For decades the Mafia controlled much of LGBTQ nightlife in many cities across the United States including New York and Chicago, and I wrote about this relationship in my groundbreaking book The Mafia and the Gays which first was published in 2015 and then followed up with a second edition in 2022. To mark the historic ties between organized crime and the gay scene I got a sleeve inked on my right lower leg involving vintage ads for several alleged Mafia-controlled gay bars from the 1970s and 1980s.
The inking was done by GB (Instagram @HeebieGBArt) from Needful Things (Instagram @needfulthingsinc), and then photographed by Amber Elizabeth from Sonder Photo Co (Instagram @sonderphotoco) in the outdoor garden of Remedies Parlor (Instagram @remediesparlor) all in Fort Myers, FL where I now live after 15 years in New York City.
In the tattoo sleeve we see the same images which gay men decades earlier saw when flipping through the “fag rags.” The ads are surviving ephemera which bring life to and evoke the identity of those gay bars from that glorious era when the LGBT community lived on the edge of society and in partnership with the Mafia — a time which perhaps constituted peak gay nightlife when the drinking age was 18, drug use was rampant, the disco was born and sexual playgrounds existed to scratch any itch.
My leg sleeve is composed of eleven tattoos six of which are for nightlife venues. The tattoo for Jamie’s on the outside of my leg was the first one done, and that place allegedly was owned during the early 1970s by the Outfit on Chicago’s near north side. The young tough smoking a cigarette has a dollar sign on his belt buckle to tip off that Jamie’s was a hustler joint, and his cocky pose against the entrance door promises good trouble inside.
Below Jamie’s is a text-only ad in a festive font for GG’s Barnum Room in midtown New York City which was a circus-like disco where trapeze artists performed over the dance floor. It opened in summer 1978 in the old Peppermint Lounge space, and allegedly was controlled by the Genovese family. It was “THE DIFFERENT DISCO,” and popular among trans girls. The “GG” was a carry over from the Gilded Grape in the Times Square Area frequented by black and Puerto Rican trans prostitutes (and their admirers) which closed in 1977. Andy Warhol recruited the models, including Marsha P. Johnson, out of the Gilded Grape for his 1971 “Ladies and Gentlemen” series. Among those who patronized GG’s Barnum Room was music producer Nile Rodgers who was inspired to write the 1980 hit “I’m Coming Out” for Diana Ross after running into a coterie of her drag impersonators one night in the club’s bathroom.
On the front of my leg are two tattoos. The top one is for the Haymarket in the Times Square Area which was a hustler bar in the mid-1970s stocked with young — and often rough — trade supposedly run by the Genovese family. The shirtless man with the Stetson hat gives off a Midnight Cowboy vibe, and evokes all those country bumpkins who took the bus into Port Authority seeking greater adventure. In the original ad the heart tattoo is on the man’s shoulder but it is offset on my leg sleeve for a larger presentation, and it’s inscribed “HUSTLE BABY!”
Below that is a tattoo for the infamous Mineshaft which operated in the meatpacking district on the west side in New York City from 1976 until closed by city officials in 1985 as the AIDS crisis was exploding. The ad illustrates an idealized macho man — muscles, tank top and a mustache — with a miner’s hat which puts the “MINESHAFT” name up in lights. The place allegedly was owned by the Gambino family but managed by a gay man who created the club concept. Freddie Mercury and Robert Mapplethorpe were among those who dug the man-on-man action at the Mineshaft where primal desires became living dreams, and the scene there provided the inspiration for the 1980 film Cruising with Al Pacino.
On the back of my lower leg are tattoos for Broadway Arms Baths in Midtown Manhattan which operated out of a building allegedly owned by the Bonanno family, and the Continental Baths in the Beaux Arts Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side which allegedly had protection from the Colombo family. One of the men in the Broadway Arms Baths tattoo flashes his old-school cred by holding a can of Crisco in his hand, and the text “BEST LOCATED SPOT IN N.Y.C. OPEN 24 HOURS” might as well just state “all action, all the time.” The Continental Baths tattoo was based on a flyer distributed to promote its opening night in September 1968, and there is a seductive elegance in the simple drawing of the nude figure lying prone which is like a welcoming invitation. The Continental was more than a bathhouse. There also was a swimming pool, hair salon, travel agency, disco and a restaurant. Bette Midler and her piano accompanist Barry Manilow began their show biz careers here.
This collage of tattooed ads expresses the zeitgeist of those bygone days, and is an homage to the queers and the mobsters who made it all happen by working together. The remaining five tattoos on my lower leg sleeve are discussed later in this essay celebrating the extensive history between the Mafia and the gays.
Gay men living as sexual outlaws in a city of night (thank you John Rechy) were natural bedfellows with underworld goodfellas. During the decades when homosexuals were prohibited by the state from even assembling together at a bar the mobsters provided our kind with social spaces in exchange for a handsome return. The Mafia acts as a check against the overreach of the state, and when meddlesome politicians prohibit something then the goodfellas step in with their cash coffers and political influence to meet the demand which is why laws clamping down on booze, drugs, gambling, prostitution and other so-called vices are of little effect. People are gonna do what people wanna do, and all that pearl clutching by polite society and all that condemnation by self-righteous lawmakers ain’t gonna change human nature. Sometimes the Mafia unacceptably crossed over the line in its vice rackets such as underage prostitution and child pornography, and the wiseguys certainly should be condemned for anything not involving consenting adults.
It’s easy to dismiss the Mafia as thuggish overlords who exploited the LGBT community but that is not the complete story and ignores the context. Few things are clearly black-and-white or absolutely right-or-wrong. There’s a lot of gray in the world, and there’s a lot of ambiguity in life. But it’s hard to imagine how the gay community could have survived all those decades under an oppressive state without the Mafia.
Writings about the Stonewall Inn inevitably harp about the watered-down booze and the unsanitary conditions. The place by many accounts was a “clip joint” where the patrons were squeezed for their last dollar. However, the Stonewall Inn was not a monolithic example of the social spaces which the wise guys provided to the gay scene. Queer culture was socially diverse even in the old days, and the capitalistic mobsters created places to meet every market including swanky places which catered to upscale queens. Often there were cover charges or membership fees, and the drinks were overpriced with drink minimums. There’s an old saying: if you want to dance, you have to pay the fiddler.
Goods and services in a black market always are expensive because risk exacts a premium. The Mafia faced real risks in running the gay scene. Mobsters risked exposure in the press and scrutiny by the state; they risked raids and closures; they risked arrest and imprisonment. My leg sleeve includes a tattoo of the text “RAIDED PREMISES” which was from the police notice nailed to the door of the Stonewall Inn. Every time the liquor authority closed down a gay bar the Mafia had to retain lawyers to challenge the decision — first in agency hearings which were conducted as trial-like proceedings with witnesses and examinations, and then up to the appellate courts for review. It was an expensive and lengthy process.
In order to minimize those risks mobsters had to make regular payoffs to liquor inspectors, local cops and countless others with their hands out in the political, judicial and law enforcement system. Organized crime cannot exist without public corruption; they go together like a horse and carriage. A “fag joint” paid the cops up to $25,000 a year, and there were dozens and dozens of gay bars operating at any given time in New York City. It was a big industry; it was a national industry. In their 1952 book U.S.A. Confidential muckrakers Lee Mortimer and Jack Lait aptly observed “[a]ll fairy night clubs and gathering places are illegal, and operate only through pay-offs to the authorities. They are organized into a national circuit, controlled by the Mafia which also finds unique opportunity to sell dope in such dives.” So in setting the drink prices the Mafia had to consider cost factors other than booze such as public corruption. The Mafia is a capitalistic enterprise and not a charitable organization, and while it fostered a libertarian culture for its patrons in return it expected premium compensation. It was a pretty fair deal under the circumstances.
No doubt the Mafia did some bad things to queer folks which underscore its sociopathic core for which no defense can be made. During the Lavendar Scare from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s a mob-tied extortion ring targeted rich and powerful closet queens for cash and favors. In a wicked twist to this ugly racket gay men such as Ed “Skull” Murphy who worked out of the Stonewall Inn often worked side-by-side with the wiseguys in shaking down their hapless victims some of whom committed suicide. There is a compelling case that the Mafia even had the gay goods on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The only reason the Mafia had a basis to extort these unfortunate men was precisely because the state in the first place had made homosexuality an offense by which it became blackmail fodder. And the state destroyed more gay lives than the Mafia ever did. Just think about all the homosexuals the state arrested and imprisoned on loitering, solicitation and sodomy charges. In just New York City during the period between 1923 and 1966 “more than 50,000 men were arrested for cruising in bars, streets, parks, and subway washrooms” according to historian George Chauncey in a June 25, 2019 article (“The Forgotten History of Gay Entrapment”) for The Atlantic. In addition to facing fines and imprisonment — many men did hard time on felony convictions — the public exposure from such arrests could result in loss of employment and family. Often cops wouldn’t arrest the often-entrapped homosexual but shake him down for cash with the threat of arrest. As the old saying goes: don’t hate the player, hate the game. Underworld gangsters, treacherous queens and dirty cops all were opportunistic players in this sordid game, and it was a game made possible only because an oppressive state and moralistic voters decided to clamp down on the perfectly ordinary human behavior of man-on-man sex.
Even with the blackmail threat from the wiseguys it’s perfectly understandable why the LGBT community cast its lot with the Mafia given the greater dangers posed by the police state. In his book Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld author T.J. English explores the alliance between jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong and organized crime, and English writes:
Black people had less to fear from a Mafioso boss than a white police officer. They saw the mob as their protection in the commercial marketplace. That was very true of Louis Armstrong. He knew you had to have your gangster for protection. Louis said, “Get yourself the biggest gangster you can.”
That really says a lot when folks — whether queer or black — trust the Mafia more than their government. Queers hated cops. Mobsters hated cops. All for good reason. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The 1971 film Some of My Best Friends Are takes place in a NYC gay bar, and it really captures the scene from that era. The owner is a Mafioso running a loan shark racket out of the bar’s office, and as the dirty cop arrives to take his payoff the gay crowd just sneers at him. That’s just the way it was.
Those who insist in knee-jerk manner that the Mafia is bad and the State is good aren’t thinking or being honest. Among the great scenes in The Godfather is when Michael Corleone tells his girlfriend Kay that he now is working for his father in the family business, and it’s no different than working for “any other powerful man . . . whose responsible for other people . . . like a senator or president.” Kay chides Michael by stating how “naïve you sound” because “senators and presidents don’t have men killed” to which Michael responds without missing a beat: “whose being naïve Kay?” Often the state behaves worse than the Mafia, and queer people know this from direct experience with both governing organizations. For decades the Mafia was the best friend we had.
The Mafia extorted rich and powerful straight men and women, too, and again the blackmail fodder was made possible only by a moralistic — irrationally so — society. Hollywood gangster Mickey Cohen threatened celebrities with exposure in the scandal sheets about their bad behavior from drug use to adulterous affairs unless they paid him to keep it buried. Cohen extorted some famous stars by making sex tapes using models who looked like them, and the innocent victims paid out because in a quick-to-judgement world irreparable damage can be done just by a shady allegation regardless of the underlying truth.
On the East Coast Antonio Rocco Caponigro a/k/a Tony Bananas who ran the Philadelphia Mafia’s rackets in Newark, NJ, apparently kept some of the local politicians in line by secretly photographing their dirty deeds with “attractive, young prostitutes” according to a well-placed FBI informant in 1957:
He said that these girls who worked for CAPONIGRO would place a prominent or wealthy individual in a compromising situation and that unknown to the victim, photographic and audio evidence of the situation would be obtained. The informant said that CAPONIGRO had telephones and/or microphones located in the walls of various locations in New Jersey which he used for this purpose, [and] informant said that CAPONIGRO obtained considerable income from this blackmail, as well as obtaining influence over prominent politicians and other persons in New Jersey.
In a striking scene in The Godfather: Part II a U.S. Senator is playing hardball with the Corleone family on a casino matter. The Senator likes his hookers, and one night is doing it with a girl at a Vegas brothel. He wakes up in a blood-stained bed with the prostitute dead next to him. The Corleone family tells the distraught senator he was lucky the unfortunate incident happened in one of their joints where the problem can be cleaned up without the cops or the press knowing anything about it. The irony, of course, is that the Mafia was behind that unfortunate incident. Must have been a bitter pill for the good Senator to swallow in capitulating to the Corleone family on the casino matter.
The Mafia did not discriminate in its extortion rackets.
On balance the Mafia did more good than bad for the LGBT community — most things in life are a mixed bag — whereas during this period the government was doing more bad than good for us. Even before the Stonewall riots the mob-tied “fag joints” often had gay and lesbian employees, and a few even had LGBT fronts. During a period when out folks had limited opportunities in the straight economy the Mafia provided queers with employment. Many of the early “gay rights” legal cases were won by the mob whether fighting the liquor regulations which kept us from assembling at a bar or the obscenity laws which prohibited us from looking at dick pics. In any event the blackmail threat pretty much had diminished by the late 1960s, and the Mafia was cutting more queers into their numerous rackets involving the bars and clubs including cash skimming, money laundering, tax evasion, drug trafficking and male prostitution. Gay men were part of the underworld life, and the Mafia ran our world.
The Stonewall riots in June 1969 targeted the Mafia owners as well as the harassing cops. My leg sleeve includes a tattoo of the text “RAIDED PREMISES” from a police notice nailed to the door of the Stonewall Inn, and a tattoo of the text “christopher street liberation day” — the forerunner of the annual parade — from a flyer to commemorate the first anniversary of the June riots. Newly-formed activist groups such as Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance continued to protest the mob role in queer spaces, and my inked leg includes the power fist which was a symbol of the GLF and the lambda sign which was a symbol of the GAA. However, the activist complaints quickly were drowned out by the partying masses. The Mafia hijacked the liberation movement for political cover and increasingly used gay men and lesbians as fronts for their bars to evade suspicion. The wiseguys allegedly even infiltrated the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee and Christopher Street Festival Committee which ran New York City’s gay pride parade and some related events for much of the 1970s and 1980s specifically in order to take the politics out of gay and make it just about the fun.
The LGBT community once was married to the mob out of forced necessity but after gay bars became legal the relationship often continued in many establishments out of mutual benefit well into the 1980s. The Mafia was not going to walk away from an industry it created, and the Mafia did its job really well. No one knew nightlife better than organized crime, and it controlled much of straight nightlife, too. Gay bars no longer were busted simply for homosexual assembly but they still risked raids if serving as sex clubs or drug drops. Accordingly, the mob still had both services to provide and protection to offer, particularly during the party decades following the Stonewall riots. If a bar had a back room for anonymous sex, operated afterhours, or sold drugs or boys, then odds are it was a Mafia joint, and that involved numerous places — casual neighborhood taverns, euphoric dance clubs and primal sex dens — during the 1970s and 1980s. No one threw a better party than a mob-tied gay club.
Steve Ostrow who owned the Continental Baths received protection from the Colombo family, and he says he never had any misgivings about the mob relationship. Ostrow even sang “The Star Spangled Banner” to open the rally of the Italian American Coalition organized by Joe Colombo at Columbus Circle on June 28, 1971, and just as the gay bathhouse operator was completing the National Anthem the Mafia boss was gunned down.
HBO series The Deuce is about the Mafia and Times Square vice rackets from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s, and it includes a story line in which a gay guy manages a mob-owned “fag joint,” and then goes on to open a series of gay spots with the mob including a supper club and a bathhouse. The relationship between the gay owner and the wiseguys is not dark and threatening but professional and cordial. Everybody understands it’s business, and there is mutual respect on both sides: it was win-win. The queers provided the vision, and the mob provided its backing.
The tattoo is an apt medium by which to tell this history because tattooing once pretty much was a lifestyle adornment only among marginalized subcultures such as the gay scene and the hoodlum life. During the 1950s and 1960s tattooists and their customers often were rough characters with colorful backgrounds. Tattoo shops frequently were located in crazy neighborhoods with amusement arcades and peep shows, dive bars and B-girls, burlesque houses and cheap prostitutes, rundown hotels and alcoholic bums, and pawn shops and desperate souls. Some tattoo shops were backed by the Mafia just like they controlled most action in a vice district.
The tattoo patrons included juvenile delinquents and hardcore gangbangers, drunks and druggies, brick layers and truck drivers, sailors and Marines, queers and hustlers, and pimps and whores. The tattoo was their mark as members of a motley assembly of broken people who accepted their lot as anti-heroes in a post-war America with her boujee values and suffocating judgments. The tattoo scene was an alternative reality from middle-class suburbia.
The homosexuals were an oft-cited customer base for the tattoo parlors. A 1947 study concludes “[t]attooing . . . may also express psychopathological conditions with an erotic, homosexual, or criminal background.” Over a decade later in 1961 New York State banned tattooing due to hepatitis outbreaks, and to bolster their case retained psychiatrist Franklin S. Klaf, M.D. who earlier had conducted a study “on the sexual abnormalities and other personality abnormalities connected with tattooing as compared to the abnormalities of a non-tattooed group.” At a hearing on the ban Klaf testified that “[w]e found a higher incidence of sexual abnormalities in the tattooed group” including masochism and homosexuality: “the individuals who became tattooed are the individuals who participated in homosexual activity, the individuals who were abnormal in personality because they derived a great deal of pleasure from a very painful process and individuals who were liable to associate in what we call ‘fringe groups.’”
Among these “fringe groups” was the criminal element. Numerous studies from the 1950s and 1960s found that prison populations were overwhelmingly tattooed, and the chronic recidivists had multiple tattoos: the more outlaw, the more tattoos. Curiously, a 1966 study comparing tattooed and non-tattooed prisoners “on personality measures which are relevant to body image” concluded “that prisoners who have tattoos feel more positively about their bodies,” and “anecdotal interpretations of tattooing as exhibitionist or as related to body narcissism are consonant with this finding.” In other words: tattooing is queer as fuck.
In the post-war years a tattooed body could belong to a sexual outlaw or a straight-up criminal, and often they were one and the same person. Some gang members in the 1950s and 1960s who got tattooed did not identify as homosexual but nevertheless “took care of” — i.e., sexually serviced — the other members. There were those who were straight but played the gay-for-pay scene. Many gang members — particularly from the Puerto Rican and Italian gangs — “rolled fags” but curiously would get blown to climax before beating and robbing their victims. Some gang bangers even developed regular queer relationships.
The marginalized homosexual long has existed in the criminal world — he often had few options in the legitimate economy — and always been overrepresented in the prison population beyond the sodomy offenses. The old records chronicling the arrest histories of imprisoned homosexuals portray drifters, thieves, forgers, conmen, drug dealers, pimps, fraudsters and killers. The homosexual often was a criminal. The homosexual villain isn’t a movie trope; it’s part of our history.
The homosexual rubbed elbows with the criminal in a shared underworld which rejected societal mores. The earliest bars at which homosexuals assembled, particularly in smaller cities before the 1970s, were not full-fledged gay bars but sketchy joints which served the full spectrum of the underworld population from degenerates to criminals. In his 1973 film Mean Streets Martin Scorsese shows some tough hoodlums and flaming queens together jumping into a car in fleeing a Little Italy joint after a shooting. The queens are dropped off in Greenwich Village on W. 8th St. — the movie camera takes a pointed shot of the street sign — which was the main strip for gay bars run by the Genovese family in the 1950s and 1960s. Among the gay joints on this strip was the Bon Soir. A 1972 article (“Outsiders Disrupt Life in The Village”) from The New York Times states “[i]n front of the nightclub stood a crowd of young men and boys,” and Jose, “a 25-year-old self-described queen,” said “[h]ustlers, pot heads, junkies, dope dealers — whatever you want is here.” Pretty much the same crowd found in a 1950s tattoo parlor. Queers were ready-made for the life.
Homosexuals not only were getting tattooed but giving them, too. Phil Sparrow (real name Samuel Steward) once was an English professor at DePaul University in Chicago, but in the early 1950s the gay prof escaped the straight jacket of academic life to open a tattoo parlor on skid row. Sparrow’s “tattoodling” venture did well enough that he smuggled cash on plane trips for deposits into a Swiss bank. Sparrow worked out of a shop on south State Street, and by the early 1960s took Cliff Raven (real name Clifford Ingram), a younger gay man, under his wing. In 1963 and 1964 Sparrow and Raven spent their weekends together tattooing sailors out of a small shop in Milwaukee where many boys on their liberty passes from the Great Lakes training station would get drunk and raise hell. By the mid-1960s Sparrow moved to Oakland, CA where he became the official tattooist among Hells Angels bikers, and Raven opened his own tattoo shop in Chicago until leaving for Los Angeles in the late 1970s where he developed a celebrity clientele. Both Sparrow and Raven acknowledge that the Mafia was behind many Chicago tattoo shops back in the day but insist theirs were left alone by the wiseguys.
Perhaps Sparrow and Raven were left alone because their good friend Charles “Chuck” Renslow apparently had Mafia ties. The three men were involved in the burgeoning gay leather scene. Renslow had gotten inked by Sparrow, and later introduced Raven to Sparrow. Although Renslow dabbled in tattooing his big thing was operating gay bars and bathhouses, and his first venture was the Gold Coast leather bar which opened in 1958.
Chuck Renslow was friendly with mob associate John Gattuso who answered to Near North Side Outfit boss Ross Prio. The FBI insisted Renslow was the right-hand man of Gattuso, and that Renslow used front men as the nominal licensees for several bars and bathhouses he actually controlled on behalf of Gattuso. The FBI advised Renslow that he was an investigative target but he nevertheless consented to an interview with the G-men at which he was read his rights. Renslow adamantly claimed that “[h]e does not own those businesses” but simply “assisted in the construction and helps the owner[s] . . . in the[ir] management and operation” because “[h]e is very interested in the ‘Gay Cause’ and helps to put ‘Gay People’ in business.” The FBI investigation into mob fronts, cash skimming and police corruption subsequently was closed without any charges against Renslow. Renslow fought the law, and the leatherman won.
In the mid-1960s Cliff Raven opened a tattoo shop funded by Chuck Renslow among the retail spaces on the ground floor of a sprawling building which ran from 900–912 West Belmont Avenue in Chicago. Above the store fronts on the entire second and third floors was where Renslow and his self-described “family” lived in several adjoining or connecting apartments. The living complex popularly was known in the gay scene as the “Black Castle” although Sparrow characterized it as Renslow’s “slave compound.” It was pretty much a fuck fest. Renslow was fucking Raven who lived in the Black Castle for several years, Renslow and Sparrow had a brief thing, and Sparrow and Raven periodically slept with each other.
At one time Raven was a co-owner of both the West Belmont Avenue building — together with Renslow’s mother who also had an apartment in the Black Castle — and the Gold Coast leather bar. Renslow’s “family” was characterized by multiple informants in a series of FBI memos as “a group of young homosexuals” involved in the BDSM lifestyle. One informant advised that “RENSLOW is a user of narcotics as are most of the members of his group that hang out at the Gold Coast,” and that the Gold Coast is for the sadist and masochist groups and those being the type, go for motorcycles and leather.” The Black Castle was described by one informant “as very dark,” and decorated “like an old castle and they have display cases inside filled with whips and swords.” Supposedly in that display “case behind a velvet cloth is a switch that moves the case and opens the entrance to a hidden room,” and in that “room on the left wall is a safe and an altar for CHUCK’s Egyptian religion” and “[o]n the other wall is a desk and a rack with his religious spices.” Renslow apparently was “a fanatic when it comes to keeping books and records” which were kept in that safe, and he was a self-described “spiritual head” of the Pristine Egyptian Orthodox Temple which conducted regular Sunday services at 7 pm.
Chuck Renslow and John Gattuso allegedly controlled hustler bar New Jamie’s which is part of the tattoo collage on my lower leg. A confidential informant told the FBI that “New Jamie’s is well known as a place to pick up male prostitutes.” Another source advised the FBI in early 1972 that Gattuso intended to buy the building out of which the bar operated, and “remodel the rest of the building and make rooms which he will rent to patrons for the bar for what the source considered to be obvious activities.” In May 1975 a source advised the FBI “that the young homosexuals who live in the Crystal Hotel above New Jamie’s Tavern . . . have credit to drink in New Jamie’s,” and that most of the young men in the hotel are male prostitutes.” The place was rough enough, and an FBI memo from the mid-1970s states “there were many shootings at New Jamie’s.”
Phil Sparrow often would ink hustlers in exchange for letting him give them blowjobs. In arguing for legalized prostitution as an extension of gay rights Phil Sparrow wrote the following in a 1961 essay for Der Kries:
You have legislated against the homosexual, harried him and hounded him, permitted him by your laws and repressions to be blackmailed, sterilized him, laughed at him, kicked him, beaten him — but you cannot change his inclinations, and chances are he would not let you if you could. Is it any wonder that you have made him defiant, and made him sneer at your attempted restrictions? If he wants to buy the pleasure of a hustler’s company for an evening, or ten minutes, how can you stop him? * * * [C]an anyone in America, by city ordinance or state law, undo a world tradition that is centuries old?
Chuck Renslow also was a physique photographer who owned Kris Studio, and hustlers were among his models. After the photo sessions Renslow would send the working boys on to Sparrow. They were all bad boys. Any boy in the 1950s and 1960s who was getting naked for the camera and exchanging sex for tattoos pretty much was a bad boy perhaps somewhat like the one illustrated in the Jamie’s ad. One of those photographed by Chuck Renslow was Paul Ferguson who with his younger brother Tommy in 1969 murdered movie star Ramon Novarro.
Phil Sparrow had an insatiable sexual appetite with a high body count which he detailed in his self-described “Stud File.” During his years as a tattooist Sparrow was friendly with Alfred Kinsey, and frequently shared his experience and insights with the Institute on Sexual Research. Apparently a lot of dudes jerk off to their tattoos; a lot of cum spilt over ink. On Sparrow’s right back shoulder was a tattoo of “a flying penis, a winged phallus, Pompeiian.” In 1953 Sparrow’s shop became known as a congregating place for homosexual activity among new enlistees from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. The “Navy was going to declare [his] shop off-limits,” and an officer warned Sparrow “keep away from the sailors, you know what I mean, or the next time I won’t be alone.” Apparently one enlistee had been discovered having sex with a fellow sailor at the Training Station, and ratted out Sparrow’s shop under questioning by naval intelligence. Steward got out the word that the enlistee was a rat and vowed vengeance “if it takes me twenty years” because “we are all, as Jacques Delaunay once said, ‘un grand Mafia,’” and “no queer fears anything so much as one of his own breed who’s turned informer.”
Phil Sparrow and Chuck Renslow had a falling out in the mid-1960s which never was repaired. Ending up in the Bay Area Sparrow become friends with Sonny Barger, the founder of the Oakland chapter of Hells Angels, designed a fuck-the-pigs tattoo which became popular among the bikers and according to his “Stud File” even had sex with one. Later Phil Sparrow wrote smut novels under the name Phil Andros. And Renslow continued in Chicago where he built a queer-as-fuck scene with the alleged backing of the Mafia. These tattooed homos were bad asses.
The tattoo on my calf is the inverted pink triangle which contains my book’s title The Mafia and the Gays. This triangle was the mark given by the Nazis to the queers who were imprisoned in the concentration camps during World War II, and gays long ago reclaimed it in our fight for liberation which included an alliance with the Mafia. Be gay, do crime!
Phillip Crawford Jr. 
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