The Peculiar Truth about the Gay Professor/Biker Tattooist

• Samuel Steward was a university professor in Chicago. He helped edit and write two well-known encyclopedias.

• Phil Andros provided research for Dr. Kinsey’s famous report on sexuality. He also wrote gay porn fiction.

• Phil Sparrow became the official tattoo artist of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club in California.

• Steward, Andros, and Sparrow had wildly different lives. Yet they were all the same man.

• He was born Samuel Steward in 1909. He was raised in the small town of Woodsfield, Ohio, 45 miles southwest of Wheeling, West Virginia - a very rural part of the United States, then and now.

• Steward attended Ohio University in Columbus in the late 1920s. After graduation he accepted a position at Washington State University.

• In 1936, he published his first novel, Angels in the Bough. It was a roman-a-clef about his own life growing up in rural America. Although it received complimentary reviews, the dean of Washington State found a passage in the novel too risqué and fired him from his teaching position.

• That was tame compared to the words Steward would later write.

• In 1936, he became an English literature professor at Loyola University. The mild-mannered man and confirmed bachelor grew to love Chicago.

• He quit after ten years of teaching and took a job writing entries in the World Book Encyclopedia. Later, he also wrote for Compton’s Encyclopedia. When those jobs ended, he went back to academia and taught at DePaul University.

• Steward was a closeted gay man. He kept a diary of his many sexual exploits, which he called his ‘stud file.’ It included rendezvous with famous men such as playwright Thornton Wilder, Rudolph Valentino, and Rock Hudson, although none of those encounters could be verified.

• 1949: He befriended sexologist Alfred Kinsey. He used Steward’s extensively written sexual experiences as data for the doctor’s famous work at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research.

• Steward wrote 10 novels of gay erotica that sold to the underground queer community. If the truth of his homosexuality was revealed, however, he could have lost his teaching position or worse. So he published under the pseudonym Phil Andros.

• During his final two years at DePaul, Steward took on a side gig for which he had no prior experience: he became a tattoo artist.

• Tattooing was nowhere near as common in the 1950s as it is today, and most of the clientele were rough customers - Navy sailors, gang members, bikers, and members of the LGBTQ community.

• After much practice, Steward opened his own tattoo parlor on State Street in Chicago’s South Loop. It was there that he took on the alias Phil Sparrow. He named the place Phil’s Tattoo Joynt.

• 196?: Steward traveled west to Oakland, California where he opened a new tattoo shop. Members of the notorious Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club liked his work so much that he became their official tattoo artist.

• In the 1970s, feminist Germaine Greer sought him out for a tattoo although they never developed any lasting friendship.

• Steward wrote 10 books of nonfiction under this real name, mostly autobiographical, and became a notable figure in gay literature.

• He retired from the tattoo business and settled for the rest of his life in Berkeley, California. He died in 1993 at age 84 and is remembered as a pioneer of the LGBTQ community.