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Samuel Steward is seventeen, one day past his birthday, standing in the hallway of the Deshler Hotel with his pulse flickering like a silent film reel, too fast and slightly unreal. On the other side of the door is an actor he has worshipped in darkened theaters. It is July 24, 1926. Outside, Columbus, Ohio, moves through a humid evening, newspapers full of Sesquicentennial headlines, and a country leaning into prosperity. When the door opens, the fantasy collapses into something human. The actor stands there in a towel pulled tight around his sculpted Italian frame, the Deshler Hotel name stitched along the edge. An autograph is signed. Steward had come with his autograph book, asking celebrities for their signatures. The actor asks if there is anything else the boy wants.

“Yes,” Steward says. “I’d like to have you.”

Later, after the encounter he will never describe plainly, he somehow procures a lock of the actor’s pubic hair. Something to prove the moment existed outside of memory, which he already knows will not be enough. What Samuel Steward carried out of that room was not just a fragment, but a way of thinking, one that would follow him for more than fifty years. The lock of pubic hair would remain singular, set apart, kept in a small reliquary by his bedside for the rest of his life. But the impulse behind it would multiply, expand, and organize itself into something far more systematic.

He would call it, simply, his Stud File.

Samuel Steward, born in 1909 in Woodsfield, Ohio, would go on to live several lives that rarely sat comfortably beside one another. First, he taught English Literature at DePaul University in Chicago, shaping sentences and curricula by day. Later, he became a tattoo artist, working under the name Phil Sparrow, inscribing eternalness onto skin first in Chicago and then in the California Bay Area. Then, in 1970, he hung up his tattoo pen and, writing as Phil Andros, concentrated on pornographic novels with titles such as 'San Francisco Hustler' and 'The Greek Way.' Between and beneath those roles ran another, quieter life. One that moved through hidden networks of desire and encounters that left no official trace unless he chose to make one.

The archive lived in a green metal card catalog, the kind found in libraries or perhaps on a grandmother’s counter, filled with recipes. Inside were 746 index cards, each one documenting a sexual encounter, one man per card, one moment reduced to a standardized format. Names, or approximations of names, were typed neatly at the top. Locations followed and dates anchored each entry. Beneath that, brief notes, but sometimes unexpectedly intimate, captured the encounter.

In the corners, Steward developed a system of codes. Letters and numbers that translated bodies and acts into something legible only to him, a kind of private language. Letters marked the body. “L” for long, “Tk” for thick, “C” for circumcised, “Cl” for clean, “H” for huge, “B” for bent or, in another context, beautifully shaped, and so on. 

Numbers recorded the encounter itself. Not in narrative, but in a type of shorthand. “A 5.” “A 13.” “88.” “100.” Each number stood in for something lived, and something reduced to a symbol so it could be stored, compared, and revisited. Over time, the cards accumulated not just as records but as data. At the end of each year, Steward painstakingly graphed his encounters, measuring frequency and comparing one year against the next. The file was alphabetical and orderly, and yet what it held was anything but.

The men came from a wide range of lives. Sailors passing through port cities, bikers, boxers, hustlers, and laborers. Working men, above all, were what drew him most. What he described as the “authentically masculine male.” These were not men who expected to be remembered. Not men who left behind careful records of their movements, their desires, and their encounters. In Steward’s archive, they were fixed to a card and given a place in a system that would otherwise have forgotten them. Some cards carried more than ink. A strip of tape holding something delicate in place, like a business card or a snip of pubic hair. 

Within the hundreds of entries, a few names lean harder against the structure, men who belonged not only to private encounters but to the wider world. One card, filed under Guglielmi, R., offers almost nothing except, “Nuf sed.” However, it says everything. Here, mid-file, the man from the Deshler Hotel comes into focus as Rudolph Valentino, the silent screen idol, sold as the embodiment of virility, now reduced to the same three by five dimensions as every other man. Just days before his arrival in Columbus, he had been ridiculed in the Chicago Tribune, branded as a “powder puff.” Within weeks, a ruptured appendix killed him. 

There are entries that read like fragments of conversation. A note that a “man has never come, except with girls.” Another that admits, “afraid of him, yet saw him a lot.” A moment observed rather than shared. “Watched Roy jack off through peephole.” 

Like Valentino, there are anomalies. A typed contract from June 1951, outlining an arrangement between Steward and one of his students at DePaul in which Steward guarantees: “five course grades of A in exchange for Sam going down on the student once a month through December of 1951, with bonus cocksucking in June and July.”

The Stud File does not chronicle one kind of experience alone. It is, as much as anything, a record of range and the ways desire can shift and take on new forms while still returning to familiar impulses. It includes what might be described as extreme, what might be described as ordinary, and everything in between. And beneath all of it, that first gesture remains.

Whether every detail unfolded exactly as Steward later described in an interview that he did with a friend just four years before his death, whether the lock of hair in the bedside reliquary can ever be proven to belong to Valentino, remains uncertain.

“I had a friend at the best hotel in Columbus, the Deschler-Wallich. He called up one night and said, somebody has registered here. I don’t know whether you’d be interested or not. His name is Rudolph Guglielmo. That was Valentino’s real name, of course. And I said, 'Oh my God, I’ll be down in a minute.' That was July 24, 1926.” 

Definitely, not knowing the Valentino encounter would become something else entirely. Steward claimed other encounters with famous men, Lord Alfred Douglas, Roy Fitzgerald, later known as Rock Hudson, and Thornton Wilder. But these names, while striking, are not the center of the archive. But the reliquary exists; there is no doubt. 

What began in a room at the Deshler Hotel on that humid Ohio evening in 1926 never ended. It just repeated itself until it became a way of moving through the world. Not how to remember everything, but how to keep something. 746 times, reducing each encounter to something that might outlast him. Living alone in Berkeley, California, semi-impoverished and in poor health, Steward died at eighty-four on New Year’s Eve, 1993. The file remains, holding what it can, certainly not the whole of it, but enough to say it happened.

Endnotes:

1. “One Night with Valentino,” The Advocate, August 18, 2010, https://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/books/2010/08/18/one-night-valentino. Accessed March 29, 2026. 

2. “Samuel Steward,” Leather Hall of Fame, 2024. https://leatherhalloffame.com/inductees-list/16-sam-steward. Accessed April 1, 2026

3. Geoff Nicholson, “Pleasure Principle: Samuel Steward Lived Many Lives, All in Pursuit of Joyous Hedonism,” Bookforum, September/October/November 2010, https://www.bookforum.com/print/1703/samuel-steward-lived-many-lives-all-in-pursuit-of-joyous-hedonism-6356. Accessed March 31, 2026. 

4. Alessandro Meregaglia, “Novelist, Academic and Tattoo Artist Samuel Steward’s Plight Shows That ‘Cancel Culture’ Was Alive and Well in the 1930s,” The Conversation, February 23, 2023, https://theconversation.com/novelist-academic-and-tattoo-artist-samuel-stewards-plight-shows-that-cancel-culture-was-alive-and-well-in-the-1930s-198484. Accessed March 30, 2026. 

5. Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 15–16, 381, 385.