By the time Alfred Kinsey first visited Steward’s apartment, his Sexual Response in the Human Male had been causing a sensation across the United States for more than a year. Based on data that had taken over a decade to amass, the first volume of the Kinsey studies (along with its companion volume, Sexual Response in the Human Female, published five years later, in 1953) was a landmark statistical study of American sexual behavior. Kinsey’s study of human sexual response was in fact related, in its approach, to his previous great project as a zoologist, a twenty-year taxonomic study of gall wasps. Since publishing the Male volume, Kinsey had undertaken a yearlong speaking tour to raise public awareness about the usefulness of statistical studies in understanding human sexual activity.
Steward’s meeting with Kinsey took place at the suggestion of a fellow DePaul professor named Theodore Kundrat. In his memoirs, Steward recalled, “The interview would last an hour, Theodore said, although sometimes they ran longer if the interviewee had a lot to say.”
I opened the door to a solidly built man in his fifties wearing a rumpled grey suit. He had a friendly face. His greying buff-colored hair stood in a short unruly pompadour; his eyes were sometimes blue and sometimes hazel. He had a rather sensitive but tense wide mouth above a somewhat bulldog or prognathous jaw, which in turn jutted out above his ever-present bow tie.
Indeed, Theodore had been a bit misinformed. The interview [about my sex life] lasted five hours, and it seemed to me that I answered thousands of questions—although there were in reality only a few hundred.
Sexual Response in the Human Male had been a work of the utmost importance to Steward, for its 804 pages of tables, charts, and statistics based on interviews with 5,940 men about their sexual histories and activities had documented the widespread occurrence of sex between men across the American population. According to the data, 37 percent of the total male population of the United States had had at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age; 50 percent of the males who remained single until age thirty-five had had overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm since the onset of adolescence; 13 percent of males (approximately) had reacted erotically to other males without having had overt homosexual contacts after the onset of adolescence; 18 percent of males had had at least as much of the homosexual as the heterosexual in their histories for at least three years between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five; 8 percent of males were exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five; and, finally, 4 percent of white males were exclusively homosexual throughout their lives after the onset of adolescence.
Since the Kinsey data on homosexuality was by far the most sensational revelation made in Sexual Response in the Human Male, cultural and media attention became fixed on male homosexuality in the years immediately following its publication—often to the detriment of the many closeted and semicloseted homosexuals who had, up until that moment, gone largely unnoticed in American society. Kinsey’s associate C. A. Tripp later noted that while homosexuality “was only one of the six basic forms of sex considered [in the study]…nothing so disturbed the critics nor brought them to such a fever pitch of hate as did the homosexual findings. Preachers, pundits and prudes found much to lament, and a variety of ways to do the lamenting: some questioned the scientific accuracy of the work—‘homosexuality just can’t be that prevalent.’ Others feared the sociological effects of even discussing such matters—‘by talking about it you encourage it.’ But the most virulent resentments arose from the fact that sex, particularly homosexual sex, was dealt with [in the Kinsey study] without a word of moralizing. Emotional reactions to the homosexual findings dominated every level of criticism, though they were frequently disguised as purely technical concerns.”
•
In the weeks and months following their first meeting, Kinsey and Steward developed a substantial friendship.* Kinsey’s fascination with Steward was based, at least at first, on Steward’s lifelong habit of sexual record keeping and his vast collection of sexual paraphernalia and memorabilia—for Kinsey, too, was a passionate collector and record keeper. As a zoology professor, Kinsey had collected gall wasps by the thousand; now, as a sex researcher, he was actively collecting not only thousands of sexual histories, but also what would eventually become the world’s largest collection of sex-related materials.*
Kinsey was impressed by Steward’s intellectual commitment to establishing the legitimacy of homosexual experience, which at that time was not only rare among academics or public intellectuals, but also quite dangerous for anyone pursuing a university career. Kinsey was himself well outside the mainstream of academia in this regard; in fact, Sexual Response in the Human Male was widely read at the time of its publication as an indictment of American society, specifically its obsession with controlling and restricting sexual freedom. Moreover, since his statistical studies demonstrated that Americans were engaging in a wide variety of sexual activities (of which only a few were then lawful), academic conservatives had quickly accused Kinsey of using his research to promote both indiscriminate and deviant sexual activity.
Kinsey soon discovered that he and Steward had very similar backgrounds and early life experiences. Both had grown up in strict Methodist households with fathers involved in the church. Both had been raised without sexual instruction in an atmosphere of deep sexual inhibition. Both had had rejecting fathers, and both had fought, despite a lack of parental encouragement, to achieve academic prominence. Both had eventually developed into strong-willed and charismatic educators. Both had strong sex drives and both were sexually conflicted, and both had chosen to devote their lives (in very different ways) to reconciling these strong sex drives with the sexually intolerant belief systems and institutions into which they had been born. Both were also extremely enterprising men who coped with their considerable psychic anguish over their sexuality by immersing themselves in work that sought to address sex via the intellect.
Kinsey tended to perceive those who had rejected or discarded injunctions against sex at an early age as impressively self-possessed, and so he seems to have had a special admiration for Steward. The fact that Steward had been repeatedly rejected as a writer, had succumbed to alcoholism, and had reached a point of utter frustration as both a scholar and a teacher may have seemed tragically wasteful to Kinsey; but it probably also made Steward seem oddly heroic to him as well—for Steward was, if nothing else, a man who had dared to live his beliefs.
Kinsey, of course, had made very different choices in his life. At the time of his first meeting with Steward, he was a happily married family man, a highly admired professor, and a justly acclaimed researcher who had spent his entire professional life successfully engaged in statistical scientific studies. He was also just then at the height of his critical and popular success. Perhaps the greatest difference between Kinsey and Steward, though, was one of faith. Where Steward had resolved the early dilemma of paternal and religious rejection by in turn rejecting both his father and his father’s religion, Kinsey had simply distanced himself from both, and at the same time embraced Darwinian evolutionary theory. Kinsey’s core faith was in science, and he found it entirely sustaining: his belief in it gave his life purpose, direction, and hope.
Kinsey’s belief in the naturalness of variations in human sexual behavior flowed directly from Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which was based not only on the variation of species, but also on variations (sexual and otherwise) within species. By creating a broad-based statistical analysis of human sexual response, he had been able to demonstrate the existence of widespread variations throughout the American population at all levels of society. His findings suggested that variations in sexual behavior were not based on acts of will and individual choice, as religious teachings had always insisted. Rather they were based on widespread biological variations existing within the human population: in other words, on genetic variation. The discovery of widespread sexual deviation and the revelation of the full extent of this deviation would at first shock America, but, ultimately, help to shift American perceptions of sexuality quite substantially. In so doing, Kinsey’s research would help make the case for increased sexual tolerance—a tolerance that today is taken so much for granted in some quarters that the great storm of controversy created by the Kinsey findings in the early 1950s is very nearly forgotten.
From the moment they were published, Kinsey’s statistical discoveries had an immediately beneficial effect upon the many individuals suffering undue guilt and anxiety about their sexual desires, habits, and practices. Through statistics, Kinsey had presented these individuals with a whole new way of understanding the sexual self. Among those with a homosexual orientation, feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety, and depression could be particularly intense, and so Kinsey’s findings were profoundly enlightening—and, by extension, healing—to these people. Certainly they were enormously healing for Steward.
In compiling his statistics on sexual activity, Kinsey had conducted thousands of anonymous interviews about sexuality with the help of three charismatic associates, all of whom Steward would come to know well in the coming decade: Wardell Pomeroy, Paul Gebhard, and Clyde Martin. Starting in 1938 (and continuing until 1956), Kinsey, Pomeroy, Gebhard, and Martin had crisscrossed America by car, interviewing people from all social levels and ethnic backgrounds in cities, towns, and villages across the country. The confidential interview they conducted had been carefully devised to obtain a complete sexual history from each participant within two hours; the results of the interviews were then recorded in code and kept entirely private. The team obtained eighteen thousand such interviews, after which Kinsey subjected the results to a complete statistical analysis. Despite being subjected to heavy scrutiny and revision, the findings remain fundamentally unchallenged and unaltered to this day.*
Kinsey’s findings about homosexual activity suggested that the word homosexual ought not be used as a noun, but only as an adjective, for clearly many men who self-identified as heterosexual engaged in homo-sexual activity. The idea that the population was not divided up between homosexuals and heterosexuals was not new to twentieth-century thought—Havelock Ellis had already hypothesized a sexual continuum (ranging from entirely heterosexual in activity to entirely homosexual in activity); so, too, had Freud. But Kinsey’s data supported the hypothesis by offering statistical proof.
•
Steward later noted of his first meeting with Kinsey:
The thing that amazed him most of all [about me] was that I was a “record keeper”—“something all too rare,” he said. But I had an accurate count on the number of persons I had been to bed with, the total number of times of “releases” (as he termed them) with other persons, number of repeats, and all the usual statistical information, taken from the “Stud File” that I had kept on three-by-five cards from my very first contact many years before in Ohio. My information like Kinsey’s was coded, but not so unbreakably or exhaustively. I showed him the file; he was fascinated.
…I [soon] became one of the “unofficial collaborators” for the Institute for Sex Research [for at that time] no one could officially work for the Institute who was not of the “majority sexual orientation” all his associates had to be married, preferably with children, or else be absolutely asexual…Unofficially, then, I steered people to him or him to people, [and] gave him samples of my literary [and artistic] production.
…Kinsey favored me in return with the most flattering kind of attention—never coming to Chicago without writing to me in advance to arrange a meeting. In the eight years of our friendship I logged (as a record keeper again) about seven hundred hours of his pleasant company, the most fascinating in the world because all his shoptalk was of sex—and what is more interesting than that?
In those early years he had one of the warmest personalities I had ever met—a cordial gregarious man as approachable as an old park bench, and just as much of an accomplished con-artist as I was later to become in my tattoo career. The “con” approach was deliberately cultivated by him, so that he could win the trust of the person being interviewed; in like manner, he took up smoking and drinking (very, very gingerly) to put his interviewees at ease. His warmth and approachability were further improved by his talent for talking to the most uneducated hustlers and prostitutes and pimps in their own language, no matter how coarse. It gained trust for him among the suspicious ones, and word of his honesty and secrecy opened doors for him that would have remained closed forever to a more academic attitude.
I learned many things from him, and in a sense some degree of “transference” took place in me. Though there was a difference of only about fifteen years in our ages, after the initial interview he became for me a sort of father-figure as he did for so many…In him I saw the ideal father—who was never shocked, who never criticized, who always approved, who listened and sympathized. I suppose that to a degree I fell in love with him.
In Steward’s first letter to Kinsey, written in February of 1950, just a short time after their first meeting, he wrote,
What I really wanted to say, I suppose, was something about meeting you and what it meant to me…I am conscious of great alterations somewhere within—where they will lead, if to anything at all, I don’t know. I still can’t think clearly about it, and if this seems fuzzy and complex, don’t mind it at all. I’ll let you know about it after I stop whirling.
In early March, Steward wrote to Kinsey again, this time about a new undertaking: “I’ve arranged a small spintriae of six for tomorrow evening; those things need a kind of Emily Post to be run successfully. I think that perhaps just for the hell of it I’ll write one up for you, and tell you what has been my experience in arranging and conducting them.”
The word spintriae was both concealing and revealing, for it was Steward’s code word for the all-male group sex parties he had been hosting regularly in his home starting in September 1949.* He would continue to host these gatherings for the next eight years, eventually hosting twenty-nine in all.
Steward’s use of spintriae located him as a man with both a classical education and a sense of humor, for it is based on the first declension masculine noun sp(h)intria, the nominative plural of which is spintriae, or, literally translated, “sphincters.” Tacitus had been the first to note the Latin word, which had been borrowed from the Greek under the reign of Emperor Tiberius, who had enjoyed having sex with young men.* The word spintria had thus entered Latin usage as a word describing a particular kind of male who had sex with other males; Steward’s spintriae, by extension, meant a group of men who had sex with other men.*
Steward’s collecting and sharing of erotic materials and information on his sexual activities was very dangerous. Yet his compulsive risk-taking seems to have thrilled him precisely because of the high stakes: namely, professional self-destruction. In 1950, the mere possession of obscene works was a crime punishable by imprisonment in most states, even if the possessor had no intention of selling or exhibiting the objects (only in 1960, with the Supreme Court review of Mapp v. Ohio, would these laws begin to be revised). Yet Steward now presided over a wildly obscene apartment in which nothing at all was hidden, and where large numbers of anonymous men were gathering regularly for sex parties. Any one of them might easily have betrayed him to the police.
In late May of 1950, Kinsey’s photographer Bill Dellenback photographed Steward’s apartment, then remained to take photos of Steward and other men having sex there while masked.* Kinsey and Pomeroy also seem to have been present; the team returned to Bloomington with Steward’s Stud File* and some of Steward’s own erotic photographs, both of which they kept until the fall.*
•
Despite his excitement about working with Kinsey, Steward had been making plans for over a year to return to Paris in the summer of 1950, and as a result, just six days after Kinsey and his team came to the apartment to photograph one of his spintriae, he took the New York Central’s Pacemaker from Chicago to New York, where he registered at the Pickwick Arms Hotel for a few days of sexual indulgence. He then embarked once again, this time for Paris. After his several very wild nights in Manhattan, he found the crossing a sexual anticlimax, for 1950 was a holy year, and the dingy, single-class S.S. Washington was crammed with fourteen hundred Catholic pilgrims headed for Paris, including enough Catholic sisters “to make a floating convent.” Apart from a brief restroom encounter with a Puerto Rican father of four, Steward had no sex at all while at sea, feeling oppressed at every turn by the horde of watchful nuns.
Toklas had reserved a room for Steward in Paris at the Hotel Récamier, just beside the monumental église Saint-Sulpice. Upon arrival he went immediately to Toklas’s apartment on Rue Christine for a reunion. It proved unexpectedly moving. “The number and length of [Toklas’s] letters, the outpouring, seemed almost to result from the desolation that she felt because of Gertrude’s absence,” Steward later noted. “[It was] as if by maintaining a contact with those [like me] who had known them both she was drawing life from the past to help her continue in the present.”
Steward recorded his 1950 trip to Paris in a diary that gave detailed descriptions of the many sexual activities he engaged in throughout the course of his stay. In it, Steward writes with almost manic good humor about his daily adventures with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of sex-obsessed men—Americans, Frenchmen, Britons, and assorted Europeans. But there is a quiet pathos to his adventures, and to the diary as a whole, when considered in the context of Steward’s original intentions for his long-awaited 1950 trip. He had, after all, been thinking quite seriously about emigrating to France since his first visit there in 1937, when Paris seemed to welcome him with open arms as an aspiring novelist, scholar, and man of letters. During World War II his passion for France and the French way of life had remained so strong that he had even written a letter (sealed, stamped, and sent to his own home address) in which he renounced his American citizenship in favor of fighting for and with the French. Throughout the postwar 1940s, Paris had continued to beckon him, promising him a return to the avant-garde literary life he had once so easily assumed he would eventually lead. The bohemian literary and artistic existence he had been dreaming about since his boyhood in Woodsfield would be his, he had then thought, if only he could find his way to Paris. There he would escape the dreary world of teaching, and instead live among artists and novelists, poets and aesthetes. In the city of Huysmans and Verlaine, of Cocteau and Diaghilev and Gide, of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, he had been sure he would find a place for himself. Alice B. Toklas was waiting there for him, ready to offer him entrée to the brillant world of Parisian arts and letters.
That, at least, had been the dream. The reality would be, in its way, literary; within forty-eight hours of his arrival, Steward noted in his diary that “after much deliberation, [I] bought Querelle de Brest, with the Cocteau illustrations—12,000 [francs]. Contracted for English Our Lady of the Flowers & Sade’s 120 Journées de Sodome. Must buy them before realization of the value of the franc descends on me.” The book purchase was, in a sense, the emblem of his summer—a summer devoted only casually to literary pursuits, and primarily to sex.
Steward’s purchase of the pornographic limited edition Querelle de Brest was a considerable expenditure: the same money would have paid Steward’s bill in the Hotel Récamier for more than three weeks. Then again it was an exceptionally rare and daring edition, for Genet’s landmark novel of brutal sexual passion between men had been published underground by Cocteau’s secretary Paul Morihien, who had put out the novel in two editions, one of them featuring a shockingly graphic series of homoerotic line illustrations by Cocteau.* It was this rare, deluxe illustrated edition of 1948, with its close-up imagery of hairy anal sphincters and rigid phalluses, of sailors fucking sailors in cheap hotel rooms, that Steward had sought out and purchased.
When not reading Genet’s novel and marveling at the power of Cocteau’s seemingly casual erotic line illustrations, Steward soon established a daily routine in Paris of sunbathing every afternoon on the quais of the Ile de la Cité “among the beauties with bikinis,” and then, later in the afternoon and evening, scoring pickups at La Reine Blanche, the wildly popular homosexual bar in St. Germain. There, too, he met up with Daniel Decure, a young French associate of Der Kreis, the Swiss homophile magazine that Kinsey had recently recommended to him. After having Decure back to the hotel for sex, Steward noted that he was “rather un-distinguished, [a] talky but sensual (and nice) 25 yr old Frenchman…we had a mediocre 69.” Before they parted, Steward showed Decure some of his own drawings, and promised to contribute some erotic illustrations to the magazine.
After a day of buying more books, including “a small dirty Apollinaire & Pompes Funebres &…11,000 Vierges”* (as well as purchasing another series of illustrations to Querelle by Leonor Fini), Steward had dinner at the Wagenende, a seedy St. Germain brasserie, with a street pickup, a young French lawyer named Jacques Delaunay. They concluded the meal with “a lovely two hours in bed,” with Steward noting afterward that “he’s had 61 lovers in 4 years—not bad. I just love to rim him—he’s so clean & cute. Then I made a sketch, and after, he whipped me a little…Such mad love. He thinks I’m 35, was not disillusioned by me.”
A week later Steward was reunited with his old friend Sir Francis Rose at a lunch at Alice Toklas’s home on Rue Christine. The two agreed at the end of a very enjoyable afternoon to meet up again several days later, this time at Rose’s apartment on Ile St. Louis. When they did, Steward arrived to find Rose’s place in a state of total uproar. His diary noted, “George Melrish* [sp?] was there & wild disorder in the apartment, wrecked by 2 Americans. Francis & I then went to see his landlord, then wandered in Montmartre, lunched at Wepler’s* & went to his gallery, Renou.”
As it happened, Rose frequented a bar in Montmartre often patronized by Genet, whom Steward now wanted very much to meet. Since Rose sometimes paid Genet’s companion, a young hustler named André, for sex, Rose offered to introduce Steward to him. Accordingly, on July 22, Steward and Jacques Delaunay went with Rose to “the small bar on rue Lepic [in Montmartre], where Francis took up with a young convict” who was in fact Genet’s hustler friend André.* Half French, half Russian, and powerfully built, André (or Java, or Dédé, for he went by all three names) was just then making the most of his money as a jackroller operating in and around a public toilet in the gardens at the bottom of the Champs-Elysées.
A couple of days later, Steward noted in his journal, “Mad, fascinating day. To Francis, & found him in bed with [André] the young murderer of Genet’s Notre Dame, the ‘Dédé aux beaux yeux’ of Saturday night.* Made a date with Dédé for Friday night & conceived the wild project of taking him to the country for 3–4 days. This is danger.”
But Steward’s adventures, dangerous and otherwise, were fast being compromised by an unremitting case of diarrhea. The following day he noted, “Alice, in lieu of taking me to see [the artist] Marie Laurencin (who is ill) took me to a frightfully expensive restaurant for bouillabaisse, which so overwhelmed me with three kinds of fish, lobster & garlic that I had to go without dinner and subsist mainly on alkaseltzer…I…have had to take paregoric to offset the Perrier shits.” He nonetheless managed to rally, picking up a twenty-year-old Scotsman that evening and sneaking him upstairs to the hotel room for sex.
On July 28, Toklas departed on a restorative trip to the country, suggesting to Steward he visit her there for a little rest and relaxation a week or so later. He had already set his sights on a weekend with Genet’s murderous hustler, however, so he told her no. But by the next night, he had had a change of heart, for after a night out with André, Steward thought the fellow more boring than terrifying: “[He] drank beer all evening [and ignored me to speak with his friends]…I don’t particularly want [to go to] bed with him…I went home—not feeling jilted but free.”
Steward’s stomach condition meanwhile grew so bad that on August 1 he wrote,
If my diarrhea doesn’t improve I’ll have to go to the American hospital…Jacques [Delaunay] came for dinner, and then we went to bed. He wanted to baiser* me as usual but I said no, & he replied, “Mais ça arrive souvent qu’on se salisse.”* Much joking about closed on Mardis, closed for repairs, for aggrandizement, etc. Too bad, but he really doesn’t excite me much any more, or maybe it’s just my maladie. Or maybe I really am about to give up sex. Might be a Catholic for a while to appreciate the return to it more.
Two days later, he noted that “in addition to the [meddlesome] concierge, I have my shits and my inability to bander*—I guess this burned out husk of an old Don Juan had better quit—or wasn’t I always this way?”
Finally, Steward had no choice but to take a “long weary trek” out to the American Hospital in Neuilly for a sulfaquandine prescription. That same evening he had another date with the young Frenchman from Der Kreis, one that resulted in “a gathering of 9 French pédés at Daniel Decure’s, in a depressing stuffy little apartment…a smelly pile of perspiring bodies on a scratchy sofa—all in all a most depressing partouzie. Still we can put it down as an experience in Paris.” The Stud File described it even more vividly as “8 Frenchmen in a small hot room, messy and smelly, with Camembert crotches.”
By now Steward was in a state of perpetual nausea, so he decided to give up sex for a while by joining Toklas at her rest home in Bourges. At the back of his mind, he knew that it was time for him to focus on his writing, and to explore with Toklas the possibility of somehow establishing himself for good in Paris. Before he left for Bourges, however, he met up with Witold Pick, the cultured, Paris-based Pole who had written to him a decade earlier to inform him of Mohammed Zenouhin’s death. “Long aperitifs hour with the mysterious ‘Pick’ from Alger,” Steward noted in his diary, also noting the presence of a young man whom Pick archly called his “‘cousin,’ a handsome blond Nordic boy…Pick’s queer as pink ink.” The evening ended with an invitation to dinner at Pick’s home the following evening. Steward went, and “as the evening grew later, Pick pressed me to stay all night, baiting the invitation with John, the beautiful Polish ‘cousin.’ So I did, and [John and I] made mad love most of the night. Whether from drink, or my unattractiveness or age, or general hetero-disinclination, he never did come…It was like bedding a bas-relief from the Parthenon.”
The next day, however, brought with it a nasty surprise: “Jacques [Delaunay told me] he had a discharge from his cock…Turns out my pretty clean-cut French lover had gonorrhea last April…caught from a Spanish lover. Certainly this news unanchors me somewhat, and is distressful.”
The horror of venereal disease hit Steward hard, for it brought back the trauma of his 1934 infection with syphilis. He canceled his plans to visit Versailles the next day and instead kept to his room, where, feeling very fragile, he “spent the afternoon finishing [tracing] the Cocteau drawings [from Querelle], and reading in Querelle, which is a very good book indeed and about the only one I ever wanted to translate…[It is] a remarkable satisfying book…Now even if the douane* takes it [away from me], I [will still] have the memory in my head.” That evening, having calmed himself somewhat, Steward had an awkward dinner at the Wagenende with Delaunay: “It could have—has—happened to any or all of us,” Steward wrote upon his return. “The love is replaced by a kind of universal pity, of which we are all in need—(No tears, now).”
Despite his fear of possible infection, Steward was unable to keep himself from a rendezvous at his hotel that night with Pick’s “cousin” Johnny. In keeping the date, Steward seems to have rationalized that the only activity they would engage in (nonreciprocal oral sex) would pose no danger to the boy—even if Steward did have an infection, which was still not even established, for he was so far free of any symptoms. Still, after Johnny left, Steward had a restless night. He spent the next day halfheartedly researching Fulbright topics at the Bibliothèque National, and returned to the hotel to find “a disturbing pneu from Jacques saying he really did have [gonorrhea].”
By Sunday, Steward had worked himself into such a state of anxiety about the possible infection that he had to hit a friend up for an amphetamine simply to get through the day. “I keep thinking of [a] friend who turned out to be a carrier and never could [have sex] again,” he wrote in his diary. “But at the same time I’ve been threatening for months to give up la vie sexuelle—and maybe this is the time to do it.”
He saw Delaunay’s doctor the following morning, who calmly reassured him that he probably was not infected, but nonetheless offered him a course of penicillin just to be on the safe side. Steward would not be able to begin the injections until the following Friday, however, since he had already booked his visit to Toklas at Bourges that week, and the injections needed to be administered in a daily sequence. “It probably means no more fucking, ever,” Steward noted grimly, for he was now convinced that he was infected, and was feeling very cast down. “Met Jacques, who was very gentil about it all…Good Lord, how I’d rather not go to the country, but begin the course [of drugs] immediately.”
Instead, as promised, Steward took the train to Bourges, where Toklas had installed herself at a very simple rest home, La Régie. He spent the next few days chatting with her and trying (unsuccessfully) to make his way through Ivy Compton-Burnett’s More Women Than Men. But neither Toklas nor the novel proved at all diverting. “I simply count the minutes until I can get on the train back to Paris,” he wrote in his journal the first night. “God, how awful it would be to spend a length of time here…I’d be mad in a week.”
The day he got back to Paris he saw the doctor for his first penicillin injection. He then had yet another glum dinner with Jacques Delaunay at the Wagenende, followed by a drink at a café with Pick. Steward had now became obsessed with the idea that he had infected Johnny—an obsession that rapidly escalated as Pick repeated over and over that Steward “looked sick.”
With the summer winding down, Steward arranged a farewell dinner with Delaunay, then made some last-minute purchases, which included a copy of Fanny Hill to read on the ship home. On his last night he took Delaunay’s doctor to dinner at Le Cochon de Lait, as a gesture of thanks for his discreet handling of Steward’s possible infection. “He came up to my room [afterward], and we talked for a long time,” Steward wrote in his diary. “He assur[ed] me my decision to give up sex was sulfa-induced and I’d be rarin’ by the time I hit N.Y.”
•
Despite its wild vacillations, Steward’s Paris diary of 1950 marked yet another new direction in his writing—for rather than engaging in mere pornographic fantasy (as in his toilet correspondence), he had chosen to spend his summer sifting through, savoring, and preserving a series of sexual experiences that were entirely private, intimate, and real. He had also chosen not to compartmentalize these experiences, but to link them to the larger picture of his life. In doing so he was gaining a much clearer understanding of his newly sober sexual self. The more melancholy moments of the summer diary bear a striking similarity to the musings of Genet’s Lieutenant Seblon, the introverted naval officer who is incapacitated by his desire for Querelle, and who turns instead to the expression of that desire in writing in order to ease his mind. The diaristic jottings of the lieutenant—anxious and full of longing, but also themselves a form of private erotic satisfaction—are described by Genet in the novel with something close to ridicule, for Seblon takes great and foolish chances by expressing his desires so openly on paper. Yet Genet, Steward, and Seblon were all united in this perilous activity of self-discovery through confessional writing. The way in which language described and defined not only a sexual experience, but also the inner life and motivations of the person engaging in it—and, in doing so, the opposing sexual mores of the society in which that person lived—would become ever more central to Steward’s own artistic project in the coming decade, even as his dream of establishing himself as a Paris-based literary novelist became increasingly remote.