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.

[2] 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.

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.

In 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.

At Kinsey's specific request he also kept highly detailed journals and diaries of his daily sexual activities, and chronicled them in a secret card catalogue he referred to as his "Stud File."

Some of his early works described his fascination with rough trade and sadomasochistic sex; others focused on the power dynamics of interracial sexual encounters between men.

By the late 1960s, Steward started writing a series of pulp pornographic novels featuring the hustler Phil Andros as narrator.

[11] In 2018, Jeremy Mulderig edited The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward: Recollections of an Extraordinary Twentieth-Century Gay Life.

In 2012, 2014, and 2018, Seth Eisen of Eye Zen Presents created the play Homo File depicting the life and times of Steward, as part of a project to unearth and spread gay history from when homosexuality "could not speak its name".

[15] Steward was honored in 2017 along with other notables, named on bronze bootprints, as part of San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley.