Samuel Steward

Samuel Morris Steward (July 23, 1909 – December 31, 1993), also known as Phil Andros, Phil Sparrow, was an American tattoo artist and pornographer.

Throughout his life, he kept extensive secret diaries, journals, and statistics of his sex life. He lived most of his adult life in Chicago, where he tattooed sailor-trainees from the U.S. Navy's Great Lakes Naval Training Station (as well as gang members and street people) out of a tattoo parlor on South State Street. He later moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he spent the late 1960s as the official tattoo artist of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.

Steward was born in Woodsfield, Ohio, and began attending Ohio State University in Columbus in 1927.

He taught English at OSU from 1932 until 1934 as a university fellow. His first year-long post was as an instructor of English in 1934 at Carroll College in Helena, Montana. In 1936, he was summarily dismissed from his second teaching position, at the State College of Washington (now Washington State University) at Pullman, as a result of his sympathetic portrayal of a prostitute in his well-reviewed comic novel Angels on the Bough. He subsequently moved to Chicago, where he taught at Loyola University until 1946. After leaving Loyola to help re-write the World Book Encyclopedia, he subsequently taught at DePaul University.

Born into a Methodist household, Steward converted to Catholicism during his university years, but had long since abandoned the Catholic Church by the time he accepted his teaching position at Loyola. From the mid-1930s until 1949, he was deeply addicted to alcohol, but he managed to overcome this dependence with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Steward was introduced to Gertrude Stein in 1932 by his academic advisor, Clarence Andrews, and the two began a long correspondence that led to a warm friendship. He visited her rented country home in France during the summers of 1937 and 1939. During the 1937 trip, he also met with many other literary figures, including Thornton Wilder, Lord Alfred Douglas (the lover of Oscar Wilde), Thomas Mann, and André Gide. He detailed these encounters, some of them sexual, in his brief memoir, Chapters from an Autobiography. He also described his friendship with Stein and Alice B. Toklas in his Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Steward met sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in late 1949 and subsequently became an unofficial collaborator with Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research. During his years of work with the Institute, Steward collected and donated sexually themed materials to the Kinsey archive, gave Kinsey access to his lifelong sexual records, introduced him to large numbers of sexually active men in the Chicago area, and provided him with large numbers of early Polaroid sex photographs which he took during the frequent all-male sex parties he held in his Chicago apartment. He also allowed Kinsey to take detailed photographs of that sexually themed apartment. He ultimately donated large numbers of drawings, paintings, and decorative objects that he himself had created to the Institute.

In the spring of 1950, at Kinsey's invitation, he was filmed engaging in BDSM sex with Mike Miksche, a New York-based erotic artist also known as Steve Masters. After Gertrude Stein, Kinsey was Steward's most important mentor; he later described Kinsey as "as approachable as a park bench" and as a god-like bringer of enlightenment to humankind, thus giving him the nickname, "Doctor Prometheus."