Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (45 page)

The novel also features an element of action and surprise, for Phil is kidnapped, taken by force sexually, and then rescued by his friends, who in turn take their sexual revenge on his abductors. Moreover, the story is also suspensful, for all three cops know that if their sexual preferences are discovered, they are sure to be dismissed from the force. When rumors about Phil’s past as a hustler reach the police captain, Phil realizes he must skip out of San Francisco before the rumor is confirmed. He leaves for Chicago, where he applies for a new job as a policeman, and in doing so he reconnects with his old friend the bodybuilding hustler Rudy Dax, who is now also a police officer.
^*
Yet for all its sexual exuberance and good humor, the novel ends on a dark note as Phil learns that Greg and Pete have been sexually entrapped by a fellow officer and so have lost their jobs.

While Steward was delighted to have published
My Brother, the Hustler
and
San Francisco Hustler
, he distrusted and disliked Roland Boudreault. When he discovered that Boudreault had facilitated the pirating of
Ring-Around-the-Rosy
and probably planned to do the same with
San Francisco Hustler
, he began to network among his fellow gay erotic authors in San Francisco for a new, more trustworthy publisher, and hopefully for a better business contract.
^*

Shortly after publication of
My Brother, the Hustler
, Steward was asked to participate in a panel discussion entitled “The Plight of Gay Novelists” at the headquarters of SIR, or Society for Individual Rights, the leading Bay Area homophile association. He shared the panel with Richard Amory, at that moment the best-known author of gay erotic fiction in America. Amory’s 1966 bestseller
Song of the Loon
and its two sequels (
Song of Aaron
and
Listen, the Loon Sings
) were the most widely read gay novels of the 1960s and ’70s; it has been estimated that during this period, 30 percent of all gay men in the United States had purchased a paperback copy of
Song of the Loon
.

The panel discussion was later written up in the Los Angeles–based newspaper
The Advocate
by Larry Townsend, an author of erotica,
^*
who noted that more than two hundred people had attended, and that Amory had been the star attraction. Nonetheless, according to Townsend, “Phil Andros [gave] quite a long, articulate statement on the writers of the past, [noting that] back in the thirties, forties and fifties, a gay writer might occasionally find his way into print with a story about homosexual protagonists, but he was then constrained to allude only delicately to sex that occurred between the men. Sometimes he was even forced to mask his story by casting one of the lovers as a woman. Those who ‘knew’ could read between the lines; anyone else would miss the point completely.”

At the time of the SIR panel, Amory (whose real name was Richard Love) had just separated from his wife and three children and moved to San Jose to work as a high school Spanish teacher and participate in the San Jose Gay Liberation Front. Steward and Amory had much in common; like Steward, Amory had been raised in Columbus, where his father had been a professor of psychology at Ohio State University. Like Steward, Amory had taken up the writing of gay pulp fiction not as a way of making a living, but rather as a way of putting his own sexual experiences with other men into perspective, hoping that in doing so he might raise public consciousness about the true, loving nature of homosexual experience.

After serving in the military, Amory had studied anthropology in Mexico City, then married and returned to the Bay Area to take a degree in Spanish while starting a family. His fiction was very different from Steward’s as it tended to focus upon deeply felt love relationships between men, ones originating in (but not necessarily based upon) their physical attraction to each other. The immediate success of
Song of the Loon
in 1966 (which was partly due to its strong back-to-nature and pro–Native American themes) had convinced Amory to continue with his writing. Nonetheless, he remained sweetly modest about the enormous popularity of his first novel in the years that followed, telling an interviewer in 1970, “I just had the good luck to hit the right market at the right time with a groovy little curiosity piece.” His status as a bestselling author unfortunately brought him no financial rewards; in his work-for-hire contract with Greenleaf he had sold the novel for a flat fee and given away all rights to his own work. He would ultimately publish six novels, the last of them in 1974; none of them would ever earn him more than a modest flat fee.

Steward greatly admired the originality of
Song of the Loon
(subtitled “A Gay Pastoral in Five Books and an Interlude”) even if he felt no great attraction to its plotting, characterization, or prose. A historical fantasy set on the American frontier, the novel was far from anything Steward would have cared to write; its blandly repetitive descriptions of sexual encounters and its frequent lapses into wildly self-indulgent free-verse poetry were a far cry from the lucid prose (and focused eroticism) of the Phil Andros fiction. Still, in its radical hypothesis of a world in which sexual love between men was the norm, the novel was conceptually remarkable. Steward responded positively to the book as well as to its author, who subsequently became a close friend.

Amory’s emotional state was precarious. Money shortages contributed to his troubles; so did the destabilizing influence, after his separation from his wife, of psychedelic drugs. Worst of all, the knowledge that his publishers had made a small fortune off his books even as they mistreated him as an author and denigrated him as a homosexual kept him in a state of constant agitation during the time that Steward knew him. “The people at Greenleaf remind me of…dirty old men selling fuck-pictures in dark alleys,” he observed in a 1970
Vector
magazine
^*
interview. “They have no real knowledge of,
or
understanding of,
or
sensitivity to a gay person’s needs or circumstances. What’s more, they don’t
want
to understand—even if they could, which is doubtful.”

As a result of their meeting for the panel discussion, Steward, Amory, and a third writer, Dirk Vanden, began working on the creation of an informal organization they named the Renaissance Group. They conceived of the Renaissance Group as a lobbying organization on behalf of gay writers to define and advance the cause of gay literature. In addition to drafting a list of specific demands that might be made of pulp publishers in the negotiation of future contracts, Amory and Steward subsequently exchanged copies of their published works, met frequently, and read and responded to each other’s works in progress.

Like Amory, Steward was risking the various indignities of pulp publication—including take-it-or-leave-it flat-fee contracts; bad, sloppy, and politically insensitive editing; and unauthorized title changes and cuts to his manuscripts—simply to get his sex-affirmative message out into public circulation. Along with Richard Amory, Larry Townsend, and others, Steward felt he was not simply writing pornography, but rather taking part in a vanguard action of sexual liberation—for he had now begun to consider himself as much a sexual activist as an agent provocateur. Townsend spoke for all of these authors when he acknowledged in the April 1970 issue of
Vector
that “anything that is produced and marketed in any art field is—and must be—a compromise between the product the artist would like to produce and the product the publisher, studio, gallery, agent or what-have-you is able to profitably sell.” He then went on to suggest that through fringe publishers such as Greenleaf a substantial (and authentic) gay literary subculture would eventually begin to establish itself. Others, however, doubted that the homosexual community would ever support truly literary endeavors when the immediate interest of most of the men reading these books was simple sexual self-gratification. One writer for
Vector
would state as late as May 1973 that since most homosexuals turned to pulp only for sexual titillation, “a writer who tries to elevate the tone of the gay paperback novel is doomed to a certain and never ending battle.”

And yet, for the moment, Amory and Steward were determined to use the “porno” houses as a means to an end. By keeping their writing just enough inside porn-house protocols to be published, while at the same time presenting a coherent and arguably literary vision of sex between men and its relation to the greater world, they were playing a high-stakes literary game. But at that moment they had no alternative; where direct description of sex between men was concerned, the fly-by-night porn game was the only game in town.

In writing his Phil Andros novels, moreover, Steward felt he finally had a chance to express himself. Whether or not his work as Phil Andros ever achieved any sort of recognition, he was at last creating fiction that gave his life meaning. He was also, he was sure, providing someone, somewhere, an experience not only of sexual pleasure, but also of sexual self-recognition. In the words of one such reader, the later erotic novelist and gay activist John Preston, “The Phil Andros books satisfied needs that had barely been recognized [at that time] even by ourselves. We yearned for validation of the pleasures of homosexual sex, for knowledge about other gay men and how they were dealing with this new world we were just discovering, and for wisdom from someone who had gone this way before. We needed, above all, to know we were not alone.”

In the midst of writing his Phil Andros novels in 1970, Steward had resumed contact with his old friend Jim Kane, for the “Mad Priest” had recently moved to San Francisco. Kane had a little vacation cabin in Manitou Springs, Colorado, that he offered to Steward in late 1971 as a work retreat. Steward was glad to get away from Berkeley, and spent his December there working on a memoir of his friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. As he later remembered the visit, “[Kane would] come home to find me folded over the typewriter crying, because the memories [of my youthful visits to Stein and Toklas] had come back [to me] in such strength.”

Steward was able to be extraordinarily detailed in his recollections of Stein and Toklas because he had kept such extensive journal records of their conversations and activities during his visits to them in Bilignin, and along with the journals, he had taken their photographs and palm-prints, too. The journals contained lengthy verbatim transcriptions of conversations with Stein that Steward had set down using a peculiar brand of phonetic shorthand that he had invented as a young professor, one that combined elements of Anglo-Saxon grammar, French, and English.

Steward’s visit to Manitou Springs came to an abrupt end, however, when the cabin’s wood-fired cookstove burned too hot, causing the roof to burst into flames. The cabin burned to the ground. Steward’s journals from the Bilignin visits were lost in the blaze, but he escaped with the draft of the memoir, which he had completed only a few days before. At the suggestion of the Yale librarian Donald Gallup, Steward then sent the memoir to Gilbert Harrison,
^*
who had recently purchased a small publishing house and had mentioned to Gallup his hope of publishing something by or about Stein. Harrison read the manuscript with interest but returned it to Steward with a brief, decisive note of rejection suggesting that “these are private experiences not meant for the public. So that what one has left [after these private experiences are removed] is not so much a book, as a charming, informative, affectionate memoir, something of perhaps 4,000–5,000 words.” Steward then realized he would need to find an agent to represent the manuscript to other houses.

Perhaps because work on the memoir had put him in mind of his visits abroad, Steward then began a new Phil Andros novel, one that drew upon his recollections of Europe—specifically his several visits to Rome, primarily the one he had taken at the end of August 1952. In
When in Rome, Do…
(later published as
Roman Conquests
) Phil Andros takes a brief Roman holiday, and while seeing the sights immerses himself in the Italian world of sex for pay. For the first time in his life Phil finds he is being asked for money instead of offered it, but rather than being insulted he is delighted—for never before has he encountered such sexually uninhibited yet entirely “masculine” men.

The most romantic of the Phil Andros novels,
When in Rome, Do…
is also the most lighthearted. Steward dedicated it, jokingly, to his alter ego Ward Stames,
^*
with the epigraph “
Teres Atque Rotundus
^*
/
Nihil Tetigit Quod Non Ornavit
,”
^*
the first part of which came from the satires of Horace, and the second part from Samuel Johnson’s epitaph for Oliver Goldsmith. In revisiting Rome through the double lens of Roman satire and English literature, Steward would salute his professorial alter ego while at the same time embellishing his own memories of sex with Roman men.

The story opens beside the Spanish Steps, as Phil tours the little house where Keats died. Phil’s opening lines for the novel are perhaps some of the most outrageous ever written by a professor of English literature:

Phil goes on to observe, “If I’d been alive a hundred and fifty years ago I sure as hell would have tried to make him…I generally don’t like people with ‘poetic’ characteristics, but when you couple them with the talent that guy had, there’s nothing I’d have liked more than to screw him.” Instead, Phil does the next best thing: he seduces the soulful young English curator of the Keats house by quoting from “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” The chapter ends with a passionate sexual encounter atop Keats’s deathbed in the stillness of the Roman siesta.

Phil has arrived in Rome slightly in advance of his sponsor, “Bertie Messer, the duly-elected-by-women’s-clubs ‘Poet Laureate of New Jersey,’” who has paid Phil’s way to Rome with the intention of joining him there for a trip to Greece. But Messer is delayed, with the result that, in Phil’s words, “I was at present enjoying the Grandeur that was Rome. Alone.”

Phil’s next adventures are with a street urchin, then a carabiniere, both of whom he pays. He subsequently meets Duke, a leading American conductor traveling incognito, who pays him; a hustler (who steals his watch); a construction worker; a sailor in the Forum; a policeman, also in the Forum; a graveyard caretaker on Keats’s grave in the New Protestant Cemetery; and then once again the carabiniere. The street pickups, the fantastic variety of classically handsome and impeccably tailored men in uniform, and the casual exchange of money for sex—all continually delight Phil, particularly since, as he notes with frank amazement, “sex was just a pastime here, and everyone did everything.”
^*

After sending off this latest Phil Andros novel to Roland Boudreault, Steward began a new project: adapting the monologues of
The Joy Spot
into a film script for J. Brian. At Brian’s request, the story would describe successive moments of youthful sexual initiation beginning with an episode based on the opening scene of
My Brother, the Hustler
.
^*
Ultimately entitled
First Time Around
, the film achieved considerable success despite having much lower production values
^*
than
Seven in a Barn
.

•

By August 1972, Steward had finished his next Phil Andros novel, tentatively entitled
Renegade Hustler
. He had by now realized that Boudreault was not trustworthy, and had secured a new porno publisher, Greenleaf. Its managing editor, Ginger Sisson, offered him a flat fee of eight hundred dollars for the work, but only on condition that the names of all well-known individuals be removed, “including, with all due respect, Shirley Chisholm.”
^*

Renegade Hustler
would be the most psychologically realized of the Phil Andros novels, and also the most profoundly melancholy. It begins as Phil Andros, now twenty-eight, cruises Telegraph Avenue among the hippies and dropouts of 1972 Berkeley, and comes to the aid of a young man who has collapsed in the street while tripping on LSD. In short order Phil helps the young man, Larry Johnson, back to his bungalow and once there brings him down from his bad trip with a dose of Thorazine. Over the course of the next several months the two become involved, and Phil helps Larry turn his life around. Beginning with the promise of a highly sexual romance, the story instead becomes a dark meditation upon the impossibility of a sustained passion between two men.

As the weeks pass, Phil realizes through his newfound tenderness for Larry that his feelings about hustling have changed: he now recognizes that the sex trade has hardened him and made him feel dirty. Larry patiently teaches him by example that love requires a continuing openness, a dedicated generosity of spirit, and an ongoing willingness to trust. “I was a suspicious pragmatist,” Phil then realizes, “always looking to see what was in the deal for Number One; he was an idealist, through and through.”

Through Phil’s mentoring, Larry
^*
lays off the heavy drugs and starts looking for a job. One day as the two are relaxing in the bungalow smoking marijuana, Phil realizes that he is becoming increasingly bored with Larry’s sweetness, and fantasizes of transforming him from flower child into brutal cop. Larry is initially reluctant to consider a career as a policeman, but ultimately he follows Phil’s suggestion and signs up for training at the police academy.

The early chapters of the novel are as close as Steward would ever come to describing a loving relationship between two men, and its florid descriptions of sex (which carry echoes of Steward’s early, romantic writings in
Pan and the fire-bird
) are among the most detailed he ever wrote:

However, even in his most intimate moments with Larry, Phil continues to take a dim view of partnered homosexual relationships, at one point observing:

As Larry attends the police academy, Phil begins to observe the hardening and distancing of his lover—a transformation he perversely finds compelling, for Larry’s new crew cut, tight uniform, and increasingly abusive manner make him, so far as Phil is concerned, “the perfect prototype of the male”: an authority figure low on compassion and high in cruelly abusive sex appeal.

As Larry then begins to physically, verbally, and sexually assault Phil on a daily basis, Phil finds himself sexually enthralled even as he realizes that both his life and his freedom are endangered. Confused and disgusted with himself, he retreats to the Berkeley hills on the morning of his twenty-ninth birthday for a full day of introspection, and in the resulting monologue, Steward conflates his own highly sexual life experience with that of his hero:

Through this afternoon of introspection, Phil realizes he hates his own abject craving for abuse, and hates as well the life he has created with Larry—for despite the intoxicating combination of physical violence with sexual pleasure, Phil recognizes that his existence with Larry has now taken on “the deadening repetitiveness you might associate with prison life.”

The novel concludes with a double betrayal. When Phil accidentally discovers that Larry is planning to turn him in to the police as a hustler, he counters by informing the police about Larry’s history of mental instability, drug use, and homosexuality. After one last miserable sexual encounter, Phil plants a stash of drugs in the bungalow and departs. The bungalow is then raided by the police and Larry is arrested; meanwhile, down at the Berkeley Marina heliport, Phil enjoys a final trick with an airline employee before flying off into the sunset.

By far the darkest of Steward’s “pornos,” the novel described the difficulty of sustaining any sort of sexual relationship based on fantasy—and in so doing detailed the complete emotional and sexual dead end Steward himself had reached in his own lengthy search for sadomasochistic fulfillment. A couple of years later, Christopher Isherwood would write to Steward, “I enjoyed all [the Phil Andros novels] greatly [but] I think what made the most impression was the drama of the relationship between Larry and Phil Andros. That would make a terrific film—it
will
make one, when gay films of that scope begin to be made.” Others would agree; despite its obscure pulp paperback publication,
Renegade Hustler
received a laudatory review from Harold Fairbanks, a critic and editor at
The Advocate
, and years later the novel found an equally appreciative reader in the literary critic and social historian Michael Bronski, who singled it out for its clear-sighted awareness of “the obsessions which haunt the underside of acceptable sexuality.”