Chicago writer and academic Samuel Steward was so obsessed with cataloging his sexual experiences that he kept a file of 746 cards, systematically cross-referenced, detailing hundreds of erotic encounters with men. He eventually became a professional tattoo artist in an effort to quell his sex drive though painstaking asexual attention to the body, but even though many of his flowery designs alluded to his friend Gertrude Stein's aphorism "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," a tattoo was always more than a tattoo for him.…
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