Steward had to start teaching a five-week summer course as soon as he returned to Chicago, and in the effort to do so he paid little attention to what at first seemed merely a summer cold or flu. By the third week of school, however, he was running a fever, was unable to keep down food, and his skin began to itch. He was deeply tanned from sunbathing in San Francisco, but when the whites of his eyes turned bright yellow, his doctor immediately diagnosed his illness as “jaundice.” Steward had, in fact, contracted hepatitis, and though he was able to avoid hospitalization by living for a month on nothing more than a sugar-water solution made out of Karo syrup, the condition left him entirely exhausted.
When a gossipy letter from Lynes arrived that September, Steward took a month before responding, explaining about his jaundice,
I resisted the hospital and went on working; it was quite a drag, and I’m glad it’s all over now. But San Francisco, my lad, was a marvel…Sex in Chicago’s a tired old thing with little excitement of the chase—but there’s a kind of frenzied wonderful excitement surrounding it out there…I stayed at the “most notorious Y in the States” (says Kinsey) a kind of Christian bordello, and I am full of tales about it…All in all, I don’t know when I’ve had a more sucksexful summer.
He went on to give Lynes the latest news about his fiction writing, which unfortunately was not good, for his novel had been rejected by Greenberg Publishers. Greenberg was at that moment the only house in the United States specifically interested in publishing homosexually themed fiction:
My novel is [now] in the hands of an agent, Greenberg being afraid to publish it although thinking it publishable. I take it they were afeard because of the three lawsuits in which they are involved in southern states over the publication of The Divided Path* and Quatrefoil.* I am not sanguine about anyone’s taking it, however, this side of the Atlantic. For the next winter I’d like to do a kind of “Grand Hotel” about the Embarcadero Y, but am not sure the subject could ever be cleared up enough to be written in a saleable non-porno book.
Steward had taken a jocular and dismissive tone about his hepatitis, but the illness was serious enough that it permanently affected his sexual desires and practices. He later noted to a friend that “an old-fashioned doctor got me through it [on Karo syrup]…Needless to say, I never rimmed anyone after that.” Although Steward had been preoccupied with sexual hygiene since his early bout with syphilis, he was of course unable to eliminate the risk of various forms of sexually transmitted infection, and the severity of this particular illness had been a sobering reminder of the many grave physical risks he was now taking almost daily in his endless pursuit of sex.
Lynes, meanwhile, had been struggling for some time with a much graver illness, for he had cancer. In late November he responded sympathetically to his “dear old poor old Sam” that “there’s scarcely an ache or pain I haven’t had…in the lesser not-lethal categories. I have 20-odd kinds of pills which I take or don’t take, on discretion. Maybe…I’ll start feeling well again. Maybe I’ve already started…But what of your book? What about it? And what about your unacademic life? I’ve been expecting, though surely am undeserving of, new chapters of the San Francisco saga…Be big about these things. Live big and tell all.”
Steward was troubled by Lynes’s illness and disappointed by the rejection of his novel by Greenberg, but otherwise had a relatively quiet fall. During that time, however, he came across a local newspaper article describing how a Chicago judge, John T. Dempsey, had been seized and roughed up by two policemen while walking his dog in Humboldt Park on Chicago’s northwest side. The policemen afterward claimed Dempsey had seemed to them to be molesting park visitors, but Steward, recognizing it as part of a well-known shakedown racket, immediately wrote Dempsey otherwise, hoping that in his position as judge Dempsey might be able to do something about a situation that had by now become all too common among Steward’s friends. As he wrote Dempsey,
A man walking alone is considered fair game for the police, who either singly or in pairs—or working in collaboration with a district police branch—accuse him of homosexuality. The man is taken to the station, not booked, but terrified psychologically: his identity is learned, and then the sergeant suggests that he “talk things over with the arresting officer” who may or may not be in plainclothes. The arresting officer then suggests that for the payment of some money—from fifty to $750—depending on his estimate of how much the man has—all charges will be dropped. Usually the frightened victim will pay to avoid scandal, even if he be completely innocent…Unwittingly you have thus had opened before you a situation under which we have all suffered for a long time. Is it too much to hope that out of your brush against it will come some eventual good?
Steward had himself recently attempted to do something about the racket when a fellow professor of English literature and journalism at DePaul had been shaken down in just such a manner. Professor Art Lennon was a charming, charismatic, closeted professional colleague who had attended at least one of the sex parties at Steward’s apartment.* Steward later gave the details of Lennon’s ordeal in an oral history of Chicago:
[Art] had cruised a plain clothes cop in the Chicago Public Library, and had been taken over to the station in Grant Park, and scared to death, and shaken down for three or five hundred dollars…[So I] call[ed] [George Reginato]…And [he] said…I’ll ask my old man [to help.] So…[he came back to me and] said well, I know this captain in Summerdale station and he owes my father a favor, so I’ll go talk to him and spread a few bucks around. And he did. The captain went down to the Summerdale Police Station and just raised hell. He said you have put your finger on the wrong guy this time, and if you ever do it again to any of my friends, I’m going to come down here and there’ll be badges flying all over the place. So [Lennon] got [off] scot-free, except [that Lennon then] with typical bitch perversity went out the following Saturday and got stinking drunk in the same gay bars on Clark Street that he had been to [before], and of course the cops were laying for him. And they picked him up, took him out, and beat the hell out of him, you know, put him in the hospital. Ah, he couldn’t do anything about that because he’d been warned…to stay out of sight for the next month.*
Steward’s concern was not just on Lennon’s behalf; after all, he himself was now enormously vulnerable to blackmail, for if police were to enter his home, his entire professional life would come to an end, and he would probably face prison time, too. Among the hundreds of sex photographs in his apartment—all of which were technically illegal to possess—many featured young men who might well have been below the age of consent. Steward had in fact been steadily involved with a sexually experienced sixteen-year-old named Bobby Krauss since March of 1953. In his zeal for record-keeping, Steward had kept Krauss’s name, age, and other detailed statistics and particulars of their many encounters on a card in the Stud File, and also written his name on the back of several of the Polaroids featuring him. Thus, even as Steward disparaged Lennon’s “bitch perversity,” he recognized a similar streak of perversity within himself: a desire—conscious or not—to self-destruct.
January brought a letter from Alice Toklas commiserating with Steward about his hepatitis, since she, too, had just recovered from it. She also sent more news of Francis Rose: “Francis has done some really beautiful line drawings for [my cookbook] and a dust cover [too]…He and Frederica are reconciled. She has bought the small top story of an old house in Ajaccio overlooking the bay and is building a small studio on the roof for Francis who in return seems to have offered the sacrifice (?) of renouncing his son Luis.”
She went on to observe, “Without any unfaithfulness to [your sister] or to legendary Emmy [Curtis] isn’t it time you found an Egeria*—what Thornton might call a serpent of the Wabash.”
Steward was moving further and further from any possibility of marriage, however. Having entirely ceased sexual relations with Emmy Curtis in 1950, he had gone on to develop a network of male sexual partners, pickups, and prospects far more extensive than any he had maintained as a younger man. One of the most regular contacts was the former serviceman Bob Berbich, a married man about whom Steward recorded, quite typically,
[Berbich] stopped in briefly around 9 to “invite” me over [to the Sun Times building]. We drove [to] the lower level to the parking lot south of the Trib[une Building], and there in a whirl of snow and reflected whiteness, I had him again. [He] made two large splotches on my black overcoat; I noticed them after I got on the El at the Mart—and wore my badge home proudly, reminding myself of an entry or two in Seblon’s diary in Querelle de Brest.
Immersing himself in a world of increasingly masochistic fantasy sex, feeling far closer to the dream world of Querelle than to the everyday world of academe, Steward was now seriously ignoring his work at DePaul and entering yet another period of extremely erratic behavior. In mid-February, after another visit by Johnny Leapheart, he wrote Lynes, “You will say I’ve been working, and I wish you were right—but I suddenly reached one of those complete and terrifying dead-ends with my writing…my invention has failed me completely…[and] it’s stopped everything else in me—except, of course, me ‘love life’…”
Leaving aside all questions of his career and his fiction-writing, Steward went on to describe his sex-party photography, for Lynes had been fascinated by Johnny Leapheart’s description of the Polaroid collection:
It was a lot of fun with Johnny, and we did take several px to add to the collection, which grows apace. It’s really a kind of obscene diary, actually; there’s no art connected with my picture taking—and I rarely use anything but flashbulbs (so they’re all pretty flat) but Dr. K has thought them interesting and copied one entire volume, and will get the other one (he says he wants it) when it’s full. I see no reason at all why you shouldn’t copy some of them if you would want them, but my face appears freely in almost all (well, a great many) so you would please have to be discreet. They stimulate some people, but wouldn’t you—and I must confess—they leave me fairly cold.
A month later, he wrote Lynes again with more news of his erotic, artistic, and pornographic activities:
Ask me what I have been doing. Lotsa, lotsa…“Thor” (a corporation of three persons selling those sex drawings under this silly name) has taken four of my drawings of motorcyclists and will shortly splash them across the country, advertising in various [publications] like Tomorrow’s Man, etc. I’ve re-drawn the “Motorcycle Pickup” series of 12 obscenities (you know it, certainly—the motorcyclist and the farm boy in the barn?) to suit my own tastes, and then was struck with the happy thought of writing a story to go with the 12 pictures—and I am sending you a copy [of the story] herewith, hoping your hard heart will melt. Then, an addition: I decided to make another Reigen,* a Ronde with it—long-term project, 8 episodes, 8 times 12 illustrations. I’ve been also adding dozens of Polaroid pictures to my collection, am well into volume III at the moment. And I have shelved my novel about Sir Rose, at least temporarily—everyone said it was indecent and libelous. I guess I’m just ahead of my time. Morihien writes thru an intermediary that he will willingly transfer the rights to Querelle to any American publisher who wants ’em.* But try to find, to find.
The day after writing this letter, Steward began to consider another tattoo, this time an extremely large one, describing his rationale for doing so in a journal he had begun keeping at Kinsey’s suggestion:
I simply must have a rose in the center of my chest, whether or not I have finished my sixth hundredth contact—this being an early self-prohibition* to help me resist too many tattoos, for the lust is in me now…Why not be honest and admit that I’m narcissistic, even with this old body, and this combines with my exhibitionism, plus a hope that it will make me sexually attractive, or tougher than I am.
Even as Steward was becoming increasingly interested in tattoos and tattooing, Lynes wrote him in early April to urge him on in his erotic writing: “The [motorcyclist] story you sent—oh, it has had a success!…More, much more, please. Make it soon. G[lenway] W[escott] was appreciative too; he went so far as to borrow and to copy it. Ditto Neel Bate, who, as you probably know, was responsible for that series in the first place.”* Lynes then went on to give Steward news of his own, for as his illness had progressed, he had been forced to think of a future home for his photographic studies of the male nude: “I am, it appears, giving all my negs of nudes into the custody of the good doctor [Kinsey], giving him (them) permanent possession eventually*…I’ve been lazy or uninspired in the picture making dept [recently]; not for lack of subjects, either.”
Despite Lynes’s enthusiasm for Steward’s sex Polaroid and erotic fiction projects, Steward found himself suddenly overwhelmed by an interest in tattooing, and in his distraction he began networking throughout Chicago to find out more about it. Through a local character named Tattooed Larry, he gained an insider’s view of tattooing and the tattooing community. During one such conversation with Larry, Steward seized upon an erotic image that would change his life forever. As he wrote in the journal he was keeping for Kinsey,
[Tattooed] Larry…said [we should go] up to Milwaukee on a Sunday that was between paydays at Great Lakes—for if it were right after payday, Dietzel’s shop was full of “sailors waiting in line” for a tattoo. He said it twice—and then it hit me. That idea of sailors waiting in line has been the longest-enduring, most-potently-effective fantasy of my whole life…I have always been powerfully stimulated by the idea of a line of naked young men, preferably sailors, waiting in line for me to go down on them. Pictures of young men in line have always excited me. I have several…And in the small book of [fantasies I drew for Kinsey] I [made] a similar sketch in inks.
Sailors in line, waiting! How odd that this should be my strongest fantasy. I am reminded of Julien Green’s reaction to the painting “The Bearers of Evil Tidings”*…I long for the day when—in my own tattoo shop in San Francisco on a Sunday morning, I can peek between the curtains, and find my own waiting room filled with nonchalant tanned young men, smoking, chatting—laughing…and waiting for me to leave my mark upon them.
Steward now began to investigate tattooing more closely, enrolling in a correspondence course and researching possible injunctions by the church against tattooing. On April 24 he wrote, “I went to the library [at DePaul]…not a word in the Catholic Encyclopedia, and not a word in the index to St. Thomas. It looks as if I were disgustingly safe on that score.” A week later, he added,
Without too much alarm, and yet with a kind of hypnotized im-mobility, I watch the progress of the tattoo complex in me. I find that I think about it much of the time during the day, and that I dream of it almost every night. A recurring theme in these almost-nightmares is that I have great huge ones on my body, and experience a kind of wild regret, a feeling of being lost, at having them there without any possibility of removal. The urge to put another on my self, and yet another, comes on me like the urge to go out and cruise…so strong you feel almost choked beneath it…
Just as he had thrown himself into sex after quitting drinking, now Steward had begun focusing upon a new compulsion: tattooing. Both tattooing and being tattooed seemed to Steward highly erotic. The horror of being indelibly marked upon the flesh—or, better yet, of administering that mark upon a pure and innocent other—had utterly seized his imagination. In a letter written at the end of May, Steward wrote Lynes:
[I have been suffering from] a vast ennui, a dreadful Weltschmerz—well, not so much Schmerz as just plain Trägheit*—and so many other things to do—sixteenyearolds, sailors, truck drivers, big ones all—and a coupla little ones. [Most particularly there was] a tattooed boy, a sailor—ears pierced for rings—his small hard body lay on the bed in the dusky near-dark, the dragon curling upon his belly, the mermaid long on his thigh, the eagle wings touching the collar bone on each side, the nippled eyes staring unwinking through the gloom. In a kind of ecstasy of disbelief at what I saw, almost afraid to touch these designs, I at last ran my tongue along the length of the great dragon, beginning low at his tail almost within the bramble patch of pubic hair, and running in bending up-curves towards his right nipple. I sucked the unwinking eyes drawn upon the nipples, and licked the two sharks above his armpits, and then I pointed the arrowhead (on the head of his cock) straight down my throat until he came…and then relaxed, but pleasantly co-operative, he lay on his side and took hold of my cock and gently masturbated me, while my fascinated fingers, hypnotized, fled back and forth over the eagle’s wings, the dragon’s head on his chest and belly. Here, at long last, was the essence of the Sailor, his motions sure and deft. Here was the hand that had knotted the rope and spliced it, the Sailor who knew the far suns and seas, the bamboo huts of savages and the stone lace-work of Indian castles, crystal pools and sand of Persia, white columns against dark blue Greek skies, the golden suns and fountains of red-walled Rome. Here was the distillate of the Sailor—dark, romantic, strange, bizarre and sexual under his tattoos, his muscles working to bring me pleasure, his body close curving…The old professor exploded in a lyric burst of semen, star-sprinkled…
And now how did I ever get into that? Enclosed please find a business card,* the which I trust you will hand to a sailor in Times Square, headed west. Some fun with all this tattoo business—real sexual. Sad-mashy.* Hooboy!
Lynes wrote back at the end of June, using a printed photographic negative of a male nude as his typing paper, and working the image into the text of the letter: “Do you do the tattooing, anything anywhere? For example just here?* And—you do neglect me—where is the typescript of the sequel to the motorcycle story you promised? What other goodies? Alibis enough. Now I want action.”
Glenway Wescott (who to this point had never actually met Steward) came to Chicago shortly thereafter,* and later described the meeting with Steward to his biographer in a way that makes clear not only Wescott’s gossipy habits of exaggeration, but also (and more important) just how shocking Steward’s lifestyle then seemed, even to a man of considerable sexual experience. As Wescott told his biographer,
Sam Steward…was a smallish, lean, wiry, Irish-looking man…I would have liked a tattoo from him but I didn’t trust him, he was such a sadomasochistic character. He [lived in] a small ground-floor apartment, with one small room and one immensely large room, and a tiny kitchen and bathroom. The walls above the bookshelves and the ceiling were covered with scenes of intercourse. There were penises this big and people that big fornicating all over the walls, painted by bad amateur artists of his acquaintance.* Hair-raising from the point of view of a cop coming in, you know, who would then want to know what all these boxes and file cabinets were. And scrapbooks. All over the walls were pornographic photographs. And furthermore he had a photographic journal of his sex life, which he showed me. It was the most astonishing thing I’d ever known anybody to have. He had a camera…and he had pictures of himself making love to every type of person you can imagine, and especially young boys. He had their names and their addresses and he told me who they were…I said, “I can’t remember such a courageous man as you. It doesn’t shock me a bit, and it gives me great pleasure to look at it all. But it alarms me. Aren’t you running a frightful risk?” He answered, “Of course, I wouldn’t dare do it, except that my dream all my life has been to be in prison, and to be fucked morning, noon and night by everyone, and beaten.” I said, “If I hadn’t seen this I wouldn’t believe it, because what you say is so extreme, and you’re so rational and intelligent and gentle and cultivated, and not the least bit cruel yourself, I should think. You wouldn’t want to hurt anybody, and you’re so vigorous, I can’t imagine you letting someone hurt you.” I felt really frightened. And all through dinner he had been talking Jean Genet talk, about how thrilling it would be to be in prison…He was the most extreme masochist that Kinsey ever found.
While Steward was by no means “the most extreme masochist that Kinsey ever found,” Wescott was nonetheless correct in his observation that Steward had set himself on an extremely self-destructive course. Indeed, during that very spring of 1954, Steward began to tattoo by appointment out of the very same highly pornographic apartment—hoping as much to seduce the men who came to him as to build himself a small business. He began actively visiting the Great Lakes base a short while later in his search for business, writing Kinsey in late May, “I go out to Great Lakes every Friday night under the auspices of the Red Cross, in one of their buses, to play chess with the poor sick sailor lads in the hospital—and of course I leave a paper trail of [my business] cards everywhere…If this keeps up long enough, I’m bound to get a call sooner or later.” In his free time, he continued to create more homoerotic visual material with which to decorate his home, adding in his note to Kinsey, “[I] have lotsa new photographs to show you, and Thor has bought eight pictures of mine to sell—they are just now being advertised.”
Steward sent one of his new tattooing business cards to Alice Toklas with the suggestion she show it to Francis Rose, for Rose had long been passionate about sailors. She declined to do so, however, explaining that “entre nous I have engaged to keep him fairly respectable—he has cost his wife too much—probably in [both] tears and dinero.”
Shortly thereafter Steward wrote Lynes to apologize for not having sent any more stories, and he explained that his new tattooing business was partly to blame:
Yes, I know—I have been delinquent in typing off that second episode to follow the motorcycle story I sent you, but there’s been so many things…Maybe in California there’ll be time. I know that last year, despite all the s-x-l encounters there (hush, hush!) I got sixteen watercolors done—who can say what I’ll accomplish in the six weeks I’ll be [at the Embarcadero YMCA] this summer?…It’ll be nice to see young Mr. Leapheart there [too]…
There ain’t no news, really. The summer has been sexually fruitful, and still I’m not sure it was fruit-filled as jam-filled.* Such lovely trade—ah le bon dieu is good! Such youth, such truck drivers! Part of it arises from the tattooing business, and much of it comes from my following the old “link” method of meeting new ones. That’s why, once a year, I like to flex my cruising muscles in a place like the Embarcadero Y, where the competition is keen and cutthroat and high, and he who hesitates gets nothing but dregs.
•
As in 1953, Steward kept a detailed journal of his 1954 San Francisco summer vacation, but this time he did so with Kinsey strongly in mind as his ideal reader, making detailed notations about each and every sexual encounter. Even so, all did not go immediately as planned. Shortly after arriving on August 5, he noted:
From the very first moment of setting foot in the [YMCA] this summer, [I] could tell that something had changed. There was a kind of furtiveness everywhere: people were quiet, there was no loud talk of any kind, and everyone walked with eyes almost painfully (and certainly maidenly) downcast. Perhaps there was an explanation for the surface dullness in the set of “House Rules” that old Pruneface handed me—saying in effect that since they wanted to establish a “Christian atmosphere” here in this Y, that absolutely no one would ever be allowed up on the residence floors…and that even among residents there would be no visiting after 11:30, and that if anyone were caught loitering in the halls or toilets he would be asked to give up his residence…I don’t see why they didn’t simply say “we’re trying to get rid of the homos here,” and let it go at that. And they certainly seem to have succeeded.
Three days later he noted, “The place is like a tomb…I might as well face it: I ‘operate’ better at home in Chicago, with my clientele, than I do anywhere else in the world. I think about sending a note to Tommy Tomlin [who is now out of prison] but do nothing about it.” He did, however, begin contacting other friends from the year before, including an acquaintance named Audrien Bingleman, who soon became a close and trusted confidant.
Through Bingleman, Steward learned that “the reason for the quiet at the Y…[is that] a sailor committed suicide there, and that called the military police in, who questioned everyone on the sailor’s floor. The old-time residents said that there was a lot of h[omosexual]-goings-on…and the MP’s went to the management and said looky here…clean it up. It’s a logical story…B[ingleman] told me to move to the Golden Gate Y—and Monday night when I see Johnny Leapheart, I’ll ask [Johnny] what he thinks about it.”
Leapheart was in fact already staying at the Golden Gate YMCA. The next night Steward called for him there, and found that, unlike at the Embarcadero, at the Golden Gate “one simply went up in the elevator without difficulty. [Johnny] was bronze and naked under the silk lounging robe, smooth as satin and twice as animated. We had a lovely session of dalliance and innocent evil…After that we dressed and had a lovely large meal…and…he walked me clear home to the gate of the Reformed church of the Puritan Brotherhood. I couldn’t ask him up—and was tired anyway.”
Steward then attempted to move into the Golden Gate YMCA, but when the desk clerk discovered he was attempting to move in from the Embarcadero YMCA, he was denied a room. Steward then realized that he had been recognized and identified as a homosexual. “Baffled, bewildered, and feeling somewhat as if I had leprosy, I went out into the street…This kind of thing carries a shock with it,” Steward wrote in his journal. “I felt (with the usual h-guilt complex) that something had been found out about me…I went around the corner to the YMCA hotel for men and women on Turk Street, only to discover I had been blacklisted at that place [too]…I began to toy with the idea of returning at once to Chicago.”
It took Steward “24 hours to get over the shock of the Y episode.” As he tried to decide what to do next, he registered at a small, noisy family hotel called the Roosevelt, where he then spent a “dull week of suspended animation” having no sex at all. Finally, and after much searching, he found a place that would accommodate his sexual needs: “the ‘bargain basement’ of the Stanford Court Apartments (Hotel) at 901 California Avenue, corner of Powell, right on the top of Nob Hill, next to the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins.” There, according to Steward, “for $50 a month, you live in a plush little room with wall-to-wall carpeting, quiet corridors, community showers—and absolutely no surveillance of any kind! Vraiment, they expect you to be queer—no kidding, and said to one complainer [about all the sexual activity] (he was a desk clerk at the St. Francis) that they really didn’t very much care at all what went on in the showers.” The ejection from the YMCA had, however, left Steward deeply shaken. Describing it in his journal as a “minor Gethsemane,” he went on to note that Bingleman had been a huge reassurance to him during that difficult time. “Almost every afternoon I went over and lay on his roof in the sun, and [there, with him] my spirit began to heal…My shell is paperthin.”
Steward was much happier in his new place of residence. He later described the Stanford Court Apartments in his Phil Andros fiction as being “for men only—rooms with community showers and toilets…a great place for the gay ones to stay when they came to town. The freedom was so nice and the management so liberal that a lot of people paid for the whole month willingly [even if only staying a week].” There Steward finally began to enjoy himself in San Francisco, noting in his journal of Sunday, August 23,
Went down an spoke to “Pop” Eddy* in his spotless tattoo joint. I introduced myself…and…he opened up and talked at length about business (not good) [and] other tattooers…He rather wistfully wished (though not saying it outright) for another war, to make things a bit better…When the moment seemed psychologically right, I showed him the rose [I had tattooed] on my ankle, whereupon he congratulated me warmly, and said my work was more professional than that of many so-styling themselves.
Steward was energized by the meeting, for he was beginning to think he might really make a career for himself as a tattooist. But his mood darkened again two days later when he received a haircut so bad that it affected his ability to find sex partners—for, as he wrote in his journal, “I look like one of those creatures from the Oz books, exactly.” Moreover, the weather had turned cold and overcast, putting an end to his daily sunbathing routine and sending him back once again to his dark room in the basement of the Stanford Court. There, with little else to do during the early part of the day, he read the local newspapers and brooded in his journal. On August 27, he noted with mixed feelings reading about a landmark ruling that had just been made involving the question of homosexuality:
Two things happened today that bear noting. One: an announcement in the papers of the reversal of the guilty-of-treason verdict of Sergeant Provoo of Berkeley. Reason: the prosecution had introduced “irrelevant testimony” regarding defendant’s homosexuality.* Did I feel the world shift just a little under my feet at that moment? My first interpretation was to read it as a kind of victory for enlarging mores, a feeling that such a thing didn’t matter, but a further amplification and quotation in the Examiner pointed out that the court had said: “obviously [the] charge [of homosexuality] was utterly irrelevant to the issue of whether he had committed treason while a prisoner of war. The sole purpose and effect…was to humiliate and degrade the defendant, and increase the probability that he would be convicted, not for the crime charged, but for his generally unsavory character. We can conceive of no accusation which could have been more degrading in the eyes of the jury or more irrelevant to the issue of treason.”
The last [sentence], of course, dashes all idealistic hopes groundward. Still, there may be some small profit: it may be an object lesson to the army (and others) that they ought to tread lightly on such matters.
The second, and far more interesting matter, concerned two clippings Emmy sent. The story told of the holding of thirty young Chanute Field* airmen for being members of Pachuco* gangs—violence and sadism. They were all tattooed with the mark of Pachuco—the cross with “merit badges” for outstanding acts of violence.
•
Without the YMCA as a center for sexual opportunity, Steward had to spend his nights out, cruising the bars. As an older man, and moreover as a recovering alcoholic, he did not find the scene an easy one. While many of his sexual fantasies involved tough guys in uniform—like the airmen who were also pachuco gang members in the article sent to him by Emmy—he nonetheless found the San Francisco bar scene much too violent and unpredictable:
the club-cruising here seems utterly unsatisfactory and frantic to me; I actually much prefer the modus operandi I have worked out at home. True, the excitement of the chase is lacking in my method—but so are the hazards of black eyes, rolling, beating, and (to a large extent) blackmail. Here, tout n’est que désordre, tourbillon, mélée.*
…I never did find Larry [Ferguson] (we were to go drinking) but I walked miles—to the Sundown, Black Cat, Gordon’s, Paper Doll (it was so packed they were drinking outside on the steps—is this a purge town?) and finally Dolan’s. All of a sudden I felt as empty as Mrs. Viveash in Antic Hay—when she and Gumbril, lost and alone in London, were taxi-riding to find someone they knew. No one at home, or all busy—or about to commit suicide. “Let us go back by way of Piccadilly,” Mrs. V. kept saying; “the lights at least give the impression of being cheerful.”
The loneliness and sense of exclusion from which he was suffering moderated, however, after a friendly encounter with an older naval officer:
at the Stanford [Apartments I met] a sailor with a hairdo…He is a great tall kind of bleached out thing, not too swish but a little…This evening he was in uniform and despite the “old salt” weatherbeaten quality of him and the bleaching and toupee (all curls in front like one of Louisa Alcott’s Little Women), he looked authentically Navy in his uniform. I introduced myself—and to an airman named George, too, who was tying his tie; they’d just finished something—and learned he was on an admiral’s staff (the admiral’s a gay one, too) and had been in the Navy 10 years—achieving by his position a kind of maritime diplomatic immunity. He and the flyboy went out to dinner, and then he came back alone—read the motorcyclist’s story, got hot, and when I asked him if he wanted a blow job, he lay back on the bed without undressing, his hands behind his head, and let me go at it—very wise as to what I wanted*…Then he looked at more pictures, posed for a sketch,—and later went and knocked up Ken McGrath (the Amer[ican] airlines boy…) and the two of them posed for a loose quick sketch, and then we had a three-way do, with myself going down on Ken, and Ken taking Mike the sailor, and then Mike going down on Ken (after I let go, Ken having come). This is the kind of wonderful goings-on to which I am accustomed, and I am certainly glad that some of it happened this summer! The Ancient Mariner’s name is Michael Duke, and he seems to be independently wealthy…
The next day, after “breakfast with the Ancient Mariner” up at Gene’s Coffee Shop, Steward’s mood had lightened, and he went down to “Pop” Eddy’s to have a tattoo put on. “We had a long talk, very pleasant; more and more I come to admire the relaxed easy philosophy of the tattooers,” Steward recorded afterward. “He’s had 44 years of experience, is one of the few old masters left—Dietzel and Tatts Thomas being others. The vacation has taken, on the whole, a decided turn for the better, and I find myself a little reluctant to leave on [September] the 9th.”
•
The following day Steward got a number of supplies from “Pop” Eddy, as well as some technical tips on tattooing. He then met up with his sister at her elegant suite of rooms at the St. Francis Hotel, for she was just then visiting San Francisco with her new fiancé, Joe Harper, a highly placed hotel executive who always traveled in great style. By the end of the week, however, Steward had had quite enough of them, for seeing his sister so happily in love seems to have triggered in him an acute awareness of his own perpetual isolation. In a desire to escape these feelings, he once more went out cruising:
Broke away from Jinny and Joe after dinner at Tommy’s, and Bing and I went cruising in Sausalito…we came shortly back to SF, entering once more on the horrible empty Mrs. Viveash rounds…In the [Black] Cat I fell to talking with a wonderful little butch motorcyclist, complete with fancy leather jacket and untidy crewcut and pug nose—a solid little dur, very fascinating…We knew many of the same s-m crew in New York, though he made it quite clear he didn’t “go in for that” in the least, whereupon I pooh-poohed it myself. But I had a lovely fantasy of his tight little hard body sitting on my face—and his leather jacket still on.
…[Later] I was turned down for the second time in one evening. This caused me to put my head against the doorjamb for a moment after he had gone, and wonder if perhaps the moment had not come when I should give it ALL up entirely…Then the pang passed, and I went to what I thought was the room of that little dish-faced blackhaired boy…who (being small) had a cock that actually did hang halfway down to his knee. Unfortunately, the only open door was to the bed of someone else—and I was startled at the stranger’s face, and left hurriedly.
Though feeling his age and isolation more deeply than ever before, Steward wrote his final journal entry the next day, September 8:
I made at least one good and permanent friend this summer, and that’s Bing[leman]…[Today] he said, in his quiet way, “You’ll never be lonesome, not with the richness of your mind,” and a little later, “it will seem like the end of summer, when you go.” These two small things I’ll certainly treasure, for they mean a lot coming from him. And then, so as to be able to put him in the studfile, and really because I was dreadfully fond of him, I went down on him a little—not much—standing there in the kitchen, naked from our sunbaths, and kind of smelly—and he so exhausted and bitten and bloody from Jimmy of the night before that he could barely raise a hardon. It was a kind of tribute, and we both knew it—unimportant to be carried further.
[Afterward], I went back to the Stanford Court and packed—and then towards midnight saw the ugly-faced little blackhaired boy with the malocclusion. I asked him if he would like a blow job. “If you’re good,” he said rather slowly. I grinned and said I was reasonably proficient. So we went to his room, and he threw the blind up so that there was light from Powell Street…He was most appreciative, and grew quite hot, and pushed with his hands on my head, and then called me up to kiss him somewhat. And when—panting, excited, his legs threshing—he grew ready to come, he grabbed it and squeezed it with both hands on it…I asked him why, and he said the orgasm was so violent with him that often he went unconscious, and stayed out for half an hour.
It was a nice ending to a stay in California.
The next morning I got up and took the morning plane home. There were no more adventures worth recording—a Filipino U of Michigan medical student sitting beside me, a mild flirt with a redcap at the airport. Emmy was there; it was grey and raining—and the key was melancholy, the drama ended, the “fun” over.