Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo With Gangs, Sailors, and Street-Corner Punks 1950-1965 (Haworth Series in Gay & Lesbian Studies)

Explore the dark subculture of 1950s tattoos!In the early 1950s, when tattoos were the indelible mark of a lowlife, an erudite professor of English--a friend of Gertrude Stein, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, and Thornton Wilder--abandoned his job to become a tattoo artist (and incidentally a researcher for Alfred Kinsey).Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos tells the story of his years working in a squalid arcade on Chicago’s tough State Street.During that time he left his mark on a hundred thousand people, from youthful sailors who flaunted their tattoos as a rite of manhood to executives who had to hide their passion for well-ornamented flesh.Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos is anything but politically correct.The gritty, film-noir details of Skid Row life are rendered with unflinching honesty and furtive tenderness.His lascivious relish for the young sailors swaggering or staggering in for a new tattoo does not blind him to the sordidness of the world they inhabited.From studly nineteen-year-olds who tra