Samuel Morris Steward (July 23, 1909 – December 31, 1993), also known under the pen names Phil Andros and Phil Sparrow, was an American tattoo artist, professor, diarist, and writer of gay erotica whose life maps the underground history of leather sex, rough trade, and sadomasochistic play across the mid-twentieth century. He kept exhaustive secret diaries, journals, and statistical records of his sex life—a private archive that later made him indispensable to both Alfred Kinsey’s research and modern leather historiography. He spent most of his adult years in Chicago, tattooing Navy trainees from Great Lakes Naval Training Station along with gang members and street people from a South State Street parlor. In the late 1960s he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and served as the official tattoo artist of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. For BDSM and leather readers, Steward is not a side character in queer studies; he is a primary source who lived, documented, and eroticized power, pain, and hustler masculinity long before “leather subculture” had a museum label.
Teaching, Conversion, and Alcohol
Steward was born in Woodsfield, Ohio, and entered Ohio State University in Columbus in 1927. He taught English at OSU from 1932 to 1934 as a university fellow. His first full-year appointment was as an English instructor in 1934 at Carroll College in Helena, Montana. In 1936 he was fired from his second teaching post, at the State College of Washington (now Washington State University) in Pullman, after a sympathetic portrayal of a prostitute in his well-reviewed comic novel Angels on the Bough. He moved to Chicago and taught at Loyola University until 1946, left to help rewrite the World Book Encyclopedia, and later taught at DePaul University. Raised Methodist, he converted to Catholicism during university years, then abandoned the Church well before taking the Loyola job. From the mid-1930s through 1949 he was deeply alcoholic; Alcoholics Anonymous eventually helped him stop drinking. That arc—respectable professor by day, secret sexual ethnographer by night—frames everything that follows in his leather-relevant career.
Gertrude Stein and the Literary Circuit
In 1932 his academic advisor Clarence Andrews introduced him to Gertrude Stein. A long correspondence grew into warm friendship. Steward visited Stein’s rented country home in France in the summers of 1937 and 1939. On the 1937 trip he also met Thornton Wilder, Lord Alfred Douglas (Oscar Wilde’s lover), Thomas Mann, and André Gide. He later recorded some of those encounters—including sexual ones—in the short memoir Chapters from an Autobiography, and documented the Stein–Toklas friendship in Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The high-modernist circle and the leather underworld were never fully separate in Steward’s life; he moved between them with the same diaristic precision.
Kinsey, Polaroids, and Filmed BDSM
Steward met sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in late 1949 and became an unofficial collaborator with Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research. He donated sexually themed materials, opened his lifelong sexual records, introduced Kinsey to large numbers of sexually active men in Chicago, and supplied early Polaroid sex photographs from the frequent all-male sex parties he hosted in his apartment. He allowed Kinsey to photograph that sexually themed apartment and eventually gave the Institute large quantities of his own drawings, paintings, and decorative objects. In spring 1950, at Kinsey’s invitation, Steward was filmed in a BDSM sex scene with Mike Miksche, a New York erotic artist also known as Steve Masters. After Stein, Kinsey became Steward’s most important mentor. Steward later called him “as approachable as a park bench” and “Doctor Prometheus”—a god-like bringer of sexual enlightenment. For historians of consensual SM research, that Kinsey film session is a rare early institutional document of gay sadomasochistic practice under scientific observation rather than police raid.
Stud File, Der Kreis, and Chicago Leather Roots
While shifting from professor to tattoo artist in the 1950s, Steward befriended gay artists and writers including Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, Julien Green, Fritz Peters, and Glenway Wescott. At Kinsey’s request he kept highly detailed journals of daily sexual activity and catalogued them in a secret card index he called his “Stud File.” From 1957 he contributed short stories drawn from those encounters—plus essays, reviews, and homophile journalism—to the Zürich magazine Der Kreis (“The Circle”). In his final Chicago years he befriended Chuck Renslow, co-owner of Kris Studio, and Renslow’s partner Dom Orejudos, the homoerotic illustrator known as Stephen and Etienne. Renslow and Orejudos would later open the Gold Coast, Chicago’s first leather bar, and found International Mr. Leather. Steward thus stands one handshake away from the institutional spine of North American leather culture.
Phil Andros Erotica: Rough Trade and Interracial Power
In the 1960s Steward began publishing erotica as Phil Andros, first with the Danish magazine Eos/Amigo. Early pieces fixated on rough trade and sadomasochistic sex; others tracked power dynamics in interracial male encounters. After U.S. publishing law shifts, Guild Press issued his story collection $TUD in 1966 under the Andros name. By the late 1960s he was writing a series of pulp porn novels with hustler Phil Andros as narrator—books that still circulate among collectors of classic gay SM and hustler fiction as period documents of desire, class, and control.
Tattooing: Dietzel, Raven, Ed Hardy
As a leading tattooist of the 1950s and ’60s, Steward was mentored by Milwaukee master Amund Dietzel. He in turn mentored Cliff Ingram (Cliff Raven) and Don “Ed” Hardy, pushing both toward the Japanese-style work he most admired. Chuck Arnett was among his clients. After retiring from tattooing in 1970, he wrote a social history of American tattooing in the 1950s–60s, published as Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos. The shop floor—sailors, street kids, bikers—was continuous with the sexual ethnography: bodies marked, desired, and recorded. That continuity is why leather historians read Steward as more than a porn pen name: the same man who filmed SM for Kinsey was inking Navy trainees and Angels, then explaining tattoo subculture in prose that still reads as social history rather than pure memoir nostalgia.
Later Years, Death, and Scholarship
In later life chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and barbiturate addiction compromised his writing. He died at 84 in Berkeley, California. In 1972 Jack Fritscher became the first openly gay writer to unearth and interview him; those audiotapes feed Justin Spring’s biography. The Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago holds 1980s–90s interview recordings plus writings, art, and stencils. From 2001 Justin Spring tracked Steward’s archive and wrote Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)—a National Book Award finalist and winner of the National Leather Association’s Geoff Mains Non-fiction Book Award for 2011. Jeremy Mulderig edited The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Seth Eisen’s Eye Zen Presents staged the play Homo File in 2012, 2014, and 2018 as part of recovering gay history from eras when homosexuality “could not speak its name.”
Honors and Bibliography Snapshot
Steward entered the Leather Hall of Fame in 2012. In 2017 he was named on bronze bootprints in San Francisco’s South of Market Leather History Alley. As Philip Sparrow, posthumous essays appear in Philip Sparrow Tells All (ed. Mulderig, 2015). As Phil Andros, key titles include The Motorcyclist (1953), $tud (1966), The Joy Spot (1969), My Brother, the Hustler (1970; later My Brother, My Self), San Francisco Hustler (1970; later The Boys in Blue), When in Rome, Do . . . (1971; later Roman Conquests), Renegade Hustler (1972; later Shuttlecock), Below the Belt and Other Stories (1975), The Greek Way (1975; later Greek Ways), and Different Strokes: Stories (1984). As Samuel M. Steward: Pan and the fire-bird (1930), Angels on the Bough (1936), Dear Sammy (1977, ed.), Parisian Lives (1984), Chapters from an autobiography (1981), Love Poems: Homage to Housman (1984), the Stein–Toklas mysteries Murder Is Murder Is Murder (1985) and The Caravaggio Shawl (1989), Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos (1990), Understanding the Male Hustler (1991), and Pair of Roses (1993). Papers are held at Yale’s Beinecke Library. For adult leather and BDSM readers, Steward remains the rare figure who combined Stud File data, filmed SM, hustler pulp, and biker tattoo craft into one documented life—proof that American leather desire had archivists, diarists, and pornographers of record long before it had pride flags.
