100 Heroes: Samuel Steward

Samuel Steward was a tattoo artist and pornographer.

Life and career

Steward was born in 1909 in Ohio.

He studied at Ohio State University, beginning in 1927.

Steward went on to teach at Ohio State University, teaching English from 1932 until 1934 before moving on to take up posts at various institutions.

In 1936, he was summarily dismissed from his teaching position, at the State College of Washington because of his sympathetic portrayal of a prostitute in his comic novel Angels on the Bough. He subsequently moved to Chicago, where he continued to teach.

Gertrude Stein

Steward met Gertrude Stein in 1932 and built a friendship with her, occasionally spending summers with her in France.

During his time with Stein, Stewart met notable literary figures such as Thornton Wilder, Lord Alfred Douglas, Thomas Mann, and André Gide. He detailed these encounters, some of them sexual, in his brief memoir, Chapters from an Autobiography.

Alfred Kinsey

Steward met sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in 1949 and subsequently became an unofficial collaborator with Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research.

During his years of work with the Institute, Steward collected and donated sexually themed materials to the Kinsey archive, gave Kinsey access to his lifelong sexual records, introduced him to large numbers of sexually active men in the Chicago area, and provided him with large numbers of early Polaroid sex photographs which he took during the frequent all-male sex parties he held in his Chicago apartment.

He also allowed Kinsey to take detailed photographs of that sexually-themed apartment. He ultimately donated large numbers of drawings, paintings and decorative objects that he himself had created to the Institute.

At Kinsey's specific request he also kept highly detailed journals and diaries of his daily sexual activities, and chronicled them in a secret card catalogue he referred to as his "Stud File."

Starting in 1957, he began contributing short stories based on his many sexual encounters to the Zürich-based homophile magazine Der Kreis ("The Circle"), to which he also contributed essays, reviews, and homophile journalism.

Pornography work

In the 1960s Steward began writing and publishing his erotica under the name of Phil Andros, initially doing so with the Danish magazine Eos/Amigo.

Some of his early works described his fascination with rough trade and sadomasochistic sex, others focused on the power dynamics of interracial sexual encounters between men.

In 1966, thanks to changes in American publishing laws, he was able to publish his story collection $TUD with Guild Press in the United States, under the pseudonym Phil Andros. By the late 1960s, Steward started writing a series of pulp pornographic novels featuring the hustler Phil Andros as narrator.

Tattooing

Steward developed his tattoo skills in the 1950s.

Living in Chicago, Steward tattooed sailor-trainees from the U.S. Navy's Great Lakes Naval Training Station. Working out of a tattoo parlour on South State Street, he also tattooed gang members and local people.

He later moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where he spent the late 1960s as the official tattoo artist of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.

Steward subsequently wrote a social history of American tattooing during the 1950s and '60s, which was published as Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos.

Death

Steward died in 1993, at the age of 84.