He later kept in touch with his former teacher through letters. Steward, who died in 1993 of heart failure, called it his "stud file."ĭouglas Martin, 78, was one of Steward's students at DePaul. This included a metal box holding index cards that described in meticulous detail his sexual relationships with 746 men. Partly at Kinsey's urging, Steward went on to maintain a vast (and furtively kept) archive of gay memorabilia. In short, it was a sex life so wide-ranging and prolific that Steward became a main source on homosexuality for Alfred Kinsey's landmark 1950s studies of sexuality. Those conquests, Steward claimed, included, ah em, Wilder, Rudolph Valentino and Rock Hudson - the last in a Marshall Field's elevator. Wednesday at the Borders in Lincoln Park, must work "a balancing act," as he said in an interview, between honoring Steward's considerable legacy as a cult artist and writer and delving into the relatively open life of a gay man who, at a time when homosexuality itself could mean jail, documented every one of his intimate encounters. Which lends a poignancy to the title of Justin Spring's "Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade," a National Book Award finalist in nonfiction. Samuel Steward, though, was his given name, and regardless of what you call him, he remains a little-known figure in Chicago's cultural history. To close friends Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein and Christopher Isherwood, he was "Sammy." Later, when his life as an obscure literary figure gave way to a steady career as a successful writer of gay pulp fiction, Steward became Phil Andros. Chips of the tattoo world."Īnd there were other names. Privately, Steward called himself "the Mr. To his students at DePaul and Loyola universities, where he was popular and taught for decades (and where his other life as a tattoo artist went largely undetected), he was professor Steward, a mesmerizing English teacher and sometimes writer whose primary work of literary fiction, 1936's "Angels on the Bough," had been compared to Henry James in a New York Times book review. That's how he was known to the Hell's Angels who befriended him in Oakland, Calif., where he later moved. On South State Street, where he moonlighted as a tattoo artist during the middle years of the 20th century, surrounded by the violent and the sketchy, he was known as Phil Sparrow.
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