Below the Belt and Other Stories (1975) by Samuel Steward writing as Phil Andros.

For the main article on the Phil Andros Novels and Stories, click here.

This one, like Stud, is a series of interconnected short stories rather than a novel. Again, all of the twelve stories feature the Phil Andros character. The publishing date is three years after Shuttlecock, but some of the stories seem to be older. Unfortunately there’s no information about when or where they may have been first published. The first six take place in Chicago, then the rest in California save for one in a Des Moines prison. In the first story Phil has sex, separately, with a father and son, neither of whom know the other is gay. In the second story he has sex, separately with two brothers. The younger brother wants Phil to teach him how to be a hustler so he can raise enough money to go to seminary and pursue his calling to the priesthood! The third “The Peachiest Fuzz “is another cop fantasy. Andros is working at a gym called, “Steve and Mikes”. He’s sleeping over to try to catch someone who’s been breaking in. He catches the guy but also catches the eye of a cop in the aftermath. The cop notices the initials of the gym on Phil’s shorts, an “easter egg” that made me smile. Phil flirts with the cop a little and invites him to come back to the gym later to work out. The cop does, and there’s some nice dancing around as the two try to negotiate sex at a time when gay sex and solicitation were a crime.

“Love Me Little, Love Me Long” is a nice bit of metafiction where Phil Andros, wanders into Pete Swallow’s tattoo shop. So Samuel Steward’s fictional hustler, Phil Andros meets the actual Samuel Steward as the tattoo artist under the assumed named Pete Swallow, in a story written by Samuel Steward under his pen name Phil Andros. Says Phil, “I looked closer at him. He was a sort of young-old type, very difficult to guess the age of. He had a small narrow mustache, brown hair with a little wave in it, and a kind of patrician aristocratic air that didn’t square off exactly with the sort of racket he was in. What the hell was an intellectual doing in a tattoo shop?” (p. 38). Pete gives Phil a tattoo of a winged dick on his shoulder. When Phil tells Pete his name, Pete tells Phil, “I just read a story about a character named Phil Andros… in one of those little queer magazines they publish in Europe” (p. 40). The story is supposedly by a guy named Ward Stames, who was Phil’s roommate back at Ohio State. Pete and Phil start to call each other “father” and “son”, which they sort of are as author and character. And they have sex, of course, Pete paying Phil the hustler’s fee for the pleasure. The story ends with Phil looking up Ward Stames and going off to meet him for old times’ sake, but did you notice that “Ward Stames” is an anagram for “Sam Steward”? And in fact Samuel Steward did write stories for “little queer magazines” in Europe under that name.

In the next story, Phil goes back and forth between the gangster owner of a gay bar and an English Professor and ends up matchmaking between the two of them. The two are in the next story, too, which features a kinky sex scene that included cutting and made me uncomfortable. “Ring of Fire” was my favorite story. Now Phil is temporarily working as a firefighter in northern California. He falls in love with another firefighter and rescues him during a wildfire. There’s allusions to Wagner in the lovers surrounded by a wall of fire. The sex is straightforward and romantic. Next there are three of Steward’s cop fantasy stories. These all land as just straight up pornography with little literary interest or merit. First there’s a San Francisco cop Phil more or less wins in a poker game. Then sex with a different San Francisco cop in the back of his paddy wagon. Then a scene with Phil in a jail in Des Moines, having sex with the cop who busted him. For the last two stories he’s back in San Francisco in the S and M scene, the first is set in a gay couple’s “dungeon” play room. The last is the same gay couple, Jim and Ike, playing with Phil as a present for his birthday.