Meet the lit professor-turned-tattoo artist who inked the Hells Angels and chronicled his every studly conquest
Samuel Steward, aka Phil Sparrow, was a Renaissance Man of the streets, unconcerned with sexual and societal taboos
When DePaul University Professor Samuel Steward grew tired of teaching lecture halls full of under-appreciative undergrads in the 1950s, he left the academy and quite literally became someone else: Phil Sparrow, Skid Row tattooer.
As he recalled his memoir, Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors, and Street-Corner Punks (Haworth Press, 1990), Steward got his first tattoo — an anchor on his shoulder — “from ‘Tatts’ Thomas, a skinny baldheaded man with a mustache, the ends of which were waxed to long fine points.” Though the needle “hurt like hell,” he liked the way the new addition looked and felt, and the company it enabled him to confidently keep, among sailors, derelicts, and thieves, all of whom had led lives on the periphery. Amid the squalor, Sparrow tattooed Chicago’s “riff raff” on south State Street — an atmosphere that “bred disaster.” Over the years, he became a mentor to tattoo artists who would go on to become famous, like Don “Ed” Hardy and Cliff Raven. Later in life, when he relocated to Oakland, California, he was a favorite tattooer among the Hells Angels.
Samuel Morris Steward was born to a Methodist family in Woodsfield, Ohio, in 1909. He earned a degree from Ohio State University, and eventually made his way to Loyola University as a professor of English. But academia left much to be desired. “The student body of the early 1950s was cowed, clannish, and conformist,” he later wrote. Faculty members rotated being in charge of an incoming class, and Steward wrote of his class that “not one of the forty-odd boys and girls had ever heard of Homer.” Thirty-four of them, however, could change a spark plug.
Of course there were exceptions, but Steward wasn’t moved by the few students (three or four of every 250, he guessed) who grew to be “‘illuminated’ or liberalized,” as he put it. “The curtain went up for them on art, music, or literature. The others were content with TV, beer, and sex,” he wrote. Eventually, they’d find their way to the “world of work, of getting up at six every morning and going to work to make enough money to buy enough food to get enough energy to get up and go to work to earn enough money…and so on.”
Steward had always wanted much more from life, and was intent on getting it. His blend of intellect, curiosity, and libertinism had led him to many adventures, including a literary jaunt to Europe so star-studded it sounds apocryphal. In a 2010 New York Times book review of Steward’s biography, Mark Harris writes of Steward that, “By his mid-20s he had sexually serviced Rudolph Valentino and become an intimate of Gertrude Stein. Visiting Europe and hoping to feel one step closer (figuratively) to Oscar Wilde, he seduces 67-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas. From London, he hops a boat train over to Paris to meet André Gide, then moves on to Zurich, where he falls under the sway and, at least once, into the bed of Thornton Wilder.” His twin passions for “books and boys,” in Harris’s words, were consuming, but he brought equal ardor to recording his exploits. In addition to keeping diaries with a compulsion that has more than once been called graphomania, Steward kept careful records of his every sexual encounter.
It’s possible this was a way of enriching the archive of gay male experience, which at the time was limited to the pages of pulp novels. Perhaps it served as a form of note-taking for future writing, or as just a personal fancy. Regardless, he was committed to the meticulous chronicling of his sexuality, from a violent affair with a Nazi storm trooper who was — wait for it — a sadist, to his swift encounters with (seven) fellow Naval trainees during his very brief enlistment.
Steward was a terrible alcoholic, but eventually got sober in 1949 with the help of a “tough-minded, hard-bitten” AA group in Chicago. The same year, he met famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, a man he’d later say was “as approachable as a park bench.” Kinsey, unsurprisingly, took an interest in Steward’s feat of sexual reporting, and encouraged him to continue it, recruiting him meanwhile for a series of projects, including a BDSM film for which Steward had sex on camera. The friendship changed Steward’s life, granting meaning to all he’d documented, as well as to the parties he threw and the growing — if still largely closeted — gay community of which he was a part.
By the late 1950s, Steward was drawing on his records, which he called his “Stud File,” to write short stories, some of which were published by the Swiss magazine Der Kreis. Under the pen name Phil Andros, Steward wrote pioneering erotica in the 1960s that took gay sex out of the shadows. In the introduction to his 2010 biography of Steward, Justin Spring writes that, though published with titillating cover art, gay pulp novels of the era were “for the most, badly written tales of loneliness, alcohol, and psychic defeat, often concluding in suicide or murder (or both).” Coming out of a decade of open experimentation under Kinsey’s mentorship, Andros, in contrast, wrote happier, sex-positive stories with literary merit (and titles like Greek Ways, Stud, and Shuttlecock) that chronicled the exploits of an Ohio State University student named Phil Andros, who became a leather-clad hustler.
The books explored play with power in various forms — BDSM, interracial sex, sex for money — and the lack of shame in the narrator’s tone lent the stories a boldness that many found both energizing and politically significant. However, though committed and fastidious in tracking his own exploits, and keen as he was to provide Alfred Kinsey with as much information as he could toward the building of a fuller understanding of human sexuality, he was not political per se.
Steward died in Berkeley, California, in 1994 at the age of 84, from chronic pulmonary disease. In addition to the 746 entries in the “Stud File” card catalog — “whimsically annotated and cross-referenced,” in the words of his biographer — that map his sexual life over 50 years, Steward’s fictional trove of high-spirited, finely detailed portraits of gay sex and love has endured. At any point throughout his life, Steward could have returned to the comforts of conformity, but he chose to remain on the margins. As he wrote in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos, “There was a bulldog in me which kept me from retreating again into the world I had left.”
