Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
linked [by touch] to Whitman [through the novelist and poet Hamlin Garland, who had touched me on the head at an OSU literary reception], there was no other way.
Even so, the possibility seemed remote…He had married in 1902 and become a Roman Catholic in 1911, and thus put behind him all such childish things as fellatio, mutual masturbation, sodomy, and so on.
     
    Steward then recalled the particulars of the visit:
    [Lord Alfred Douglas] opened the door himself—a man of medium height with hairline receding on the right side where it was parted, and the somewhat lackluster straight mousy hair falling down towards his left eyebrow. His nose was very large and bulbous. The red rose-leaf lips * beloved by Wilde had long since vanished; the mouth was compressed and thin, pursed somewhat, and the corners turned slightly downwards. I looked in vain for a hint, even the barest suggestion, of the fair and dreamy youth of the early photographs with Wilde. None was visible.
He never stopped talking—a long monologue in which “As a poet I” and “As an artist I” recurred again and again and again. He seemed not even to realize the extent to which he revealed his violent prejudices and hates, nor the immaturity of his view of himself. It became obvious before very long that he had never really grown up. He remained psychologically (and in his own eyes perhaps physically) still the radiant and brilliant adolescent beloved by the gods. He was a man of vast essential egotism…As for homosexual leanings and entanglements—that had all been given up when he became a Catholic—oh yes. He still got hundreds of letters from curiosity seekers and homosexuals and he could have had his pick of any of them (my ears and armpits flamed), but that was all finished. Sins of the flesh were obnoxious and uninteresting.
     
    The conversation took a turn for the better, however, when Steward suggested they adjourn to a pub for a drink, and Douglas responded by opening a bottle of gin:
    Within an hour and a half we were in bed, the Church renounced, conscience vanquished, inhibitions overcome, revulsion conquered, pledges and vows and British laws all forgotten. Head down, my lips where Oscar’s had been, I knew that I had won.
After I finished my ministrations and settled back, his hand stole down to clamp itself around me. It began to move gently. Still moving it up and down, shafering me, he spoke: “You really needn’t have gone to all that trouble, since this is almost all Oscar and I ever did with each other…We used to get boys for each other…We kissed a lot, but not much more.”
     
    “I got to Brighton for the ten o’clock train that night,” Steward concluded. “Lord Alfred never wrote to me again, nor I to him. He died in 1945.”
    •
     
    On August 19, Steward left London, taking the boat train to Paris. His visit took place during the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne 1937, where, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Boris Iofan’s Soviet Pavilion confronted Albert Speer’s German Pavilion, and Picasso’s Guernica hung in protest against the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War.
    Along with trips to the Exposition and to Paris’s various monuments and museums, Steward met up daily with some fellow homosexuals he had met on his crossing on the Aquitania . One night he stayed out until 2 a.m. at a seedy dive on Rue de Lappe, where, as he noted in his diary, “ les hommes dansent ensembles .” He picked up several Frenchmen and sneaked each of them up to his hotel room, only to be horrified by their low standard of hygiene. Of one he noted, “Desire to give the whole French nation a collective bath.” Of another, “The French get dirtier and dirtier, and I more odor conscious.”
    On August 23, he made his way to André Gide’s apartment on Rue Vaneau, where a handsome eighteen-year-old Arab in a burnoose led him in to meet “a tall, slightly stooped man in his late sixties,

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