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

by Justin Spring

Even if he had felt no shame about his homosexuality, Steward must at least have been shamed by his own dishonesty. And of course, Steward had no one to blame for this dishonesty but himself. He lived in a world where the truth about his sexuality was simply not acceptable, and so, when pressed, he had done the only thing he could do: he lied.

Though pressed by his interviewer, Steward declined to give any further details of the sexual encounter.* But young Steward emerged from the hotel room not only with the autograph, but also with a swatch of Valentino’s pubic hair,* which he subsequently kept in a monstrance at his bedside until the end of his life.* The experience was all the more trenchant for Steward because within a month Valentino suddenly ruptured his appendix and died, aged thirty-one.

Steward was himself an able poet. His Italian sonnet “Virginia to Harlotta,” written at age nineteen, presciently describes a consciousness divided between virtuous chastity and thankless promiscuity:

This is yours: to lie beside him all the night And feel the steady heat come out from him; The coolness of his hands, each slender limb Made restless by the absence of the light… To know the graceless touch, the never-quite- Sufficient kiss of lip on lip, or breast, And when the day comes, grey unwanted guest To see love’s death, each in each other’s sight. And this is mine: a solitary bed, And I so still…unwarmed, untouched, unkissed, With moonlight fingering flowers on my spread, And moaning trees and crying winds and mist… Weave me a spell, O bow-boy, so that he Embracing her sends his caress to me!

If one does not want to suppress his nature and yet is afraid of expressing it, what is he to do? I do not know. Not now. The homosexual, probably more than the normal man, learns the futility of mapping out a path for his emotions. I do not know what I shall be feeling or believing five years from now. I do not even want to know.

There is, of course, a somewhat brighter picture. I may find a satisfying companion; I may fall in love, and because of love give up my career and find another career with which love would not be so likely to interfere. Up to the present time, although I have had infatuations for normal men, I have never been in love with another invert. Obviously I cannot predict what I might do should I fall in love. For love, my normal friends tell me, makes one do strange things.

“Trying to teach cowboys and the sons of cowboys about semicolons is not a rewarding pastime,” he wrote years later, “[and] there was nothing to do in Helena…Almost every evening I would be tanked on sherry, for my life as an alcoholic was by now well under way.”

Steward later described the traumatic amputation of his testicle—and the horror of the biopsy that followed—in greater detail: It was certainly cancer…[and] afterwards [the biopsy revealed a malignant teratoma* containing] hair follicles, sweat and sebaceous glands, nerve and teeth elements…And then I began to remember other small details about myself…I had four fewer teeth than usual

His twin.

[and a] tiny, rudimentary nipple two inches below my right one… There was no getting around it! I had been meant to be a twin, and it had not worked out right…Since I was an autosite* for a twin, there were other metaphysical questions that began to arise—the old wives’ tale saying that if you were a twin, you shared one soul with another—so quite possibly I had no more than half a soul.

Steward was devastated by the operation, not least because of the centrality of his genitalia to his everyday life. (But, as he soon discovered, he functioned perfectly well with his one remaining testicle, and very few of his partners seemed to notice or care about the missing one.) Still, the surgery left him wit...

I say, the old usual ordinary fucking and sucking holds little pleasure for me any more—I’ve had too damned much of it and like the unusual things.

With sex, I'm a meat and potatoes guy.

The homosexual of his generation, he went on to note, “is not quite sure that it is wrong to practice discrimination against him…the worst effect of discrimination has been to make the homosexuals doubt themselves and share in the general contempt for sexual inverts.”

I'm 77. This was my experience and observation, leaving a life-long scar.