As 1955 began, Steward focused ever more intently on his journal writing, now recording events as they unfolded rather than trying to shape them into stories, essays, or anecdotes. “Everything [in the journal came] from direct observation,” he later wrote. “[It would be wrong to] expect [it to have] the arrangement and symmetry of the scholar’s monograph, [for] the order, logic, and design of the universe cannot be impressed on the chaos of life as it was observed on the skidrow of South State Street in Chicago.” Even so, his daily journal entries often read as excitingly as fiction, for as Steward later explained, “tattooing furnished me with a kind of continuing drama, exciting, odd, and unusual, and quickly spoiled me for any kind of dull workaday routine occupation…The unusual clientele—always different, always changing—kept me fascinated and swimming in the mainstream of life—certainly in its dark rich depths…For anyone with even the mildest interest in people, tattooing was an ideal occupation.” Then again, the journal was primarily a confessional work, and its most substantial entries concerned Steward’s daily state of mind as he reflected upon the relation of his various sexual activities to his increasingly solitary life.
To his own surprise, Steward found he had a knack for running a shop, as well as a natural ability for handling the many tough guys, criminals, and drunks who frequented it. The sex researcher and psychologist Wardell Pomeroy, who visited the shop with Kinsey and, later, on his own, recalled that “[I] spent many hours in his shop watching him ‘operate’ [and]…It never ceased to amaze me how he was able to transform himself from the academic ivory-towered English professor to an entrepreneur who could handle very sticky situations and some very tough customers with an aplomb that even those raised in lower social levels would find difficult to duplicate.”
Despite his primary focus on running the kiosk as a profitable business, Steward also began having a number of semipublic sexual adventures there, a form of risk-taking he found particularly exciting. One Sunday morning when Bob Berbich stopped by the arcade looking for some action, Steward did not take him back to his apartment; he simply pulled the curtain across the front of the booth:
He came in; I drew the curtains and stood him against the back of Randy’s trunk, and went down on him. He came rather quickly…and as I turned to get some Kleenex…the curtain parted a crack and it was young Ted Bott and three-four friends come for some [tattooing] work…I was flustered for a moment, but [then] told them that Bob had had a fly put on the head of his cock.
The danger of exposure added greatly to the thrill. Steward courted danger in other ways, too; most notably by becoming involved with Kenny Kothmann, a “boot” sailor training for the medical corps at Great Lakes who despite being quite sexually experienced was still only sixteen, and thus recognizably below the age of sexual consent. Steward, knowing this, nonethless let Kothmann stay regularly at his apartment on his weekend liberties (just as he had let Bobby Krauss do the year before), and from February through August the two had sex together twenty-three times. As with Krauss, Steward kept photographs and records of Kothmann that noted his age and background as well as their various sexual activities.
Through his relationship with Kothmann, it seems the forty-four-year-old Steward had been experiencing a second adolescence. And indeed, the new world in which he lived and worked was largely populated by adolescents:
An astonishing day, really. After class I was visited by three [DePaul undergraduate] beauties: Bruce Smith, Dick Avery of the soft black eyes, and Ralph Johnson* of the tremendous torso—and I could not help think how generous life is to me, to surround me with such beauty: a kind of sentimental Thornton Wilder reaction, but an honest one nonetheless. And then down to the shop, to find a letter from Kenny [Kothmann], charming and appreciative of my “lavish apartment” and other things—and to see him swish in a little later, accompanied by a tall southern belle in black wool too, both of them from the medical corps school at Great Lakes. This one, Bill Peterson, was an even wilder bitch with a soft South Carolina accent…And they had not been there long when a crowd of young Pachukes appeared at the doorway, the central crewcut blond one fingering his cock and saying, “can you put a fly on the head of it?” I swallowed hard and without batting an eye said yes, whereat they all crowded inside and we closed the curtains. I took his cock in the palm of my left hand and carefully and methodically rubbed in the anaesthetic cream—he got hard and enjoyed it all, I can tell—and then put the fly on…it seemed to satisfy him. And then I put chocolate and vanilla above each one of his nipples…
Kothmann initially treated Steward as if he were just another sailor-trainee from Great Lakes, and Steward was in heaven, for to be a sailor who had sex with other sailors had always been one of his great fantasies. With Kothmann and several other boot sailors now stopping by regularly for sex, Steward even went so far as to ask himself, “Now that the ‘Navy’ is opening up for me, which is exactly what I have wanted all along, shall I maybe give up tattooing and concentrate on sex? Else why did I take up tattooing in the first place? But…I like tattooing; it’s in me like a virus—[I’d] sooner cut off my head, really.”
Shortly thereafter, Kinsey came to Chicago for a visit, and the two men met to discuss some other possible projects. Steward noted that Kinsey “had an idea that we should all collaborate on an article on the sexual implications of tattooing…I was properly modest, and we both realized the difficulty of having anything appear under my own name, even under that of Phil Sparrow. ‘You’d be fired in a moment,’ he said, and I knew it too, perhaps not so much for tattooing as for being associated with his name.” After the meeting, however, Steward began to worry about Kinsey’s health, for he looked very ill.
Kinsey’s life had become enormously difficult since the second volume of his monumental study, Sexual Response in the Human Female, had been published in 1953. His lifelong habit of working himself to exhaustion had taken its toll on a heart that, already weakened by childhood illness, was now further weakened by chronic work-related anxiety and tension. Since the early 1950s Kinsey had been taking both amphetamines and Nembutal daily in order to keep himself going; he was now also taking digitalis for his heart, which was enlarged and arrhythmic. After a collapse that had required hospitalization in 1953, he had suffered a number of small heart attacks in the months that followed.
Popular resentment of Kinsey, meanwhile, was growing. Unlike his Male volume, which had been hailed as a landmark study, Sexual Response in the Human Female had been roundly denounced by both Catholic and Protestant groups, and had been received throughout the country with an enormous upswell of popular anger. Part of this popular rage against Kinsey’s sex research was a delayed response to the findings of the Male volume; but Kinsey also had to contend with the wholesale popular rejection of his statistical finding that women had strong sexual urges—a finding that many people thought deeply insulting to American womanhood.
The resentment of Kinsey was also part of a greater shift that had been going on in American culture since the late 1940s: a shift toward political and social conservatism. In the five years between Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, public fears about conspiracies, spies, and enemy agents working within the United States had been wildly exaggerated at the federal level by Republicans intent on seizing and consolidating their political power. As a result of this shift, Kinsey had lost his Rockefeller Foundation funding, which was crucial to his enterprise. In his naïveté, Kinsey had expected that the knowledge gained through his statistical studies would bring about a greater understanding, tolerance, and acceptance of sexual variation within the American population. What had happened, in fact, was just the opposite: both he and his research were reviled, and sexual intolerance grew and spread. As a result, Kinsey’s health collapsed, for he was worn down not only by exhaustion, but also by stress. He was also, in the the words of a close colleague, “crushed with disappointment.”
•
A few days after Kinsey left Chicago, Steward made up his mind, once and for all, to place the large rose tattoo in the middle of his chest. Accordingly, he drafted up a rose image featuring a phallic meatus at its center, planning to bring it to Milwaukee to have it applied by Amund Dietzel.
The phallic rose would soon become Steward’s emblem. When he left the Sportland Arcade to open his own tattoo parlor in the coming year, he would adopt it as his shop’s insignia and feature it on his letterhead. One of his first significant published stories, meanwhile, would be entitled “The Sergeant with the Rose Tattoo.” He was interested in the rose for its traditional symbolism: the mystic center, the heart, the garden of Eros, the flower of Venus. Originally from Persia, the rose had been considered by Arabs a masculine flower, and in ancient times was a symbol not only of joy but also of secrecy and silence. Moreover, the rose had been a staple of Western tattooing since the nineteenth century. Steward also associated the rose with Gertrude Stein, whose stationery featured a rose around which figured her famous saying, “Rose is a rose is a rose.” His decision to place a large rose on his chest probably also owed something to Tennessee Williams, whose 1951 stage play The Rose Tattoo featured a rose tattoo (similarly placed in the middle of a man’s chest) as the emblem of an overwhelming physical passion.*
Steward had an ulterior motive in going to Dietzel to have the rose put on. With his usual craftiness, he planned to extract (and absorb) as much technical information as possible from Dietzel during the process. Dietzel was, after all, a great master of the art: at the time Steward went to him, this former merchant seaman originally from Denmark was the greatest source of tattooing wisdom in the entire Midwest, and even today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest tattoo artists of the twentieth century.
While Steward would in many ways become Dietzel’s successor, the two would never quite be friends, for the differences between the two men were many and great. Born in 1890, Dietzel had gone to sea as a cabin boy at age ten. Between 1912 and 1915 he had worked as a traveling tattoo artist, and in 1915 he had opened a tattoo parlor on South State Street. As his sense of style, use of shading, and ability with finer lines made him sought after from coast to coast, he decided to move up to Milwaukee. There, starting in 1916, he introduced a number of designs that proved enduringly popular, including the leaping black panther. His fortunes took a turn for the better when World War II brought a tattooing boom to Milwaukee, which was just a short train ride away from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. By the time Steward met him in 1955, Dietzel had long since become independently wealthy from real estate speculation, and had continued to work at the tattoo parlor only out of sheer love of the art. He was also a rough and somewhat vulgar man, and entirely heterosexual. “The purity and assurance of his line, the supreme and absolute confidence with which he created his tattoos, could be recognized even by a lay observer,” Steward later noted. “‘Dietz’ was in a sense my teacher, and I learned more from him about tattooing than from any other person.”
•
When not teaching at DePaul or tattooing down at the cage, Steward continued to cultivate his contacts in the world of erotic art, in part because he enjoyed introducing these men to Kinsey, and in part because he himself was still toying with the idea of publishing his visual erotica. Steward devoted the majority of his energy during this time, however, to the cultivation of his sex life, for after years of standing before handsome and aloof young male undergraduates to instruct them on grammar, composition, and the history of English literature, he was now meeting similarly handsome young men on a daily basis—handling their bodies in any way he liked, and having a great deal of sex with them. In exorcising the sexual frustrations of a seventeen-year academic career, he was incidentally discovering something Kinsey had already published in his Male study: namely, that the sexual lives of working-class and underclass American males were quite different from those of middle- and upper-class American males, particularly in their attitudes toward premarital intercourse, prostitution, and homosexuality. According to the Kinsey findings, young men with only a grade school education experienced four or five times as many homosexual experiences as did young men who went to college. Moreover, lower-class males tended to be quite promiscuous in the early years of marriage, had a higher tolerance for homosexuality, and were much more direct, even blunt, in their approach to sexual acts of any sort. As a result of his move downward in the American social hierarchy, Steward found his sex life had been given an unexpected boost.
And yet despite Steward’s sexual success on South State Street, the stress of his double identity was beginning to wear on him. He was now regularly popping Benzedrine to get through the teaching day at DePaul, and people were starting to notice and comment on his erratic behavior. In a strange way he seemed not to care: during the early summer, despite the abundance of shocking new tattoos on his body, he began sunbathing regularly on a DePaul University rooftop, taking only the smallest of precautions to prevent his discovery there by administrators. With this and other actions Steward was clearly courting his own dismissal; nonetheless, he regularly experienced anxiety attacks.
Indeed, he faced the very real possibility of being shaken down, robbed, or possibly even murdered on South State Street. One evening, having been informed by two tattooed minors that the cops were trying to get them to sign a complaint against him, Steward wrote,
A curious day, the end of it doom-filled with the same empty terror I used to feel while drinking—that’s twice within a short space of time. [The youngsters’ story] was the beginning of the fear, which grew steadily all the rest of the evening. I thought of a dozen plans—denial, lack of proof, stopping completely…I left [a sex party with] the dread large inside me, and visions of capture. (I can easily see that panic grows in the criminal and leads him to do foolish things in that tight emotional emptiness which he feels.)
Sensing disaster was imminent, Emmy Curtis begged Steward to hide the great masses of erotic material and sexual records he had stockpiled in his apartment, and even volunteered to take them into her own home. Despite Emmy’s attempt at intervention, however, Steward made few changes to his lifestyle, for the semi-anonymous sex gatherings in his erotica-strewn home were now a well-established way of life: “In the evening Bobby Krauss came, about eight-thirty, and we called Bert Bauer and invited him over. He came, we spread the old chenille (freshly laundered by [Emmy’s cleaning lady] Mrs. Mersel, and brought back in a hurry by Emmy when I told her it was the daisy-chain blanket: ‘Oh, mercy! I’ll have it there by Saturday!’—and she did.)”
The Monday after the daisy chain, Steward noted in his journal that “school is…awful: Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, facing my big classes, I have to take half a benny—and even then it is hard.” His panic attacks continued as well: “There’s a definite kind of reluctant fear in me to go down to the shop any more,” he noted. “I kinda feel that each evening may be my last [as a tattooist], unless they let me tattoo in jail.”
•
The situation down at the arcade became even more difficult that June, when a young man fascinated by the tattoo cage and its decor introduced himself to Steward as a magazine writer, and told him he wanted to do a feature on Steward and his work. Steward was quietly horrified, but even as he knew he ought to refuse, he worried that by declining to be interviewed he might draw even more attention to himself. So instead he gave the reporter the interview, but lied extensively about his age, training, and background. “The Ancient Art of Professor Phillip Sparrow,” published in July 1955 by Chicago magazine, gave a fascinating glimpse of Steward’s double life:
The inside walls of the shack are covered with colored insignia: crosses encircled by thorny wreaths, lions rampant and entwined by bright green vipers, bleeding hearts capped by scrolls reading “mother” and “sweetheart,” blue anchors, red roses, obsolete army tanks, daggers, mermaids, hula dancers and fierce looking eagles clutching writhing lizards in their talons.
This is a tattoo parlor—the roost of professor Phillip Sparrow, one of the row’s four epidermal artists.
…Sparrow bears little resemblance in appearance or manner to any stereotyped conception of a tattooer. He is a wiry 36-year-old [sic] of medium height, with wavy blond hair and mustache and a handsome, almost patrician face. Although he carries six tattoos of his own, none are so located as to be visible to the public. His one sartorial concession to the trade is a nautical working costume of blue jeans and a dark turtle-neck sweater…Sparrow’s literary allusions…run [from the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament to] Freud and various books on the history of tattooing, and his soft polysyllabic speech helps account for his academic nickname.
…“He’s a real perfectionist,” said one of his customers. “One little flaw and he’s tearing his hair.”
…Sailors and motorcycle riders, Sparrow said, are the social groups most prominently represented among his clientele. Of approximately 400 people he has perforated here, only four have been women.
Shortly after the magazine appeared, two of Steward’s students discovered it and circulated it among other members of their class. The discovery caused a sensation among the students, but even so, administrators were slow to catch on. On Friday, July 1, Steward wrote in his journal,
If DePaul should fire me, it is pleasant to think what might be done: perhaps Life magazine would find enough sensational shock value (pointing up the plight of the underpaid professor who had to become a tattooer to make ends meet, etc.) in my petite histoire to run something about it—which might make DePaul known in years to come as “that university where they couldn’t pay one of their professors enough and he took up tattooing.”
Though worried about losing his job, Steward nonetheless took pleasure in the article, and sent a copy of it to Kinsey along with the next hundred-page installment of his journal. In response to Kinsey’s subsequent suggestion that he send Bill Dellenback up to Chicago to continue his documentation of Steward’s apartment, Steward wrote, “As for having things to photograph—well, I just haven’t been doing anything except the tattooing, and my ‘art gallery’ is now walking around the world.”
In a subsequent journal entry, Steward described how his sex life, too, had changed: “I have now seen so many [sailors], handled so many arms, helped them on and off with jumpers, that the wonderful spell they used to cast has all but disappeared. What a shame this is!…If the sailor-object disappears, what in the world can be left? I am afraid my old brain can not of itself engender a new illusion to live by.”
Sex with sailors had been Steward’s central erotic fantasy for more than fifteen years; now the fantasy had been overtaken by quotidian reality, and Steward had temporarily lost his bearings. Part of the problem was, as he noted, overexposure. But there was another, unmentioned problem: age. Nearly all the sailors in his shop were either still adolescents or else in their early twenties. Steward, by comparison, was forty-five. The situation was particularly difficult with Kenny Kothmann, the sixteen-year-old sailor from Great Lakes who had been living at Steward’s apartment on his weekend liberties—for though the two were still sexually active, Kothmann had become increasingly oblivious to Steward’s thoughts and feelings. Having ceased to respond to Steward as a lover, he had begun treating him instead merely like he would any other authority figure—someone to be taken advantage of whenever possible, and otherwise simply avoided or tuned out. Over the past several months Kothmann had driven Steward half crazy with his constant stand-ups and sudden, unexplained disappearances; what had once seemed to Steward a perfect romance was now only embarrassing and humiliating. Realizing he needed to end the attachment, Steward left a note on his kitchen table asking Kothmann to return his apartment keys. Kothmann did so, with a note promising to spend the whole of the following weekend with him. When Kothmann proved a no-show the following week, Steward wrote in his journal,
…the day [was] a blur of sailors…and more sailors, demanding anchors, hearts, skulls, daggers with snakes entwined…and finally, with my senses reeling, Kenny and [his friend] Peppy appearing, and Kenny saying he was going to a party, and did I mind? And all the small hopes built on the strength of last week’s note…shattered, dusty, gone…with the feeling that tattooing…[is] spoiling my sex life almost beyond all recognition. After next Friday—I hope I never hear or see Kothmann again, ever: and I hope that when my psyche re-orients itself, gets the gyroscope of common-sense working again, I shall never again permit myself to be so entrapped…
Kothmann showed up at the apartment the next morning. Having started the evening at a party, he had ended it in the Clark theater,* but then he had needed a place to sleep and shower before heading back to Great Lakes—and apparently he had kept a copy of Steward’s key in case of just such an emergency. “I got out of bed [and] confess[ed that] I had fallen in love with him three months before,” Steward wrote sadly in his journal. “[Then saying,] ‘so—if my actions seem a little odd and abrupt to you—consider why.’”
Then I went to shave. I heard him cough a coupla times, and when I came back he had fallen over on the sofa, ostensibly asleep—but how else could we have avoided an embarrassing moment? I give him credit for a dramatic resolution…When I got home there was a note from Kenny, saying amongst other things that yes, I did a good job hiding it, he thought he was just someone else to go to bed with when there wasn’t anyone else. “I can never thank you enough for all you’ve done. I know one sailor who would be awfully homesick and mixed up if it wasn’t for you. I have a little something I’ll give you next weekend.”
The following Saturday, however, there was no present for Steward. Kothmann had simply dropped him and disappeared.
That Saturday was Steward’s forty-fifth birthday, and even though the day passed in a blur of biceps and chests, he struggled hard to fight off depression. “The $91 I took home with me this evening didn’t make me any less lonesome,” he noted wearily in his journal. “I guess I’ll have to start arranging spintries again—it’s just been that I’m so damned tired after work that I don’t feel like [doing] anything.”
Four days later, Kothmann was caught having sex with a fellow sailor at the Naval Training Station, and authorities there placed him in hospital isolation for observation and intense cross-examination. In line with the nationwide hysteria about homosexuality, naval authorities were now actively seeking to uncover any and all traces of homosexuality within the ranks of enlisted men. In doing so, they had also decided to investigate any person or place in the Chicago area that might be involved in promoting or encouraging homosexual activity. Steward, not yet knowing the full extent of Kothmann’s trouble, noted in his journal that a couple of days earlier he had written “a note to Kenny, the tenor of which was that the Navy way of life was really an abnormal one and that frequently damage was done [by Naval authorities] in trying to create these ‘young men pure’ [through forced celibacy.] As a kind of bulwark against his despair [about his life at the Training Station], I tried [using my good-luck] amulet* on him…[and right after that] I got his letter announcing the worst had happened.”
Two days later, DePaul finished for the year, and Steward was free to immerse himself entirely in his tattooing. After putting tattoos on a pair of particularly handsome young construction workers, he noted in his journal,
God, if teaching was a martyrdom, what is this? A very real burning at the stake…I handle [these young men] so closely; I come so near to all these tanned young shoulders; I see the tension of the serratus magnus pattern; I feel the hair beneath the arm pit; I look into the eyes, I press the fainting head down between its legs and look at the ridge of the backbone curving like a well-fleshed bow; I see the hair running into a rivulet down beneath the belt center—my god, what is going to be left after all this? Probably nothing except the Catholic religion, or checking umbrellas in a museum.
A week later, Steward noted, “Thomas Mann died today. I re-lived the moments he and I had passed together. And wept a little…[Then] Kenny [Kothmann] came in, with horribly bleached hair (the underthatch quite dark), coarse and ropy; he looked like a male whore of thirty-five. He [has] got an Undesirable Discharge.” Two days later, Steward had even worse news from Thurman Peppington, an effeminate black boot sailor who was a friend of Kothmann’s. Peppington (or “Peppy”) had heard from a mutual friend “that Kenny had spilled the whole works to the Navy—with e special reference to the Daisy Chain [with Peppington and several others at my apartment on] May 22,* and that the Navy was going to declare my shop off-limits.” Steward was at that point more concerned about losing his business than with prosecution by naval authorities, since as a civilian he was technically beyond their reach. Still, he wrote, “There’s no describing the shock this gave me—like one swift terrible blow right to the solar plexus, leaving me kinda dark and non-functioning in the head, and unable to think or grasp what was going on externally.”
While Steward instinctively knew that Kothmann had betrayed him, he could not yet bring himself to hate this damaged, troubled, and heavily promiscuous sixteen-year-old whose entire professional future had probably been irremediably compromised by his undesirable discharge. When Kothmann stopped by the shop the following day, Steward bought him a bus ticket to San Francisco and gave him a tattoo as a going-away present. Afterward he wrote, “[I] put my big rose on Kenny’s shoulder, working Tab Hunter’s initials into it [at Kenny’s request]—half wondering if I should not have moistened the colors with curare or arsenic, or used my rustiest needles…I have never in my life been so glad to see anyone depart.”
The next day, however, the situation worsened yet again: “The pudgy little queer negro [boot sailor], Peppington, came in—and told me [all the] details. Kenny gave way completely, told them everything about me, gave Naval Intelligence my name, picture, told of the tattoo shop, intimately described the daisy chain with Tab Buonfiglio* [right] down to the color of the [chenille] bedspread [I had] put down on the floor…When I got home in the early evening, I called [another sailor,] Lou Tobler…[who] confirmed every detail.” Steward now realized that not only was his tattoo business in danger; he also faced dismissal from DePaul and public exposure as a “sexual deviant.” “The one thing I wonder [most],” he wrote, “is if [Kothmann] gave them my name at school, or told the Navy I taught at DePaul.”
Several days later Steward spoke with his friend Bill Bates* in San Francisco. “I alerted the west coast against Kenny Kothmann…Since we are all, as Jacques Delaunay once said, ‘un grand Mafia,’ word like this can travel quickly, [since] no queer fears anything so much as one of his own breed who’s turned informer…I’ll get Kothmann if it takes me twenty years.”
The next day, while Steward was applying a tattoo, a heavily decorated chief yeoman from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station appeared at the entrance to the kiosk. When the last of Steward’s customers left, he asked Steward if his name was Phil Sparrow, and if he happened to live in an apartment on Kenmore. Steward said yes, and asked how the man knew. The yeoman replied, “Let’s just say it’s my business to know such things”:
Here it comes, I thought. And it did. Then he asked if I knew Dion White, Kothmann…Peppington and Malone.* I admitted to “remembering” Peppington and Kothmann, said I didn’t know the others. Then he muttered something about “living in Chicago and the police” which didn’t register precisely, although I knew he was threatening…Then he told me, “Keep away from the sailors, you know what I mean, or the next time I won’t be alone.”
He left, and I called after him, “Is this official?” “Yes,” he said.
Naturally I was in a whirl, and near-state of shock, but managed to get home, and sought solace in a sleeping pill. This looks like ruin—or was it just the “friendly” warning?
By popping a handful of Sedormid pills, Steward managed to get a few hours sleep. The next morning when he returned to work at the arcade, he was stopped at the entrance by Frank, the building’s manager, who informed him that “a guy from naval intelligence was in asking just what goes [on] with Sparrow.” When Steward asked Frank what he had told the intelligence man, Frank responded that he had covered for Steward: “[By] the luckiest sort of coincidence, Frank had known [the guy from naval intelligence] from way back, and gave him a song and dance in his best Lithuanian bluff manner, saying everything was on the up and up, and just let that pasty-faced little motherfucking little goddamned liar [Kothmann] come around and make his accusations face to face.”
“I hope that settles it,” Steward concluded, “but I am fearful still.”