably be right back at the bottle.
He later articulated the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of this first tattoo somewhat differently:
Perhaps the first tangible sign of my “anti-intellectual” revolt was that I got a small tattoo very high on my left deltoid. This was an odd experience for me. I had been “supering” with all kinds of companies that came to Chicago…In the Ballets Russes version of the Nutcracker I was always the gondolier who in the last scene rowed the little girl heroine [back from] the land of make believe. For this the Ballets Russes furnished me with a gondolier’s costume, a part of which was a knit sleeveless dark-green nylon shirt.
It occurred to me that a gondolier might very well have a small anchor on his shoulder…The idea of getting the anchor tattooed on me was both fascinating and terrifying. Accordingly, one rainy night before that year’s arrival of the Ballets Russes, I fortified myself with a couple of drinks and went down to South State Street in Chicago to get one.
I got it, all right—from “Tatts” Thomas, a skinny, baldheaded man with a mustache, the ends of which were waxed to long fine points.
Steward was again binge-drinking heavily; while doing so in June, he met a blue-collar former marine who subsequently became a long-term sex partner. Steward’s first account of him went to Baron:
I got to talking with a kind of long-nosed Pollack, an ex-marine who was very sympathisant—and he was going to get married—is going to—come this next weekend. Finally a lot of plain talk got him to say yes, he’d come home with me, “but,” said he, “I’m broke and can’t pay you anything for it.” Lord God, I wanted to laugh but couldn’t very well.
He later gave a more detailed account of the man, whose name was Bob Berbich, in his memoirs:
In all those [sixteen] years [of our acquaintance] Bob really answered several of my needs; he was [employed] successively [as] a sailor, a motorcycle delivery boy, a taxi-driver, a night steel worker, a truck driver and a uniformed guard. In my growing preference for the blue collar instead of the white, these occupations of his were just what I needed for my fantasex.
Over the summer, Steward traveled to New York. He wrote Thornton Wilder to say he was planning a visit to New Haven while on the East Coast, to arrange the donation of Stein’s letters to the Yale library* (for he hoped to visit Wilder, who lived close by); but Wilder seems to have carefully set aside the letter until after Steward had come and gone, later writing him:
Oh, oh. I humbly beg your pardon…Tomorrow [my sister and I] sail for 6 months abroad…so please forgive my silence. I hope you did come to New Haven and consign your G.S. letters here…I shall be seeing Alice before long and we shall talk of you. As a sign of your forgiveness do write me a letter of what you finally settle down to do. And surely, Sam, you are also doing some writing.
The final break with Wilder took place later that fall. During the early 1940s, Steward’s friend Wendell Wilcox (whose fiction was by then being published in The New Yorker) developed an idea for a novel based on a story from Catullus. In Steward’s recollection, “Wendell made the mistake of detailing his carefully researched plot to Thornton, and some time later [in 1948] Thornton’s [novel] The Ides of March appeared. Therein, alas! Wendell found his plot. After that Thornton found that many of his friends in Chicago disappeared or grew cool.”
•
Steward’s September was difficult in other ways as well. As he later wrote, “In autumn of 1948 my father died, sitting at a stool, from taking amphetamines too soon after a [drinking] binge…I did not go back for his funeral, money was low.” Unemployed but unwilling to return to Loyola, he instead found himself wandering “casually and a bit uncertainly into the Dean’s office at DePaul University, [where I] told him of my background and asked if there were any openings.”
DePaul University was much less distinguished than Loyola: its students came largely from blue-collar backgrounds, and most had received only basic secondary educations. The school had only a small liberal arts faculty, and an even smaller English department. Worse yet, Steward soon made an appalling discovery about the pay scale: “Laymen at this college were salaried not so much on their educational accomplishments and qualifications as on their marital status and the number of children produced for Mother Church—a highly immoral view, it seemed to me, but nonetheless rigidly followed.”
Steward was equally dismayed by his students: “Many entering freshmen could barely read…[And as a recovering alcoholic] I no longer had [my] boozy tolerance [of stupidity]…instead, I found myself more and more being forced to take a half-tablet of some amphetamine to be able to face the classes that I came more and more to dislike.”
Since he had no potential for material advancement at DePaul (and no possibility of tenure), and since so much of what went on within the school simply disgusted him, Steward could hardly take his new job seriously. Instead, he later wrote, he chose to
let the fog rise about myself…purposively. I had now been away from alcohol for over a year and was much more in control of myself than I had been formerly. Here and there I dropped a word—yes, I had known Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; yes I had written a novel…yes, I had known Thomas Mann, Thornton Wilder, André Gide and others…
The technique worked wonderfully well; by the time I had taught there a couple of years I was classed as a character, a personality—the campus paper interviewed me…the “literary” journal also carried a profile. By student request, I formed the arts club…and my classes grew more and more popular, until usually each term they had to be closed at eighty to a hundred persons, despite the fact that I worked them hard.
•
In July 1949, Steward turned forty. With no great interest in his work at DePaul, he instead spent more and more time in his apartment—reading, writing, drawing, or else simply puttering among his various erotic materials. In his correspondence with Hal Baron he noted that he was now searching as far as New York for particular rare erotic titles;* but he was also collecting contemporary literary fiction relating to or describing various forms of homosexual experience. Photographs of the apartment at the Kinsey Institute show bookcases full of hardcover first editions of contemporary novels such as James Barr’s Quatrefoil, Charles Jackson’s The Fall of Valor, and other literary novels and short-story collections that were addressing the topic of homosexuality much more capably than anything that had appeared from American publishers in the previous decade.
The increasingly dire social circumstances homosexuals faced in 1950 were best described at the time by The Homosexual in America, written by the sociologist Edward Sagarin and published under his pseudo nym Donald Webster Cory.* Steward owned a first edition of the book, which described the legal, social, and economic discrimination then being routinely leveled against American homosexuals, and at the same time described something much more insidious. As Sagarin noted:
As a minority…homosexuals are…caught in a particularly vicious circle. On the one hand, the shame of belonging and the social punishment of acknowledgment are so great that pretense is almost universal; on the other hand, only a leadership that would acknowledge [its own homosexuality] would be able to break down the barriers of shame and a resultant discrimination…Until we are willing to speak out openly and frankly in defense of our activities, and to identify ourselves with the millions pursuing these activities, we are unlikely to find the attitudes of the world undergoing any significant change.
The homosexual of his generation, he went on to note, “is not quite sure that it is wrong to practice discrimination against him…the worst effect of discrimination has been to make the homosexuals doubt themselves and share in the general contempt for sexual inverts.” Moreover, Sagarin noted, the situation would not get better any time soon, due to the growing public condemnation of homosexuality: “The homosexual’s chief concern is neither with civil rights nor with legal rights, important as these are. His is the problem of condemnation, which involves the necessity for concealment, imposes a burden of self-doubt and self-guilt, and creates a condition which inhibits the struggle for amelioration.”
•
Along with Sagarin’s book, Steward had been especially impressed by James Barr’s literary novel Quatrefoil, which had described the new set of circumstances faced by two post–World War II homosexual men as they struggled to remain invisible to outsiders and yet true to their sexual and emotional orientation. Steward had a particular liking for the book because it described a passion between two navy men; but he also thought it beautifully articulate in its vision of two “sane and well-balanced” lovers who, in his words, “with subterfuge and skill waged an eternal battle to remain closeted…successfully conceal[ing] their love for each other, living by a deceit which was forced upon them, dangerously skirting discovery and escaping it only by clever fabrications and skillfully invented fictions, compelled to stand guard over every gesture.” In later life Steward observed, “In some ways Quatrefoil was a wonderful treatise on how to live happily in the closet in 1950…[For here was] a graphic and accurate picture of the secrecy and concealment that was necessary in those days…[including a] firm determination—common to so many homosexuals in the past—to be an individual, standing alone, finding all answers within [one]self, and never identifying with any group.” Steward had long since defined himself as just this sort of loner—a man who found scant consolation among other homosexuals, and who maintained not just one, but a number of secret and highly compartmentalized identities. The isolation mandated by such circumstances was profound; but there was no option—and Steward, who had lived in this isolated way from earliest childhood, therefore saw in the novel a powerful evocation of the way in which he himself actually lived.
•
Disliking his new job, Steward continued to daydream about moving to France, and also made plans to take a summer vacation in Paris as soon as he could possibly afford one. He knew that once he was there, Alice B. Toklas would happily introduce him into a number of important intellectual and artistic circles, including that of Jean Cocteau. In a recent letter she had pressed him once again to visit her, then added,
I’ve kept off the subject of your teaching again—fearful that you had once more thrown it over. I do hope not. You always made one feel that you were exceptionally good at it—making things come alive to the dullest of impossible boys…Don’t you find subjects galore amongst their strange relationships—you ought to be able to do a smashing novel about them and no one has in the U.S. They do it all the time still in England—so try it.
Toklas was now working on a book project of her own, for in her bereavement she had decided to realize a long-held ambition of writing a cookbook. Writing, she found, had a tonic and stabilizing effect; she therefore encouraged Steward to do likewise, even as she encouraged him to persist in his sobriety, noting, “Gertrude always said that liquor only improved the deséquilibres and my dear we hope you are not that…I’m all for [Alcoholics Anonymous] since it has done so handsomely for you. The program is sensible and generous and for God’s sake take it as yours and doucement allez doucement as they used to say in Bilignin.”
She also expressed real enthusiasm for his newfound passion for painting and drawing, which he had described to her in an earlier letter—for through Stein and her paintings collection, Toklas had established a long and loving relationship with the world of visual art. In one instance she even wrote him that “painting as a diversion for you is perfect—the trouble with Picasso was that he allowed himself to be flattered into believing that he was a poet too…It will be the deepest satisfaction to me if you pull off something of your real quality—you know Gertrude expected it of you.”
Steward quickly made plans for a trip overseas. Now forty and decidedly unaccomplished, he was eager to reacquaint himself with this peculiar, famous old lady who could so easily mention his efforts at painting in the same sentence that mentioned Picasso. He needed her. She in turn wanted to help him, and so kept his “reform” strongly in mind:
It’s all one to me how you achieve your salvation as long as you do—whatever makes you happy—the Church or Alcoholics Anonymous or anything else. I’m a good Jesuit—any means that suits you—why even what Francis Rose chose—a strong wife…So if a good looking female a very few years older than you are says she wants to marry you and you think she really is in love with you—why just let her have her way. Francis is really happy and it’s [his wife] who has induced this…Is there anything like her in the offing for you. For you and Francis are not so awfully unlike.
But there would be no wife for Steward. The “salvation” that would knock on his door in late 1949 would instead be his new mentor, Alfred C. Kinsey.