Samuel M. Steward

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Samuel Morris Steward (born July 23, 1909 in Woodsfield , Ohio , † December 31, 1993 in Berkeley , California ) was an American writer (pseudonym Phil Andros ) and tattooist (pseudonym Phil Sparrow) . He was best known for his homoerotic stories and novels published under the pseudonym Phil Andros . Steward also wrote detective novels.

Life, work, effect

Steward received his PhD in English Literature from Ohio State University in 1936 . His first novel Angels on the baugh (1936) had little success, but earned him the admiration of the writer Gertrude Stein , with whom he was close friends until her death in 1946.

From 1934 to 1954 Steward taught literature at various American universities, most recently he was a professor at the Catholic DePaul University in Chicago .

At the same time, he had been working as a freelance tattoo artist under the stage name Phil Sparrow since 1952 . He learned tattooing with Amund Dietzel in Milwaukee and ran his own tattoo shops in Chicago and from 1965 to 1970 in Oakland , California. He passed his knowledge on to Cliff Ingram, aka Cliff Raven , and Don Ed Hardy . In 1970 he gave up tattooing for good. His book Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos (1990) is a mixture of autobiographical recollections of his years in Chicago and a cultural-historical investigation of the tattoo phenomenon , which at that time was particularly widespread among the lower classes and among marginalized groups. The investigation paid particular attention to the connection observed by Steward between the active and passive act of tattooing and hidden or suppressed sexual desires. Although Steward's rank as a tattoo artist in the specialist literature is by no means undisputed, a number of important tattoo artists of the following generation, such as Cliff Raven and Don Ed Hardy, who both worked with him, have acknowledged his influence.

In 1958, Steward began his third career as an author of homoerotic literature. His first stories and essays appeared under various pseudonyms (the best known was Ward Stames , an anagram to Sam Steward ) in the international Swiss gay magazine Der Kreis , which had an English-language section since 1951. Although Steward remained loyal to the magazine, which also published a number of erotic drawings from his pen, until it was hired in 1967, he was disturbed by its conservative image of homosexuals, which was based on the ideal of monogamous relationships and only allowed a subtle hint of sexual contact. For his more revealing stories, which first appeared in relevant Scandinavian magazines (such as Eos and Amigo ) from 1964 , Steward took the pseudonym Phil Andros (for example, lover of men , derived from the Greek philos = love and andros = man ).

The main character of most Andros stories is a first-person narrator of the same name, who earns his living as a prostitute and reports in great detail about his sexual encounters. Steward's self-confident and educated fictional character, which differs significantly from the literary depictions of the homosexual man as a sex criminal, weakling or victim, which was common at the time of its creation, gained worldwide popularity during the emancipation phase of the US lesbian and gay movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Between 1966 and 1984 six Andros novels and several volumes of short stories were published, which were translated into several languages ​​and published many times. The best-known titles in the Andros series include $ tud (1966), San Francisco Hustler (1970), When in Rome ... Do (1971) and Different Strokes (1984). Drawings by Tom of Finland , a prominent artist in the gay leather scene , were often used to design the book covers .

The success of the Andros books was due not only to Steward's instinct for contemporary homosexual ideal images and stereotypes, but also to his stylistic skills in creating plots , characters and storylines that set his erotic stories apart from the growing range of homosexual pornography . His precise knowledge of the international homosexual subculture , especially the leather and SM scene and the stick milieu, make his books an interesting document of homosexual lifestyles in the decades before AIDS . Some new editions in the 1980s and 1990s contain introductory notes on the time the novels were written and warnings against unprotected sexual intercourse.

The success of his books enabled Steward, who had lived in Berkeley, California, a center of the American protest movement since the mid-1960s, to concentrate entirely on writing after 1970. In 1981 his memoirs Chapters from an Autobiography appeared , in which he frankly talks about his sexual biography and his encounters with prominent personalities in homoerotic literary history. While the veracity of his sexual encounters with the playwright Thornton Wilder and the writer Alfred Douglas ( Oscar Wilde's lover ) is controversial, his contacts with Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas as well as with the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey are considered certain. Steward had been friends with Kinsey since 1946. He supported his research by participating in experiments, personal records, collecting materials and providing information and contacts to the gay scene.

As early as 1977 he published his long-standing correspondence with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas under the title Dear Sammy , which is an important document on their biographies and on American-European literary relations from the 1930s to the 1960s. Friends Stein and Toklas appear as literary characters in three detective novels ( Parisian Lives , Murder is Murder is Murder , The Caravaggio Shawl ) that Steward wrote in the 1980s. In doing so, he also made a contribution to the genre of the historical crime novel, which received a strong boost at this time through the global success of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose . In Murder is Murder is Murder , Steward creates a portrait of himself in the character of the young American Johnny, who is visiting the Stein / Toklas couple in southern France and working with them to solve a murder. In The Caravaggio Shawl , Steward lets other prominent figures from the Parisian artist scene such as Jean Gabin , Jean Genet or Jean Cocteau appear in small subplots.

Steward's last major work was Understanding the Male Hustler (1991), a cultural-historical attempt on male prostitution , which he designed as a dialogue between himself and his fictional character Phil Andros .

In the summer of 1993, a few months before Steward died of chronic lung disease, he gave the journalist Owen Keehnen an interview in which he once again detailed his encounters with prominent personalities such as Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, André Gide and Thomas Mann . In the end he quoted the English poet Matthew Arnold when asked by Keehnen for "words of wisdom" : "Ah love, let us be true to one another".

Works

As Samuel M. Steward:

  • Pan and the Fire-bird , Introduction by Benjamin Musser, New York 1930
  • Angels on the bough , Caldwell / Indiana 1936
  • Dear Sammy. Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas , Edited with a memoir by Samuel M. Steward, Boston 1977
  • Chapters from an Autobiography , San Francisco 1981
  • Parisian Lives. A Novel , New York 1984
  • Murder is Murder is Murder , Boston 1985 (German edition: MordistMordistMord , translated by Sebastian Trautmann, Berlin 1998)
  • The Caravaggio Shawl , Boston 1989 (German edition: The Caravaggio scarf , translated by Sebastian Trautmann, Berlin 1999)
  • Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos. A Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors, and Street-corner Punks 1950-1965 , New York 1990
  • Understanding the Male Hustler , New York 1991 (Haworth series in gay & lesbian studies; v. No. 3)
  • A pair of roses , Afterword by Marvin R. Hiemstra, San Francisco 1993

As Phil Andros (selection):

  • $ tud , New York 1966
  • Heksering / The great men's carousel / Ring-around-the-rosy . Trilingual edition (Danish / German / English). Copenhagen 1968 (new edition under the title: The Joy Spot , New York 1969)
  • My Brother, the Hustler , San Francisco 1970 (Re-titled: My brother, my self , San Francisco 1983)
    • German edition: Brotherly love . Translated by Martin Rometsch. Albino Verlag, 1997
  • San Francisco Hustler , San Francisco 1970 (reissued under the title: The Boys in Blue , San Francisco 1984)
    • German edition: Bull wedding . Translated by Martin Rometsch. Albino Verlag, 1994
  • When in Rome… Do , San Francisco 1971 (Re-titled: Roman Conquests , San Francisco 1983)
    • German edition: Latin Lovers . Translated by Martin Rometsch. Albino Verlag 1999
  • Renegade Hustler , San Francisco 1972 (reissued under the title: Shuttlecock , San Francisco 1984)
    • German edition: hot goods . Translated by Martin Rometsch. Albino Verlag, 1994
  • The Greek Way , San Diego 1975 (Re-titled: Greek Ways , San Francisco 1983)
    • German edition: love services . Translated by Martin Rometsch. Albino Verlag, 1995
  • Below the Belt & other stories , San Francisco 1981
    • German edition: Men's business . Translated by Olaf Herrmann. Albino Verlag, 1992
  • Different strokes. Stories , San Francisco 1984
    • German edition: bed whispers . Translated by Martin Rometsch. Albino Verlag, 1999

The English-language first editions of the first Andros books appeared in small underground publishers such as the Guild Press (New York), the Gay Parisian Press (San Francisco) and Greenleaf Classics (San Diego). A number of pirated prints , now difficult to find , appeared, for example an abridged edition by San Francisco Hustler under the author name Biff Thomas and entitled Gay in San Francisco (Cameo Library, early 1970s). Most of the licensed new editions of the 1980s and 90s were published by the Perineum Press (San Francisco), which also published a few new titles. German translations have been published since the late 1980s, first by Albino Verlag (Berlin), then by Bruno Gmünder Verlag , Berlin , which specializes in homosexual erotica and which also published translations of two detective novels Stewards (see above).

literature

  • Michael Williams: In Memoriam: Samuel Morris Steward, 1909-1993 , in: Journal of Homosexuality 30 (1996), no.3, pp. Xiii-xv
  • Brief biographical sketch by Axel Schock : Die Bibliothek von Sodom , Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 12-14
  • Hubert C. Kennedy : The Ideal Gay Man. The Story of Der Kreis , Haworth, Binghamton / New York 1999, pp. 42-44; German: The circle. A magazine and its program , Verlag Rosa Winkel, Berlin 1999 (Rosa Winkel library; vol. 39), ISBN 3861490846
  • Terence Kissack : Alfred Kinsey and Homosexuality in the '50s. The Recollections of Samuel Morris Steward , in: Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (2000), no. 4, pp. 474-491.
  • Hubert Kennedy: Stewart, Samuel Morris , in: Robert Aldrich / Garry Wotherspoon (Ed.): Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History. From WW II to Present Day , Routledge, London, 2001, pp. 388f.
  • Justin Spring: Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade , Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Albert L. Morse, The Tattoists, 1st Edition 1977, ISBN 0-918320-01-1 , p. 50
  2. ^ Albert L. Morse, The Tattoists, 1st Edition 1977, ISBN 0-918320-01-1 , p. 44
  3. ^ Albert L. Morse, The Tattoists, 1st Edition 1977, ISBN 0-918320-01-1 , p. 28
  4. ^ Owen Keehnen: A Very Magical Life: Talking with Samuel Steward ( Memento June 22, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) . 1993.
personal data
SURNAME Steward, Samuel M.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Andros, Phil
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 23, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Woodsfield , Ohio
DATE OF DEATH December 31, 1993
Place of death Berkeley, California