In the Life: Ep. 2004, "Hidden Histories"

[Narrator:] "In the Life" is funded in part by the H. van Ameringen Foundation; Patricia Kind, in honor of her brother Henry van Ameringen; Arcus Foundation; The Estate of Richard W. Weiland; Gill Foundation; Paul and Alexandra Herzan; and these funders; and by the annual support of In the Life members like you. [Narrator:] LGBT people often excavate a buried collective history so it may be celebrated and claimed as one's own. This month on "In the Life", we feature the Smithsonian's Hide/Seek show which boldly acknowledges for the first time ever signs of sexual difference and LGBT desire expressed in American art. [Jonathan Katz:] We've been looking at these images for, in some instances, over a century. But we haven't talked about the specifically LGBT content of these works. [Narrator:] And later, a look at the chronicled life of Samuel Steward. [Justin Spring:] This is the stud file. It's Sam's lifelong record of all of the people that he had sex with in the course of his life. There's almost 900 cards in here. ["In the Life" theme music] [light jazz music] [Martin Sullivan:] I just want to express the appreciation, to all of you, for coming out to celebrate with us, what we honestly believe is a landmark exhibition in Washington, for the Portrait Gallery certainly, and, and we think, in the country. [Katz:] Everything in the exhibition is iconic. We've been looking at these images for, in some instances, over a century. But we haven't talked about the specifically LGBT content of these works, and that's what this exhibition is trying to get out. [Barbara Rose:] It's a brilliant way of investigating a whole field that hasn't been investigated, which is the picture behind the picture. And I like the title Hide and Seek, because it's there in plain sight. But not if you're not looking for it. [David Ward:] We began to talk about what was a tacit exclusion of the question of same-sex identity or the same-sex relationship from the museum world. [Sullivan:] This was a show whose time had come and we needed to make it happen. [light jazz music] Portraiture is not just about brushstrokes. It's about identity. It's about what you reveal, what you conceal. It's about a whole question of human personality. The history of LGBTQ art in America, has been a game of hide-and-seek precisely, lots of images of import to sexual minorities, but never talked about and rarely acknowledged. What we've tried to do by inflecting it through the lives of the artists and the lives of the sitters who are depicted, is to give you a wholly new slant on portraiture from 1890 or so, coming through the year 2000, and contemporary artists working today. [Anthony Giocolea:] I kind of enjoy creating something that's a bit ambiguous, in the sense that it can be viewed or interpreted in different ways. [Giocolea:] And I think that that's something that plays into identity and the coming-out process. [Katz:] Anthony Giocolea is remarkable photographer. And I'm particularly compelled by two portraits by Jack Pierson. And they're remarkable because they're both labeled self-portrait, and they're clearly of two different men. [Wayne Koestenbaum:] He creates a drama of the man pining for the inaccessible object of desire. Essentially like Blanche DuBois and that young poet that she fell in love with so long ago in the Belle Reve days. [Deborah Kass:] When I was doing the Warhol project - since I was inhabiting Andy Warhol's work, I wanted to inhabit his representation, which is why I did myself as Andy in different pieces. Like I did the "Camouflage Self Portrait". Oh, and I did this one, "Portrait", but I called mine, "Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man", 'cause it was self portrait. [Koestenbaum:] Work like Deborah Kass's, which in - or even Andy Warhol's which involves layers of camouflage, impersonation. Not simple portraits of what I really look like, but complicated acts of seeming. In some instances, like the work of Eakins, the question of sexuality becomes extremely complicated because indeed the very word, right, homosexual, was not in wide usage at the time that Eakins painted the image that we're showing: "Salutat". It's an image of a boxer, a young boy. He's being applauded by an audience. [applause] And the man who stands behind him is looking down at him, almost as if to stare. Whereas other painters of boxing showed fisticuffs, showed actual engagement with masculine aggression, this picture takes that image of masculine aggression and turns it into occasion to celebrate the beauty of the young male body. [Lindsay Pollock:] You know, they had to lead a very different sort of life where they had to hide a lot of their personal preferences, their sexuality. And I would think even that works by Demuth - there's a watercolor of some sailors in the show - and I would imagine he probably made that work for his own pleasure. [Katz:] I find it troublesome that we can only talk about the sexuality of artists, who forthrightly first claim it. Why can't we talk about the sexuality of artists who don't claim it? Who are, who are long-deceased? Why did it take place, as it did very, very recently, that the Metropolitan Museum of Art did an extensive exhibition of Eakins's work covering every major historical theme and movement and moment, covering all the scholarship except one kind of scholarship. Now 25 years of scholarship on sexual difference and Eakins. That was struck from the show, from the wall labels, and from the catalog. [Ward:] I don't believe as an intellectual there's any question you can't ask. And I think it was a question that we wanted to ask about artists in, in in past time about what was the relationship between their private life, and the artistic expressions that they made? And, the case in point, almost the signature for Hide/Seek is, is that of Marsden Hartley, who's America's really first and still greatest Abstractionist, the man who invented a whole style of abstract portraiture precisely because he was unable to express himself openly as a gay, American, a gay artist. [Katz:] Marsden Hartley fell in love with a German officer in the dawning days of World War One. In a series of remarkable portraits called "Portrait of a German Officer", Marsden Hartley exposes his incredible love for this man by including his initials, his age of death, his unit. Hartley, who could not in any direct sense expose his feelings instead was forced to invent a vocabulary, in so doing. [Rose:] Georgia O'Keeffe used to say to me - she used to refer to Hartley and Demuth as the "odd boys". And of course, they were very much part of the Stieglitz circle, but then again you have to realize that the avant-garde was a minority, and it was a basically a, you know, reviled minority in this country. [Pollock:] I think there may be an awareness that certain artists who people hadn't known were gay are gay. I'm thinking of Grant Wood for instance, who, you know, one always thinks of as this Midwestern artist of a certain era. Until I heard about this exhibition, I wasn't aware of his personal life at all. [Katz:] Here is a figure who is widely understood because of his painting "American Gothic" as one of the great regionalist figures and a figure who comes to represent, in some sense, American painting of the period. But Grant Wood was a completely self-identified gay figure and in a number of works, suggests this pictorially. [Rose:] Everybody thinks of "American Gothic", "Paul Revere" that these were celebrations of American history and of American types. They weren't. They were camp. [Katz:] One of the most signature images for the show is a, a remarkable photograph by Berenice Abbott. And it shows Janet Flanner who was a lesbian journalist in Paris. The picture shows two masks and the masks are removed from the face. She's clearly communicating gender nonconformity, but she's also communicating in being unmasked, a willingness to expose, right, that gender nonconformity and presumably sexual nonconformity. These very queer pictures that Abbott does in Paris when she's an expatriate, she utterly abandons when she comes back to the United States. [Rose:] To me, it's part of the American dilemma. I mean, why do you think Gertrude Stein didn't want to live in the United States? Why did James Baldwin live in Paris? Why did all the, you know, Black jazz musicians and the artists, why did everybody want to leave here? It's because of these underlying cultural problems having to do with Puritan repression of sexuality. [jazz music] [Katz:] Harlem was remarkable because it really was conceived of in the context of racist America as a place apart, another country. And to cross the boundary into Harlem was to cross into another social universe. In one of the pictures that we're showing in the exhibition, a beautiful portrait of the white writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten, a picture of him seated in a white suit. And very subtly painted in the background, a series of Black male faces. It bespeaks a number of important things, one of which is that Carl Van Vechten was sexually interested in young Black men. But also that he built his career in some sense on an African American community, which nonetheless was behind him. It's a portrait gallery of an elite. [Koestenbaum:] And I think any of us looking at these pictures would kill to be in that company. We'd kill to have somebody look at us with the idealizing gaze that Carl Van Vechten lavishes on these figures. [Sullivan:] What makes an individual unique? What is it about each person's personality, values, life experience, that is revealed through a good portrait? And to some extent, what is not revealed but concealed? In what way is portraiture a mask or a code that you need to study in order to better understand the person? [Katz:] Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. They had a relationship for a number of years and a number of the paintings that we think of as iconic images in American painting, are in fact, if you will, encoded pictorial missives, letters, to one another, responding to each other's art. [Koestenbaum:] I saw the Jasper Johns retrospective at the Whitney in 1977. And I had never seen art like that in my life. Particularly "In Memory of My Feelings" which I recognized right away was an homage to my favorite Frank O'Hara poem. I felt that there was a triangulated love affair possible between me, Jasper Johns and Frank O'Hara. [Katz:] The image is a kind of reversal of the first image that Jasper Johns made upon developing his relationship, which would last for seven or eight years, with Robert Rauschenberg, the most important relationship in either painter's life. One side of the picture shows a fork and a spoon wired together as if, right, spooning. And on the other side of the picture, the spoon and the fork are separated. And indeed the picture is about the end of a relationship, the end of their relationship. [Ward:] The exhibition arcs forward from the 1890s with the, the very definition of the category of the homosexual, through to 1969 with the Stonewall riot, and the emergence of the modern gay liberation movement. But then out of left field comes the AIDS epidemic, circa 1983. [Ward:] You have people, Robert Mapplethorpe would be a good example. Keith Haring would be another, who are just beginning to experience the delights of freedom, as they have to confront their own and others' mortality. [Ward:] The incredible series of mourning portraits, that we think speak to the experience of a community in crisis, a community that is being decimated. Those are the most painful portraits in the exhibition, where you literally, in AA Bronson's portrait "Felix", of his artistic collaborator, at the moment of his death. A lot of the portraits in this show, I think, are involved in the construction of a gay canon, gay and lesbian canon of taste. I felt comforted looking at these images as if I were a Catholic going to St. Peters and looking at all my favorite saints. Say, oh there's, you know, Saint Gertrude. There's Saint Frank, Saint Langston. He died for my sins. Isn't he cute, you know? We didn't want to make an alternative American history. We wanted to take the American history that everybody knew, the American art history that is the story that every museum tells and show how profoundly it was crosscut with questions of sexual difference and sexual identity. I mean that layer of America which we can refer to as high culture, it was developed and supported by gay Americans. If you think about the opera, the ballet, the theater, the art museums, not to mention the contributions of individual artists, you, you just, you wouldn't have it. [Ward:] Representing Keith Haring in this exhibition is his last work of art. It's called "Unfinished Painting". It consists not simply of an unfinished painting, but an unfinished tapestry. There's only a corner of it and strings are hanging down where the worker was going to finish it. And of course, what that indicates is a life cut short, a work of art that, that was unable to be completed. But I'd like in a way, to look at it the other way, that it's up to us to finish that painting. It's up to us to complete American culture in a way that, that's commensurate with our, with our own great goals, our own great ambitions, and our own great dreams for equality and diversity. And I want us to look again at how it is we came to be American. And I think this exhibition does that. I think it adds a strand to the unfinished tapestry, the "Unfinished Painting" of Keith Haring. [Sullivan:] To be a portrait gallery that represents the American people today, we have to be many things. We have to be about gender diversity, age diversity, ethnicity, and sexual identity, which is part of American life. So we feel this is a step for the Portrait Gallery toward filling out the contours of what it means to be an American today. [Narrator:] A man of his very own extraordinary invention, Samuel Steward lived decades before the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, yet his sexual identity was never in question. Sex was central to his life, and he had lots of it. [Justin Spring:] This is the stud file. It's Sam's lifelong record of all of the people that he had sex with in the course of his life. There's almost 900 cards in here, and it's very carefully cross-referenced and indexed, written in code. Pull it open. Sam was trained as a librarian at Ohio State University. With each of these cards, he has the name of the person, the activities they engaged in, the dates they engaged in them, penile dimensions. So it's a very detailed and often quite humorous set of cards. [Narrator:] Author Justin Spring chronicles the life of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artist and sexual renegade in his book "Secret Historian". [Spring:] "Secret Historian" is a biography about a man very few people have heard about. And in that way, it's sort of a unique biography. So I was out at a bookstore called A Different Light. There I found on the shelves just sitting there, this series of novels by a person called Phil Andros. I recognized immediately that I was in the hands of a storyteller who just happened to write stories about men having sex with other men. I took them home. I collected them. I shared them with people and they all agreed that these were extraordinary tales, but we didn't know who Phil Andros was. [Spring:] Years later, I came across this man, Sam Steward, who was also friends with Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder and Alice Toklas and lived a literary life. Then it turned out he ran a tattoo parlor. That's strange. And then, reading and reading, I finally realized this was Phil Andros. This man was the same person. I began trying to figure out everything I possibly could about this man. It took me a couple of years, but I finally found the man who was the executor of the Sam Steward estate. And it turned out that he had just boxed up everything after Sam died. He invited me to come out and look through it and when I got there, I realized I'd hit the jackpot. You know, just this incredible, you know, sort of like a Ali Baba's cave of 1930s, '40s and '50s sexuality. [Narrator:] Born Samuel Morris Steward in Woodsfield, Ohio in 1909, he had modest small-town beginnings. [Spring:] I think Sam as a young man was hurt very badly. He was left by his father to grow up with three spinster aunts in a boarding house in Ohio. His mother died when he was very young. And I think he suffered quite a bit of rejection at the hands of his father. And because of his sexual nature, which expressed itself really pretty early in childhood, he always had a sense of himself as an outsider. [Narrator:] An outsider, but no wallflower. Sam had his first sexual experience with another boy he described as quote, "a big guy. A football player. Two minutes later, it was over." [timer ding] Apparently not so with silent film star Rudolph Valentino. Simply seeking an autograph, Sam got so much more. He was all of 17. [Spring:] Here's a photograph of the reliquary that Sam put together of the film star Rudolph Valentino's pubic hair. It says "Ex Corporis Valentino" and Sam put the little bit of pubic hair that he'd retained from his encounter with Valentino into a monstrance. And he kept this little object at his bedside for most of his life. [Spring:] Sam was a literary man from the very earliest. His poetry collection and his first novel were well-received. He was going to go on and become a novelist like so many of his literary heroes. He was also working and living as a university professor teaching English literature. And, he got sidetracked. First by alcoholism, and then after he was able to get sober, his sex life kind of blossomed and became a very essential to his life, in a way that also sidetracked his literary ventures. Sam collected a lot of leather and disciplinary devices. Sam was very interested in the ways in which pleasure and pain could be combined for a heightened sexual experience. Here's a riding crop. Police billy club. Sam was interested in men in uniform. He always had a soft spot in his heart for policemen. Sam was a bit kinky sexually and he also had a great sense of humor. So here's an example of one of his sex toys, letters are phi, beta and kappa. Sam was actually a member of the National Honor Society, a Phi Beta Kappa key holder, and so he used a Phi Beta Kappa paddle in his spanking escapades. [slate clap] [Narrator:] Sam would encounter several luminaries through the years. One of his warmest friends and mentors was famed writer Gertrude Stein and her lifelong companion Alice Toklas. It was Stein who introduced Steward to novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Their sexual liaison lasted 10 years. In late 1949, Sam met pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and became an unofficial collaborator. Steward's highly detailed documentation of his sexual experiences underscored and supported Kinsey's controversial findings about men having sex with other men. [Spring:] So a lot of Sam's literary talent was poured into diaries that were meant expressly for Kinsey. And Sam's diaries are amazing. They're over a thousand pages typewritten, of his sexual adventures, experiences, his thoughts about his sexuality, and really turns it into something more like a novel. But Sam was an unbelievably truthful man in these diaries and journals, because he felt like he was creating a testament, not only for himself but for Kinsey and for sex researchers of the future, for people who really wanted to know what was going on in society. [Narrator:] By the early 1950s, Sam had transformed his life. He chose what was then a socially objectionable profession, with a clientele limited to hustlers, sailors, bikers and street thugs. For Sam, it presented a perfect medley of sexual prospects. Sam Steward became Phil Sparrow, tattoo artist. [Spring:] There was a creative element in him that was just very powerful and very exciting to be around because he created these wonderful things. When he really made that break and became a tattoo artist and began doing his illustrations and decorating his apartment in this outlandish way, it was as if his entire life became this artwork. And even if he couldn't share that artwork with anybody, he would live in the center of it. It, it became a kind of private world. [baroque music] [Narrator:] In 1966, one young man entered Sam's private world in Oakland, California, where Sam had a tattoo parlor. He would become one of the most commercially successful tattoo artists in the United States. His name, Don Hardy, later known as Ed Hardy. He knew Sam Steward as Phil Sparrow. [Hardy:] Of course impressed me with Sam, the entire setup of the shop the first time I saw it. This guy is coming from somewhere different. It was much more like an art studio, had classical music playing, and all the flash was hand-painted. It was obviously created, you know, [Spring:] Just for the shop? [Hardy:] by hand for the shop, which was kind of unique in those days. [Hardy:] In those days tattooing was so underground. It was such a closed shop. I did my first, probably five or six tattoos in his shop, under his tutelage on art school friends. And put the first one on myself as was traditional, with him looking over my shoulders. [Spring:] Okay, so Don, here's some of what I came across when I found the Steward archive. This one always cracks me up because it looks like one of those peasant blouses that were popular in the 1930s. You know, like for gals, right? [Hardy:] Yeah. [laughs] [Spring:] And here's your motorcycle guy, tough tattoos with the motorcycle boots and the jeans. [Hardy:] Yeah. Typical tattoos. A panther crawling back, black panther, panther head and Stinky the skunk. I mean, all these things are so iconic for that era. [Spring:] Sam hated Stinky. He just - 'cause he had to put on so many of them, and he just thought it was [Hardy:] All of us. It became just this thing and you're like not another one. Of course, but it paid the rent so Sam would speak, laughing from wherever he is, about the fact that tattooing, which he saw as really a dying folk art, you know, and his interest of course was largely sociological, anthropological, sexual and as well as artistic. Now, the revival even of interest in those classic, corny, sort of Americana designs is huge. You see young people walking around, they look like they were tattooed in like 1940, all the images on them. And the classic, the chest eagle, which has remained a classic. [Spring:] And here's one of the sweetest images ever. Sam made this when he made his changeover from being a professor. It's a tattoo artist. He opened his tattoo parlor, and he sent greetings from Phil Sparrow to all his friends with a, a reindeer putting a Merry Christmas tattoo on Santa Claus. [Hardy:] It's great with the Santa's beard. You know, [Spring:] draped over the antlers. [Hardy:] looped, yeah, draped over the antlers. Like moving the beard out of the way so you can tattoo the chest, you know. [Spring:] And of course, Sam being Sam, the big sexy boots are part of Santa's... [Hardy:] Sure. [Spring:] Santa's fashion statement, right. [Hardy:] Highly polished. Yeah. [Spring laughs] [Spring:] And there was a whole history of generations, two or three generations of gay men, who we knew that they existed, but we didn't have any day-to-day awareness of what their life was like. Quite apart from the sensational nature of Sam's life, for me to reconstruct that life in painstaking detail, was also to reconstruct what it was like to be a gay person in 1925, 1935, 1945, 1955, 1965. [Narrator:] Samuel Steward died in obscurity on New Year's Eve in 1993. He was 84. [Awards presenter:] The 2010 National Book Awards. [Narrator:] In November of 2010, Justin was honored with a National Book Award nomination. [crowd noise] [Narrator:] Thank you for watching "In the Life". To learn more about the issues in tonight's program, or to tell us your thoughts about the show, text ITL to 69866 on your mobile phone, or visit itlmedia.org. ["Robert Newmann" by SEIFEdesJAZZES] [Narrator:] "In the Life" is funded in part by: the H. van Ameringen Foundation; Patricia Kind, in honor of her brother Henry van Ameringen; Arcus Foundation; The Estate of Richard W. Weiland; Gill Foundation; Paul and Alexandra Herzan; and these funders; and by the annual support of In the Life members like you. [logo music] [logo music]