12/27/2023 0 Comments Chicago reader samuel steward![]() ![]() After becoming the official tattoo artist for the Hells Angels, a job that turned out to be dangerous, he finally retired in 1970 but felt cut off from his former life. Moving to Oakland, California, he discovered to his regret that there was no business. Hucklefaery, John William Watkins and Estado Flotante in a scene from Kelly’s “Underneath the Skin” at La MaMa (Photo credit: Bronwen Sharp for La MaMa) When Illinois passed a law in 1963 forbidding tattooing of anyone under the age of 21, he lost his clientele among the sailors at the nearby naval training center. He gave up teaching and became famous as Philip Sparrow. He found he was meeting a great many handsome young men and no longer needed to go cruising for partners. ![]() In 1952 he took up tattooing and worked part time in the Sport Land Arcade on South State Street where he used the name “Philip Sparrow” to hide from his academic career. After the experience, he wondered why he was etching on metal when he could be writing on skin. Working as an extra in such Chicago productions as The Nutcracker, he decided to get a small anchor tattoo high up on his shoulder to be more in character. This led to his etching his own pornographic designs on aluminum drinking glasses. He began taking life drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago and became enamored of the erotic drawings of Jean Cocteau after meeting him in Paris in 1950. Steward was an alcoholic for 17 years, finally giving up alcohol in 1947. In 1943 he enlisted in the Navy but on his first night in Great Lakes Naval Training Station outside of Chicago he had such a reaction to the food that he was promptly given an honorable discharge. Alfred Kinsey in his investigations into sexuality in the American male. John Kelly as Samuel Steward in a scene from his “Underneath the Skin” at La MaMa (Photo credit: Bronwen Sharp for La MaMa)įrom 1936 – 1946, he taught at two Catholic universities by day and conducted his sex life at night, keeping a so-called “Stud File” in which he cataloged all his lifelong sexual encounters. The following year (1936) he made his first trip to Europe where he met many of the later gay icons of literature (Stein, Mann, Gide and Lord Alfred Douglas who had been Oscar Wilde’s lover.) When he was 27 he was already a published novelist with Angels on the Bough with its sympathetic portrayal of a prostitute which led to his being fired from his teaching post at the State College of Washington. We then travel back to when he was 17 and growing up in Woodside, Ohio, with three spinster aunts who ran a boarding house where he finds a volume a book left by a departed guest by sexologist Havelock Ellis which told him he was not alone.Īttending college in Columbus, he attends a lecture by author Hamlin Garland and gets to shake the hand of a man who had met Walt Whitman. Steward’s life is rather amazing considering he lived in a time when “homosexual love is a crime, punishable by arrest, fines and imprisonment.” The performance begins with a recitation of a defense of homosexuality that Steward wrote when he was 25 but signed with a pseudonym. The play is mainly narrated and performed in chronological order. Kelly plays Steward from ages 17 in 1926 to 84 when he died in 1993. John Kelly and John William Watkins in a scene from John Kelly’s “Underneath the Skin” at La MaMa (Photo credit: Bronwen Sharp for La MaMa) An earlier incarnation of Underneath the Skin appeared in October 2019 at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. The period music is from 16 different composers and singers. ![]() Having won an Obie Award for her 1999/2000 performance as Gertrude Stein in a previous play, Lola Pashalinski plays Stein on video, photographed by Josef Astor. Three actor/dancers (Hucklefaery, Estado Flotante, and John William Watkins) play all of the other characters (students, sailors, nightmare creatures, and hustlers), as well as two appearances as Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. The multitalented Kelly is credited with the direction, choreography, video design, animations, and set design. Underneath the Skin is a fascinating and engrossing blend of theater, dance, video, erotic art and a gay history of the 20 th century.Īll of the texts are taken from Steward’s own writings. Toklas, Thomas Mann, André Gide, had trysts with Rudolph Valentino and Lord Alfred Douglas, and became the lover of Thornton Wilder. He was also a friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Famed performance artist John Kelly has brought his latest show, Underneath the Skin, to La MaMa, subtitled “A Penetrative Portrayal of a Queer Giant Based on the life and work of Samuel Steward 1909-1993.” Steward had a remarkable life in the first three-quarters of the 20 th century as a college professor, a tattoo artist, a pornographer, an unofficial collaborator at the Kinsey Institute and a sexual renegade. ![]()
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