Some people just can’t ever be satisfied. You must be familiar with this species of ambitious creature: the medical assistant training to be a doctor, the waitress waiting to be discovered as a model/actress/singer, or the prostitute pounding the pavement, hoping the Fortuna wheel of the street will eventually give him or her that lucky spin toward something loftier. So on that note, let’s meet the overachievers, the busybodies, and the multitalented call girls, rent-boys, and common streetwalkers who came to distinguish themselves not only in the field of floozies, but by other, more newsworthy achievements than just lying down to take it and fake it.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Politician
CLAIM TO FAME: A trick with a goose; ruling the
Western world
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Byzantium
Meet Theodora, the whore who once held dominion over the Western world. She was born a Greek Cypriot with a bear trainer for a father and a “scandalized” mother. Her fate, it seemed, was to be stuck in a dead-end gig as a mime/nudie dancer, but in A.D. 527 Theodora managed to work it all the way to the throne of Byzantium.
The ancient scholar Procopius in his Historia Arcana, which lay hidden for centuries in the Vatican archives, recounts one of Theodora’s signature moves:
She would sink down to the stage floor and recline on her back. Slaves to whom the duty was entrusted would then scatter grains of barley from above into the calyx of this passion flower, whence geese, trained for the purpose, would next pick the grains one by one with their bills and eat.
Luckily for Theodora, Justinian, the open-minded emperor of Byzantium, also commonly referred to as “The Emperor who never sleeps,” was smitten with this courtesan’s beauty and her willingness
to get a little freaky. Theodora and Justinian married, and it is Theodora, by most accounts, who is credited with being the brains of the
operation to restore Rome to its former glory. Justinian insisted that his bride share the throne and that she serve as a spearhead in all decision-
making processes. They were well on their way to glory when the
bubonic plague thwarted their grand vision by decimating the population.
An ardent champion of women’s rights, Theodora spent much of her life working to reform Byzantium, starting with a prohibition on forced prostitution. In Rome and abroad she successfully lobbied to expand women’s legal rights in domestic proceedings, property issues, and guardianship, while showing no quarter to criminals convicted of rape (think lions) and other crimes against women.
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Junkie; poet
CLAIM TO FAME: “The Mayor of Forty-Second Street”
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Forty-Second Street
If you look closely, you’ll notice prostitution is a theme that emerges in the lives of many figures from the “Beat Generation,” the group of post–World War II writers and artists that includes Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, among others. However, perhaps the “beatest” of the Beats, was the man who coined the term, the man who operated in the shadows, the man with the perfect name for a back-alley prosty: Herbert Huncke (pronounced “hunky”).
Herbert was born in 1915 in Massachusetts, but his family soon relocated to Chicago. There, Huncke thumbed his nose at the authorities and dropped out of school to hustle wide-eyed Windy City tourists, then hopped trains and lived the hobo life, which was tough, because where the hell are we supposed to deliver your paper, Mr. Caboose? The reality was that Herbert Huncke had no need for, or interest in, reading a newspaper; he was one of those unique life forms who exist purely in the ethereal space between life, time, and the local news.
In 1939 Huncke hitched a ride to the Big Apple and took up residence on Forty-Second Street, where for the next decade he would be a fixture known as “Huncke the Junkie,” and/or “The Mayor of Forty-Second Street.” It was here, in Times Square, that Huncke the prostitute blossomed. Huncke was an open-minded, gender-blind working boy who offered his services to men and women desperate enough to enlist a homeless addict sporting a wilted boutonnière, and attracting the kind of attention usually reserved for fistfights and devastating apartment fires.
In the autobiographical Junky, William S. Burroughs remembers seeing Huncke (called “Herman” in the book) for the first time:
Waves of hostility and suspicion flowed out from his large brown eyes like some sort of television broadcast. The effect was almost like a physical impact. The man was small and very thin, his neck loose in the collar of his shirt. His complexion faded from brown to a mottled yellow, and pancake make-up had been heavily applied in an attempt to conceal a skin eruption. His mouth was drawn down at the corners in a grimace of petulant annoyance.
Of course Burroughs was trying to sell Huncke some morphine and a submachine gun at the time, a pitch that may have contributed to Herbert’s “waves of hostility and suspicion.” And while the temptation is to talk about how insane it is to name a child “Herbert”, it’s time to get back to the call-boy boogie.
Before Huncke could serve as an inspiration to his Beat contemporaries, live off their charity and regale them with stories of slanging every iteration of the word “junk” in Times Square, he had to live the life. In a 1949 journal entry, Allen Ginsberg wrote of Huncke:
I appreciated [his] activities as touches peculiar to Huncke alone, and therefore valuable, lovely and honorable. They were part of his whole being and “life force.” I also enjoyed mythologizing his character. It is a literary trick which Kerouac, the novelist—who has written much about Herbert Huncke—and I exploited in the past.
As a literary muse, Huncke was unparalleled. To be sure, he was a junkie and thief, but the man was also a Times Square Prometheus who imparted his own brand of fiery wisdom to the poets and then suffered the wrath of the gods while flaunting his opiate-saturated booty along Broadway. As a prostitute, maybe he just needed money for dope, or maybe he was indeed, as Jack Kerouac described him, “martyred. Tortured by sidewalks, starved for sex and companionship.” In his autobiography Guilty of Everything we are given Huncke the writer, which if you are interested, offers a certain tedium and explains why he had to have lots of other day jobs.
“Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: the Mark Inside.”
—William S. Burroughs
Shakespeare poses the question, “What’s in a name?” With a name like Herbert Huncke, you’d better be ready to go knuckles out on the playground, and often, or make your entrance from around the back. For better or worse, Herbert made his choice.
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Writer; political activist; scamp
CLAIM TO FAME: Colossus of French modernism
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: France
Doesn’t the name “Jean Genet” make you yearn for a trans-Atlantic tryst with an artsy Frenchman? Maybe he’s also mysteriously reticent, wearing a beret and a black-and-white striped shirt. Wait, no. Those are mimes. Different fantasy.
Although not a mime, Jean Genet is known as the powerhouse dramatist of French modernism. He was also controversial for his political activism, for his alliance with the Black Panthers, and for the graphic portrayal of homosexual sex in his plays and novels. Born in 1910 and abandoned at seven months by his mother, a destitute prostitute fighting a losing battle on the rancid rues of Paris, Genet was charged with his first crime (theft) when he was only ten. He spent most of his early years in state-run institutions and reformatory “schools,” where he got by on his prodigious intelligence and a certain facility for theft, drug-dealing, and, of course, prostitution.
You may call it the grundle, taint, gooch, choad, nifkin, or durf, but the area bridging the divide from your anus to your genitalia is actually called the perineum. Scientists and freaks are wont to measure this fleshspan, called anogenital distance (AGD), with longer AGDs linked to increased fertility in men (the average AGD is around two inches, or 52 mm). For the ladies, studies indicate that massaging the perineum with warm olive oil toward the end of the third trimester can reduce tearing and the need for an episiotomy. And yes, I’m referring to the pregnancy trimester, not the trimester where your proposal to major in “choad measuring” was declined by the biology department, the narrow-minded fools.
Living for a time in Gibraltar during the 1930s, Genet sometimes sold his body for sardines and a loaf of bread (literally) to English seamen. He would often dress as a woman to aid in his petty thievery, and presumably, to make the sailors of the stuffy English armada feel less guilty about dorking a master of modernism on a dirty wharf. Genet recounts many of these buoy-toy experiences in his seminal novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, which he wrote while in prison for “vagrancy” and “lewd acts.” In this worthy tome, Genet graphically details all the ins-and-outs of a man-whore subculture, along with one of the best odes to a choad you’ll read this week:
There was in his supple bearing the weighty magnificence of a barbarian. . . . The most impressive thing about it is the vigor, hence the beauty, of that part which goes from the anus to the tip of the penis.
Our Lady of the Flowers had worldwide influence, inspiring participants in the New York Stonewall uprising and the Tokyo Street riots, both turning points in the fight for gay liberation. The legendary philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre praised Genet’s novel as “an epic of masturbation . . . a matchless, unholy trinity of scatology, pornography and the legitimate study of evil.” One would think an author could pen only so many weighty epics on masturbation, but Genet would continue for years to explore themes of sex, politics, prostitution, and society, most notably in The Balcony, a masterpiece of modern theater in which a brothel serves as the focal point for a violent revolution in the streets. The prostitutes featured in The Balcony are well-developed characters, full of humanity and righteousness, unlike the morally bankrupt characters that represent the status quo. Genet remains often imitated but never duplicated, and his influence transcends time and culture, which only occasionally results in misbegotten mime fantasies. A towering figure in both the art world and the tart world, Jean Genet gave a voice to the dispossessed, and he offers a frustrating reminder of how, if one is dead-set on creating meaningful art, one should probably catch a case and go to prison for a while.
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Sex icon
CLAIM TO FAME: Prostitute/porn star turned artist/sexologist
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: San Francisco
Camille Paglia calls Annie Sprinkle a “feminist revolutionary”; Sprinkle calls herself a “metamorphosexual”; and I hereby proclaim her “Queen of the Golden Shower Ritual Kits.” But Annie Sprinkle would have merited none of these titles if she hadn’t first distinguished herself as a prostitute.
Born Ellen Steinberg in 1954 in Philadelphia, Annie Sprinkle never shied away from her past. In fact, her trailblazing porno film, Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, which made her the “second-best selling video star of 1981,” is largely autobiographical. The film features a character named Ellen Steinberg, a shy little Jewish girl from Philly with dreams as big as her breasts. The movie follows the bashful Ellen as she grows up to be the inimitable Annie Sprinkle, exploring her sexuality with a host of talented costars, including Ron “The Hedgehog” Jeremy in one of his first roles!
In a 2000 interview with Salon, Sprinkle recalls “feeling ugly and wanting to be touched” as a child, and she believes these feelings were the driving force behind her entrée into porn and prostitution by her late teens. Whether it was nature or nurture, according to Annie, “Porn was exactly what I needed, and up ’til my mid-20s, I really liked being a prostitute.” That’s something you don’t hear every day, and they are strong words from the former Girl Scout, but Annie is nothing if not unconventional. “I’d do something that was so-called taboo and say ‘that doesn’t feel bad.’ It’s like growing up with a religion you end up rejecting,” she adds, although the analogy strikes me as a bit strained. This would be more like growing up with a religion you end up fisting.
Annie’s provocative one-woman show, Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn, is a performance and film diary that explores Sprinkle’s thirty-year odyssey of orgasms, orgies, and orifices, from her sexual awakening around the time of the sexual revolution of the sixties, to her “discovery” as a porn starlet while “fluffing” Harry Reems, and then on to her present vocation as a “modern media whore” and lecturer. Highlights from Herstory include the aforementioned fisting, along with golden showers (I’m serious about those Golden Shower Ritual Kits), sex with amputees and dwarves, bondage, and “rainbow showers,” which is code for barfing on people—almost anything you can think of, really.
Believe it or not, according to Sprinkle, after a while, “straight-porn directors didn’t want to work with me anymore; they said I was too kinky.” And where do we take it to when we get “too kinky”? That’s right, we take it to the “performance art” scene and join up with other horny neo-Dadaists and Fluxus artists to make avant-garde nudie flicks, author a journal on “piss-art,” and then move on to more lucrative instructional videos like Annie Sprinkle’s Amazing World of Orgasm. You may think, “That’s just cashing in on the notoriety that comes with being filmed nude and drinking pee,” and you may think right.
But in 2002, Annie Sprinkle not only talked the talk, she walked the walk and chalked the chalk, receiving her PhD in Human Sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, in San Francisco. Prostitute. Porn Star. Provocateur. Professor. Never let it be said that Annie Sprinkle didn’t cover all the bases. But let’s just hope she covered the mattress with a tarp or something.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Cowgirl, but don’t call her “girl”
CLAIM TO FAME: Pioneer badass; good with the six-shooters
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: The Wild West
Of all the picturesque figures out of Wild West lore, Calamity Jane stands out as the one who probably gave the most head. Born Martha Jane Canary Burke in 1852 in Missouri, Calamity Jane is said to have earned her epithet not by some misguided sexual escapade involving Wild Bill Hickok’s unruly moustache, but through the perception that to offend her would be to invite calamity, venereal and otherwise. Some reports claim she was given the name because of her tendency to roar “What a calamity!” when bested at poker. Nobody can say for sure. However, what we do know is that Martha Jane was a well-known, often drunk, cross-dressing tranny prostitute who was well acquainted with the vicissitudes of life for a woman on America’s frontier.
After intense scrutiny from their vantage points in various wood-paneled American libraries, professors ultimately determined that Calamity Jane was not the Indian-killing, bank-robbing gunslinger the movies and Deadwood have led us to believe. Even so, the woman was a character and most certainly, as you’ve likely guessed by now, a card-carrying hooker.
Described by frontiersmen Jesse Brown and A. M. Willard in their 1924 Black Hill Trails as “nothing more than a common prostitute, drunken, disorderly and wholly devoid of any conception of morality,” Calamity Jane nevertheless possessed a humanitarian bent. In 1878 during an outbreak of smallpox in Deadwood, this scourge of polite society came through huge for the townsfolk. Jane girded up her overtaxed loins, rolled up her sleeves, downed some cocktails and proceeded to nurse the afflicted patients ceaselessly, even as other, more upstanding and God-fearing citizens stayed away claiming the plague was probably biblical and no doubt beyond their control. Also, they didn’t want to die.
Moreover, Calamity Jane lent her unique services to the United States Army at the “Three-Mile Hog Ranch,” Fort Laramie’s fabled house of ill repute. According to one lieutenant, the place was populated by “as hardened and depraved [a] set of witches as could be found on the face of the globe,” adding, “In all my experience I have never seen a lower, more beastly set of people of both sexes.”
Our Calamity Jane eventually managed to get off of her back, eschew whoring, and land on her feet in the history books, but at fifty-one she died broke and hammered in the Calloway Hotel of Terry, South Dakota. On her deathbed, she asked to be buried next to Wild Bill Hickok, who, according to many sources, found her company excruciating. But, Calamity Jane got her wish.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Former mayor of Sausalito, California
CLAIM TO FAME: “Dean of San Francisco Prostitutes”
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: San Francisco
You don’t survive eleven heart attacks, three decades as the grand madam of San Francisco, and a career as an elected politician without being one hardy hooker. Sally Stanford was born in Oregon in 1903. Christened Mabel Janice Busby, the precocious vixen quite understandably moved on as quickly as possible to her nom de horizontale, and would prove herself to be one of the most resourceful, resilient, and savvy harlots around.
At the age of sixteen young Mabel eloped with a machinating dipshit who claimed he was the grandson of Colorado’s former governor. Granted, his alleged credentials were not all that impressive, even if true, but Mabel thought she saw an opportunity, and she took it. She soon found herself caught up in a failed robbery scheme orchestrated by her dunce husband, and the judge sentenced her to two years in the Oregon State prison. Mabel, however, carried out her sentence hanging out with the warden’s wife in their house. Apparently, when Sally was taken to Salem, the warden said he had no place to care for a child and turned the young girl over to his wife, so Sally lived in the couple’s house for two years. I agree. That makes absolutely no sense, but one gets the impression things were even weirder back then, when the law was vague enough to allow for creative (but not in the Guantanamo kind of way) forms of punishment or “rehabilitation.”
Bouncing back after her brief “incarceration,” Mabel changed her name to Sally, made a handsome nickel in the speakeasy business, and invested in hotels, first in San Francisco’s shadier Tenderloin but eventually setting up shop on Nob Hill. She then quickly became the Bay City’s main madam. By all accounts Sally’s girls were refined, gorgeous, loyal, and discreet. If anyone got blitzkrieged on booze and raised a stink, Sally promptly had their ass thrown to the curb, and that would include even the likes of such luminaries as Humphrey Bogart, a notorious sot, whom she hated (by many accounts a terrible drunk and a prissy diva) and had booted for disorderly conduct.
Sally was also an early pioneer in the sphere of globalization. Nowadays that term is something of a hackneyed buzzword, but in 1945, when Sally and her girls entertained the delegates from the United Nations Organizing Conference, there was nothing “hackneyed” about her operation. In fact, according to the Pulitzer Prize–winning San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, “The United Nations was founded at Sally Stanford’s whorehouse.” Strong.
After suffering countless collars for the usual “lewdness” charge, Sally became weary of visits from the SFPD vice squad, and she bowed out of the game gracefully. The retired madam opened a high-profile restaurant, and eventually ran for the city council of Sausalito. She was defeated in her first five attempts, but as Sally always said, “Sinners never give up!” She won the mayoral race in 1976 on—what else?—a pro-business ticket.
In 1978, when the inevitable movie was made of her juicy autobiography, The Lady of the House, Sally famously dissed Dyan Cannon’s portrayal of her, saying, “She just didn’t have it in her to play me,” although Sally, always a player and a politician conceded, “I have to admit, it’s a hard act to follow.” Upon news of her death from her twelfth heart attack, all the flags in Sausalito flew at half-staff, an erectile dysfunction rarely, if ever, witnessed in Sally’s old place at 1144 Pine Street.
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Stone-cold streetwalker
CLAIM TO FAME: Brought Assemblies of God minister Jimmy Swaggart to his knees.
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: New Orleans
When the wildly popular televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was caught with a prostitute in 1988 at a dingy Travel Inn, he got on TV and wept, “I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me.” You know the drill. And while we remember Swaggart, one wonders: What happened to the prostitute? We have no idea. During the scandal in the late 1980s, the hooker Debra Murphree remarked to reporters that she might go back to live with her children in Indiana, maybe do some interior decorating. Then she posed nude for Penthouse. This was followed by the obligatory cyclone of tax problems faced by a $20-a-session hooker becoming a world-famous centerfold, and then, like Amelia Earhart, she disappeared. Well, not exactly like Amelia Earhart. Maybe she’s just working on wallpaper arrangements and custom nesting tables. But for a few fleeting moments at the close of the twentieth century, Debra Murphree was at the center of the media universe.
When Jimmy Swaggart’s former rival and fellow Assemblies of God minister Marvin Gorman (against whom Swaggart had earlier made a concerted effort to expose as a philandering sinner) came equipped with a telephoto lens and a private detective to the Travel Inn, he photographed Jimmy in flagrante with Debra, a working girl just trying to make a life for herself and her nine-year-old daughter in the unforgiving alleyways of New Orleans. A familiar face in the New Orleans trick tank, maybe a small problem with the drugs, and not the best example for her daughter, Debra Murphree nevertheless was integral in bringing down Swaggart (temporarily), and these days, well, sometimes all we can manage is to embrace our angels on their descent.
Erototalia, is the act of sexy talk. Research shows that over 70 percent of couples engage in some kind of erototalia to keep things interesting during intercourse. Well, that’s all very interesting, but what the hell do you call what passes for sweet nothings in Rev. Swaggart’s world? I’ll tell you what those are; they are “pieces of mouth diarrhea” or “coprolalia,” (the obsessive use of scatological language) and very rarely a turn on.
Murphree was born Debra Hedge and raised in Patoka, Indiana (pop. 735), where classmates, in a 1988 Dallas Morning News article, recalled that she “went to school,” “wasn’t involved in any extracurricular activities,” and once even “left town with a biker named Dick,” among other dazzling recollections. Well, things were about to change for the high school dropout and small-town girl.
At its apostolic apogee in the mid-1980s, the Swaggart Ministry was a $140 million-a-year business, taking in $500,000 every day. And each week, his television program, The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast, attracted 8 million viewers across the globe. However, for Swaggart, with smoking-gun photographs and revelations such as the ones dished out by Ms. Murphree in the pages of Penthouse, the pastor’s popularity began to wane. Speaking of her dalliances with Swaggart, Murphree noted:
He’d ask me if I’d ever let anyone screw my daughter when she was that young, and I said, “No, She’s only nine years old.” He asked me if she started developing [breasts] or if she had any hair down there. . . . I didn’t know what to say. I thought, “This man’s got to be sick.”
Sick is one way to put it. A loathsome pig too tainted even for the abattoir is another. After the scandal broke and Swaggart was whimpering like a simpleton, the Assemblies of God moved quickly to defrock—Swaggart’s exploits were too much even for the church of too-much. Of course, after Debra Murphree made the media rounds, she faded back into obscurity. Swaggart, on the other hand, managed to return to the limelight, coming out shamelessly for encore after frustrating encore.
In his new iteration as a Pentecostal minister, Swaggart has come forward to claim that the prophet Mohammed was a “pervert” and a “sex deviant.” Ever the hypocrite, this perverted con artist and would-be Christian asserts that gay marriage is an “abomination” and that if a gay person ever “looks at me like that” he plans to “kill him and tell God he died.” So things are actually pretty much as they were, I guess.
As for Debra, you can’t even track her down on Facebook or Linkedin, for Christ’s sake. Swaggart, now seventy-seven years old, continues to broadcast his Jimmy Swaggart Telecast to 104 countries around the world. God, why art thou so far from helping us, and from the words of our roaring? You’re not even listening, are you?
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Performance artist; hustler
CLAIM TO FAME: Being famous
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: New York
Be it ballet, traditional hula, or whoring, Raven O is a man of many talents. A one-time member of the pliable Cirque du Soleil, Raven O hit the streets of New York at age eighteen, a fresh-faced, Hawaiian Adonis, ready to conquer the world. About an hour or so later, Raven-O found himself addicted to crack and whoring himself, while go-go dancing at the now-defunct Limelight Club. In an interview with OutinJersey.net, Mr. O explains, “I began my career as a singer-actor-dancer and fell into whoring to pay for my drug habit,” but luckily for us, he adds, “where there is the elite, there are whores. Both worlds are one in the same. [sic] As I say in my show, everyone’s a whore one way or another.”
Proving his point, Raven O eventually hooked up with the likes of Keith Haring and Grace Jones, and joined that ethereal realm of the “artist” whose precise talents appear to lie primarily in their ability to consume vast quantities of cocaine, though who can forget Grace Jones’s stunning performance as “May Day” in the third-best James Bond 007 movie, A View to A Kill?
“It is a poor family that hath neither a whore nor a thief in it.”
—Proverb
Raven O’s prodigious talent, along with his remarkable networking skills, drew him out of New York’s druggy underbelly and put him on the path to regional stardom. Blessed with a beautiful voice and a willingness to showcase it while wearing devil horns and a cock ring, Raven O eventually wound up at the Box, a Lower East Side nightclub where confused frat boys go to be gay, but was once an interesting venue for performance art and celebrity sightings. There, he captivated audiences with provocative stage acts and an impressive boner. Talking to the NY Press, he elaborates:
When I was at The Box, we wanted to do a number to say “fuck you” to the press . . . to the Nirvana song “Rape Me.” When the curtain opened, my back was to the audience and I was completely naked. I decided to be completely erect, so when I turned around I was singing with a hard on. I’ve always been about going for it. Nothing’s off limits with me.
In 2010, Raven O’s one-man, off-Broadway production, Raven O: One Night with You, opened to critical acclaim, and then closed to critical acclaim. As of this writing, the artist is spending way too much time on Facebook: “I realize I don’t have a ‘job,’” writes Mr. O in a recent Facebook post, but he’s writing from Cannes, Ibiza, and London, and it’s hard to sympathize with that kind of frictional unemployment. Raven O nevertheless remains an electrifying performer and an accomplished vocalist, although I might add that it’s not really that daring to expose yourself if you are possessed of an outsized penis. Where is the fear?
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Merry Prankster; thief; oral historian
CLAIM TO FAME: Inspiration to the Beats
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Pretty much anywhere “On the Road”; Mexico
If you could bottle up all the outrageous plaudits, moony remembrances, and bong-loaded questions surrounding the life and times and death and drugs of Neal Cassady, you would have a bottle filled with a pestilent clash of truth and myth, and it would most likely taste like gnatty communion wine and camphor. Let’s drink it!
That’s the kind of initiative a guy like Neal really would have appreciated—and the reason why nobody ever had a clue as to what in the smash he might be going on about. But it doesn’t matter. Neal Cassady was fast, beautiful, and real, and you were lucky enough just to have him gust through your groovy transom. Cassady was the inspiration for countless depictions of hipster-speak, gigolo swagger, blasted genius, and what Kerouac called the “energy of a new kind of American saint.” In fact, for the uninitiated, the character of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic, On the Road (still the standard-bearer of puff-puff-give hipster quips and New Age dharmic ooga-booga) was based entirely on Neal Cassady.
Born in 1926 in Salt Lake City, after Cassady’s mother died when he was only ten he was left with an alcoholic father, who eventually zigzagged the family across America to Denver, where Neal began a life of car thefts and prostitution in earnest. According to some, Cassady just couldn’t get enough sex, and the money was a nice perk for satisfying his satyriasis. Others attribute Neal’s flesh-life to his living purely “in the moment,” attracted to the basic urges of human functioning, led by what Kerouac dubbed his “enormous dangle.” Allen Ginsberg, completely and desperately smitten (Ginsberg and Cassady would remain occasional lovers for twenty years) wrote in his poem “Many Loves” that Cassady, “brought me to my knees/and taught me the love of his cock and the secrets of his mind.”
Neal was one of those visionaries who not only had a huge dong, but a huge intellect, as well. Even when money was not in short supply, Cassady would prostitute himself for “knowledge” and tutoring, writing once to Ginsberg that he slept with the poet only “as a compansation [sic] to you for all you were giving me,” which caused Ginsberg to call Cassady a “dirty, double-crossing, faithless bitch.” Lesson: You can take the man out of the dirty truck stop, but you can’t take the dirty truck stop out of the man.
Dad was right when he chastised, “Moderation in all things.” Too much of a good thing—including solo sex play—can turn deadly. Consider the story of Rev. Gary Aldridge, pastor of Montgomery, Alabama’s Thorington Road Baptist Church and one of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s bosom buddies. The holy man met a particularly diabolical end when, in 2007, police discovered his body “clothed in a diving wet suit, a face mask . . . a second rubberized suit with suspenders, rubberized male underwear. . . . There are numerous straps and cords restraining the decedent. . . . The hands are bound behind the back. The feet are tied to the hands. . . . There is a dildo in the anus covered with a condom.
Call me crazy, but wearing two wetsuits smacks of overkill.
Jack Kerouac would state that, for Neal, “sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life.” Indeed, Neal’s sexual appetite was so gargantuan that he was often forced (perhaps “forced” isn’t exactly the right word) to masturbate six or more times a day, in addition to his normal sex load. Neal Cassady was many things to many people. In “Howl,” Ginsberg writes of Cassady that he is the
secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too.
Today, Neal is still celebrated, venerated, and occasionally reviled as a crank and a druggie loser, but “The Holy Goof” serves as a veritable avatar for an entire generation of dispossessed Americans. Neal Cassady seemed to have done it all, and at the age of forty-two, he lay down on some train tracks outside of San Miguel de Allende and died, finally and completely beat.
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Forensic pathologist; child health researcher
CLAIM TO FAME: Blogstitute
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: London
For years the question remained: Who is this mysterious “Belle de Jour,” and does she take Diner’s Club? For the better part of the 2000s, the blogosphere was abuzz with chatter about Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl. The book is a wildly popular account of a hardworking British university graduate who ditches the daily grind for a life of gaping and rimming and occasionally beating the shit out of people for the low, low price of $400 (and sometimes maybe a little more) per hour. More bestselling books were to follow, including The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, and The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl, and each was adapted into a hit TV series. But who was this duplicitous demimondaine?
In 2009, Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a forensic pathologist, child health researcher, and Yank no less, outed herself as the Belle de Jour. After years of speculation and threats from an ex-boyfriend, Dr. Magnanti succumbed to pressure and revealed that for fourteen months during her postgraduate studies at the University of Sheffield, she’d arched it for an escort service in order to pay for her studies, and she admitted to being the author of the bawdy blog. After an interview with the Sunday Times in which Magnanti revealed her true identity, she posted on the Belle de Jour blog:
It feels so much better on this side. Not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about. To be able to defend what my experience of sex work is like to all the skeptics and doubters. Anonymity had a purpose then—it will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on.
We all owe Dr. Magnanti, the Belle de Jour, an enormous debt of gratitude. Since revealing her identity, she remains active in research medicine, while continuing to address important issues relevant to the sex-trade industry. Through her blog and subsequent writings, she has been instrumental in dispelling puritanical myths about sex and pornography, and she has lobbied for sex education and the unbiased study of sexuality through science.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Actress
CLAIM TO FAME: Married Tarzan, died with her head in a toilet
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Mexico, Hollywood
Lupe Vélez is a difficult woman to get a grip on. Christened María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, sometime around 1908, her father was a strict military man who died when Lupe was in her early teens, while her mother appears to have been an opera singer, a prostitute, or both. Vélez was a difficult, rambunctious child, and for a time her parents sent her off to a convent school in Texas, which they expected would force her to reform. Lupe, however, would have none of it. According to Kenneth Anger’s sensational Hollywood Babylon, Lupe was a sex leviathan: “Whenever I see a man,” says Vélez, “there is something in here which must make me winkle my eyes at him…. When I cannot flirt with some mens, I get a fever.” You wonder what exactly Lupe meant by “winkle my eyes,” but you get the impression her temperature ran a pretty consistent 98.6°F.
After Lupe’s father died, young Lupe’s mother suggested her daughter carry on the family tradition. In his autobiography Moving Pictures, the Academy Award–winning screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg writes,
Lupe’s mother had been a walker of the streets. . . . Lupe herself had made her theatrical debut in the raunchy burlesque houses of the city. Stagedoor Juanitos panted for her favors and Mama Velez would sell her for the evening to the highest bidder. Her price soared to thousands of pesos.
Moreover, Anger, in Hollywood Babylon, calls Vélez, “the gyrating cunt-flashing Hollywood party girl.” Yeowch! Vélez was also known as “The Mexican Spitfire” and remembered as a pioneer who brought Latinos to the silver screen, advanced the feminist cause, and boned just about everyone in Hollywood. Gary Cooper? Check. In Lupe Velez and Her Lovers, author Floyd Conner quotes Vélez as saying “[Cooper] has the biggest organ in Hollywood but not the ass to push it in well.”). Errol Flynn? Check. Johnny Weissmuller, aka Tarzan the Ape Man? Check. And the list goes on.
Vélez’s first screen appearances were bit parts in Hal Roach comedies, but soon she found her niche onscreen as the recurring Mexican Spitfire; her character, like she herself, was vulgar, voluptuous, and occasionally violent. Of course, her act provided endless entertainment for those of the quasi-racist, moviegoing public who (like now) found the shortcomings and malapropisms of a vixen speaking English as a second language rather humorous. But offscreen, Lupe Vélez’s life was one of torment. In 1944, Spitfire found herself pregnant with the child of a B-list actor who rejected the idea of marriage. Devastated, Lupe made up her mind to kill herself. She arranged flowers and scented candles, and she went to get her hair and nails done—an elegant exit for an eccentric young woman. She took a lethal dose of barbiturates and wished her life away.
Well, wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills up first, say the experts. Here’s the description from Hollywood Babylon that describes what happens when you eat too many enchiladas then try to kill yourself:
The bed was empty. The aroma of scented candles, the fragrance of tuberoses almost, but not quite masked a stench recalling that left by Skid-Row derelicts. Juanita traced the vomit trail from the bed, following the spotty track over to the orchid-tiled bathroom. There she found her mistress, Senorita Velez, head jammed down in the toilet bowl, drowned.
To paraphrase the Scottish poet, Robert Burns, “The best-laid schemes of mice and men [also starlets]/ Often go awry, / And leave us nought but grief and pain, / For promis’d joy!” That’s true shit.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Socialite
CLAIM TO FAME: Muse to the likes of Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, among others
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Worldwide, indeed
Truman Capote once fawned, “If [Denham] Fouts had slept with Hitler, as Hitler wished, he could have saved the world from the Second World War.” Now that’s high praise, even if it does come from the author of In Cold Blood during his quasi-coma-toasted-on-codeine phase. Unfortunately, there’s no documented proof that the Führer made a play for Denham’s drawers, but nobody pursued good gossip like Capote.
Denham Fouts was born. From there, the details get murky. One story asserts that at age sixteen he was liberated from behind the counter of his father’s Jacksonville, Florida, bakery and shuffled off to Berlin by a German baron, perfume magnate, and cruller aficionado. After a Christ-like ellipsis in the early years of Mr. Fouts’s biography, he emerges more or less fully grown in the 1920s. At this point we find him shagging a Greek shipping tycoon, robbing him, landing in jail, and then being rescued from the pokey by Evan Morgan, aka Lord Tredegar, a Welsh poet who took a shine to Fouts. And, even though Lord Tredegar provided more than enough cold hard cash for the young gigolo (not to mention legendary parties that included, among other bewildering creatures: a baboon, Aleister Crowley, a bear, H. G. Wells, and a parrot trained to fly out of the nobleman’s britches), Fouts soon ditched the penny-ante entertainments of British royalty for another, decidedly more influential, Greek luminary, the future king, Prince Paul. With World War II looming and Prince Paul presumably vexed about the Greek Orthodox Church’s stance on homosexuality, Fouts headed back across the pond for an American tour. He came armed with Picasso’s Girl Reading under his arm and “severance pay” from one Peter Watson, a satisfied customer and margarine mogul.
The word tapette in French typically refers to a fly-swatter. However, in colloquial usage, tapette is often used to refer to a person who is flamboyant, in particular, a homosexual male who publicizes his sexual orientation ostentatiously, perhaps even taking the metaphor to its inevitable conclusion: swatting meddlesome squares who insist on buzzing around asking for fashion tips, a squirt of Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male, and/or wine recommendations (or garden-variety assholes that perpetuate gay stereotypes about fashion, cologne, and/or wine recommendations).
Stateside, Fouts came face-to-face—and to other, less conventional geometries—with the A-list of American literati: Gore Vidal, W. Somerset Maugham, Truman Capote, and Paul Bowles, among other luminaries. In his role as artistic muse, Fouts again played the part to perfection, regaling his audiences with ribald tales from his past and looking at them with “eyes set on different levels, as in a Picasso painting” or like “Dorian Gray emerging from the tomb” in the words of part-time lover and British novelist Christopher Isherwood, who went on to add that Fouts was “the most expensive male prostitute in the world,” and “the last of the professional tapettes.” Fouts even found time to study medicine at UCLA for a brief period, but he eventually tired of America and travelled to Paris, where he could be found shooting flaming arrows out of his apartment window. He was a skilled archer, and it is always advantageous for a man of the evening to have a side gig if he’s going to walk the Champs-Élysées.
Isherwood, Capote, Vidal, Bowles, and others lionized Fouts as a lover and an Adonis, but his early thirties were marked by drug abuse and more sinister nighttime adventures. Illustrator and painter Bernard Perlin remembers Fouts lying in an opiate-induced stupor, “in bed like a corpse, sheet to his chin, a cigarette between his lips turning to ash. His lover would remove the cigarette just before it burned his lips. At night Fouts took out his cigar box of drugs, injected himself and . . . came to sparkling life for the evening.” In 1948, after years of hard living, Fouts expired in Rome of congenital heart failure, a condition that was surely exacerbated by ingesting enough opium along the way to dope up most of Western Europe. A sour endnote for a savory stud: Denham Fouts lives brilliantly in the great literature of his time, while his real life was a fog of sex, drugs, and a little archery.
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Gas station attendant; prostitution ring leader
CLAIM TO FAME: Lover of Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, among others
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Hollywood
If you pictured the celebrated actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, as a bunch of randy whoremongers, you’d be right. The question is: Who had the talent, the moves, and the mojo to take on Hollywood’s most famous actor/fornicators? The answer: World War II Marine GI, bartender, gas station attendant, and whore to the stars Scotty Bowers.
Scotty Bowers was born and raised on his family’s farm in Illinois. He moved to Chicago, where he made a modest living turning tricks, until duty called and the young Bowers shipped off to Iwo Jima as a paratrooper. By this time he was a hardened, streetwise, battle-tested kid, but there was still nothing to suggest that Scotty would someday run a prostitution ring that catered to the Tinseltown elite out of a Richfield gas station at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Van Ness, but there rarely is. In the end, kids just grow up to be themselves.
After the war, Scotty went to California, Hollywood specifically, where he found work at the service station and ran a brisk side business setting up newly returned GIs with older men. Word of this new enterprise quickly spread throughout the city, where Bowers forged a “friendship” with heartthrob Tyrone Power and a host of other stars, eventually morphing into the most celebrated pimp/prostitute in a town pulsing with pimp/prostitutes. Scotty’s clients and sexual partners allegedly incorporated much of the A list, including: Edith Piaf, Spencer Tracy, Vivien Leigh, Cary Grant, Edward VIII, Tennessee Williams, Charles Laughton, Katharine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Errol Flynn, Noël Coward, Mae West, James Dean, Rock Hudson, and J. Edgar Hoover, and that’s just the appeteaser.
In his tell-all book, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, Bowers’ gives a firsthand, warts-and-all account of screen idol screwballs and their sordid sex lives. On Katharine Hepburn, he noted that “she had skin like a dead crocodile,” and as for James Dean, he was “a fucking little prick.” Ouch. Such is the danger of pissing off your prostitute.
Speaking of crocodiles, sex, and Katharine Hepburn, it’s probably a good idea to turn to birth control for a moment. We’ve all had scares with torn Trojans, diced diaphragms, and misplayed pull-and-prays, but in ancient Egypt, the science of birth control was still stuck in the Dark Ages, and those hadn’t even happened yet. If you were a female prostitute (or anybody trying not to get pregnant) in Ancient Egypt, the preferred method of contraception was to insert crocodile excrement into your vagina. Nope. That’s it. You just went and found an alligator, encouraged it to poop in your hand, and then sought out a private place to make the necessary application. I’m all for safe sex, but I think if it were up to me, I’d just take my chances with the lunar cycle.
Before gay liberation, before this new wave of STDs started withering our genitals and before the paparazzi lurked around every corner ready to Tweet the grade of gasoline you chose, if you wanted sex and you wanted discretion, you found yourself low on fuel near the Richfield station. Now pushing ninety, Scotty still lives in Los Angeles with his wife, who must be frustrated knowing that no matter what, the best-case scenario is that she’s got the second-best stories at the party.
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Writer; raconteur
CLAIM TO FAME: “The Naked Civil Servant”
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Old Compton Street, London
Before we get rolling, I’d like to introduce you to one of the best little monologues on masturbation ever.
As soon as I was old enough to wash myself, I had begun the habit of staying in the bath until my body passed from lobster-pink to scum-gray. While lying in one of these semi-submerged trances, in a boarding house in Queen’s Gate to which my parents moved temporarily, I discovered the only fact of life that I have ever fully understood. Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who, before anything has reared its ugly head, have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies. . . . Vice is its own reward.
The source of the passage is the controversial, bestselling memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, by English eccentric and former rent-boy, Quentin Crisp. But let’s be clear about this; Quentin Crisp was more than an intellectual pioneer in the philosophy of self-flagellation. The man was as comfortable with the trick-towel as he was with the spankerchief.
Born Denis Pratt in 1908 to “middle-class, middle-brow, middling” parents in Sutton, Surrey, our young hero was sent to school, or what he described as “a cross between a monastery and a prison” in Derbyshire where he was understandably bullied for cross-dressing. Pratt soon left school and settled in London, where he got rid of his Victorian birthright and adopted the truly fabulous sobriquet, “Quentin Crisp.”
An easily recognizable figure in London’s queer scene, Crisp would often find himself beat up, ridiculed, reviled, and ravaged—and that was on the slow nights. However, some people can’t be faded—not at their core—and that was Quentin. The Naked Civil Servant was published in 1968, and in addition to ruminations about how he might do in his enemies, he also includes stories about chicken hawking, nude modeling, book designing, and good old-fashioned English manners.
One particularly charming yarn involves Crisp’s adventures during the London Blitz of 1941. On one notable night during the German attack, he sprang into action for God, for country, and for men in uniform everywhere. He hurriedly applied the last of his makeup, left his flat, bought five pounds of henna, and then sashayed about the bombed-out streets of London in the dark, picking up American G.I.s. While never investigated for war profiteering, the fact that the self-proclaimed “Stately Homo of England” went out trolling for doggers and ducats during a Luftwaffe strafing is enough for us to let it slide. As you might imagine, however, the good citizens of Great Britain were scandalized by his behavior, but then everything from flatulence to wet cement seems to scandalize the average Brit.
By the time Crisp made his move to New York in 1981, most of his tranny antics seemed pretty ho-hum, but his quill, scroll, and most of all his voice really made the old rent-boy resonate here in the Colonies. A champion for gay rights, a unique presence in a knee-jerk, fall-into-rank world, and a sure bet for a sound-bite until his death in 1999 at the age of ninety, Quentin Crisp was a gentleman, a scholar, and a sexpot for the ages.
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Master’s candidate at Moscow State; Bolshoi ballerina
CLAIM TO FAME: Devotchka
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Moscow
With surprising candor for a Soviet, Yuri Brokhin explored the dark underbelly of sex and crime in Moscow in his 1975 exposé, Hustling on Gorky Street. During the Cold War paranoia many Americans thought all Russians were busily making uranium isotopes in their bathtubs as part of a plan to blow us back to the Stone Age. We imagined that any Soviet not so engaged would be carted off by the KGB and relieved of his eyelids.
According to Brokhin, however, the Soviets were more like us than we thought; murders, the mafia, drugs, prostitution, and corruption were all rampant for the Commies, too. If we had known, we could have been singing a Cold War “Cumbayá,” but we didn’t. It would take another decade and a half before the Iron Curtain rose dramatically, and a parade of Frederick’s of Hollywood models would march toward Moscow like lemmings in lingerie.
“He that has neither fools, whores nor beggars among his kindred, is the son of a thunder-gust.”
—Benjamin Franklin, American statesman, Founding Father
Hustling on Gorky Street provides a rogues gallery of floozies, but Regina Savitskaya stands out from all the rest. She was a Bolshoi-trained ballerina who earned a master’s degree from Moscow State University and a fat roll of rubles from her real calling, interdevochka, or “international girl,” a fancy term for a prostitute who can demand the high hard currency. Regina got around, but she always came back to her old haunt at the ballet. She tells Brokhin:
In the evenings, I worked the Bolshoi Theatre. My favourite ballet was Swan Lake: four intermissions to spend time working the crowd in the lobby…. I’ve been screwed by such famous pricks as John Steinbeck, Yevgeny Yevtushenko . . .[and] clergy from the Vatican.
One must obviously ponder which (if not all) definitions of the noun “prick” Ms. Savitskaya intends to convey here, but Regina goes on to explain how the rigid Soviet-bloc training she received on the way to earning her master’s degree gave her an advantage over the ogling johns and Steinbecks lurking under the ominous shadows of Moscow’s onion domes:
Later in the day, I’d stand on Kutuzov Prospekt, where the foreign residents live, and pretend to hail cabs, keeping an eye open for Mercedes Benzes or Cadillacs, wearing my best Simone-de-Beauvoir expression. (My study of existential philosophy came in handy for hooking foreign suckers that starved for an intellectual cunt.)
That the Soviets possessed an arsenal of nuclear weapons aimed at our armpit, and they had a hot-to-trot devotchka with her existential ass aimed at some of our most important novelists failed to result in a global apocalypse, and for that we’re lucky. It would have been a twentieth-century Trojan War, with Regina of Moscow replacing Helen of Troy in the role of beautiful woman whose charms threaten to tear the world asunder. And instead of a Trojan horse, it’s a big Soviet bear stuffed with hookers, nuclear bombs, and Yakov Smirnov. The Americans are aware of the caveat, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” although the slightly lesser known adage, “Beware of Soviets gifting bears” hasn’t made the rounds. Just like that, the Bolshoi bombshell could have become a destroyer of worlds.
These days, Regina Savitskaya manages an international road transportation and shipping company out of the Czech Republic. I’m not sure if that’s the same Regina Savitskaya we’ve been discussing here, so if it is, nice work. Hell, even if it’s not, nice work—not everybody can perpetrate upper management.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Tap dance champion
CLAIM TO FAME: Once known as NYC’s “#1 Escort”
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: New York
When you’re on the cover of New York magazine and printed over your picture is the headline “N.Y.’s #1 Escort,” well now, that’s just making momma proud. Although, according to her tell-some memoir, The Price: My Rise and Fall as Natalia, New York’s #1 Escort, winning the 1996 Canadian Junior National Tap Dancing Championships may have been a greater source of pride for Natalie’s mother. After her daughter’s terpsichorean triumph, Natalie’s mother beamed, “Honey, I am so proud of you,” to which Natalie later responded, “I wish I could have bottled up that moment and put it under my pillow.”
Natalia, at her swankiest charged $2,000 per hour. Wait a sec, you say. $2,000 per hour?! Well, according to TheEroticReview.com, Natalia achieved a level of prostitutional perfection bordering on apotheosis. The website encourages clients to “rate,” on a scale of 1–10, his or her experiences with various sex workers about town. To receive a rating of “10” is rare, something akin to a “10” on the uneven bars at the Olympics. During one incandescent streak in 2004, however, consummately satisfied clients awarded Natalia seventeen straight 10s, a “once-in-a-lifetime” distinction. It defies logic that one girl could be so preternaturally gifted in her tap shoes and out of her knickers, but that’s Natalia.
Before she fell under the spell of “The King of All Pimps,” Jason Itzler, and his torrid team at NY Confidential, she found work bartending, acting off-Broadway, and “crawling across the floor like a horny hyena” while posing for photographs taken by legendary bon vivant, Peter Beard. It was Beard who introduced Natalie to Itzler, and the next thing she knew, she had transformed into “Natalia” and even better, Jason’s “bottom-bitch,” which, in escort jargon, counterintuitively refers to the “top draw.”
It was all fun and games and money and Manolos until somebody—Itzler mostly—fell victim to harem hubris and the whole house of cads came tumbling down. Among the throngs of hedge-fund managers, NFL quarterbacks, rock stars, and politicos turnstiling in and out of Natalia’s lair, there were also large, conspicuous Con Edison vans outside NY Confidential headquarters in Tribeca, the place she and Itzler called home. The heat was on. Cops began to show up daily to root around, gawk, and pass judgment before eventually taking their leave. Any reasonably alert working girl would have taken this action as a sign to put the brakes on. But by this time, egad, Natalia was so coke-addled, paranoid, and devoid of hope, she “slumped down on the floor of Macy’s and burst into tears.” Sure enough, NY Confidential headquarters was raided, with cops taking computers, credit card receipts—even the goddamned fog machine! Naturally, Natalia and many other members of the old Tribeca gang were arrested for prostitution, money laundering, and a host of other no-nos. Natalia pleaded guilty to attempted money laundering in 2010 and now lives in Montreal, where she was offered a much more lurid and disturbing role than any she had played before either on stage or in the bedroom: the lead in a play by Ayn Rand.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Rapper/singer
CLAIM TO FAME: “Brought down” former New York governor Eliot Spitzer
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: NYC
What must it be like when you’re an aspiring pop singer from Jersey; Dad is mad ’cause you so wrecked the Porsche and you’ve got to get out of town; you’ve been abandoned by your boyfriend and you’re all alone on 5th Avenue with nothing but your wits and a line of credit? It’s like being Ashley Dupré, except that you probably don’t have a job servicing a man resembling the love child of Frankenstein’s monster and Yoda who just happens to be Eliot Spitzer, governor of the great state of New York. Clearly, Ms. Dupré worked hard for the money, too. Her court testimony reveals Governor Spitzer was almost as much of a pain in the ass in the bedroom as he was in his job at CNN: refusing to wear condoms and refusing to shut up, respectively.
Just when Dupré was building up a nice little grub-stake, making some strong sales and emerging on New York’s “scene,” along comes Spitzer, or Client #9, and the ensuing scandal/media frenzy. Was all that notoriety a good thing or a bad thing for Ashley’s career? If you’re familiar with Ms. Dupré’s musical oeuvre, you know why even the hype surrounding the little ménage with Governor Spitzer didn’t move her Pussycat Dolls–influenced jams up the download charts more than a trifle. Her beats are hackneyed and Ms. Dupré’s lyrics, if not an overt nod to Ezra Pound’s fascist-era doggerel, seem inspired by a similar brand of delusion.
So, what has all the fuss come to? There’s Spitzer droning on CNN, and there’s Ashley making the rounds of the reality TV show circuit, most recently on VH1’s Famous Food. Also, trading the upscale ho stroll for a quill and scroll, Ashley now serves as the dating and sex columnist for the New York Post. Her advice column, “Ask Ashley,” offers solutions to probing existential questions:
Q: My boyfriend insists on showering immediately after sex. What’s a girl gotta do to get some cuddle action?
Ashley: I get the whole needing-to-shower-off-all-the-gooeyness factor (especially if you use lube), but physical touch plays a huge part in any relationship—most importantly after intercourse. . . . What about hopping in before him? If he’s so particular about being clean, I bet he’d want you to be, too. Then, let him rinse off after you. This way, you can jump back into bed naked and prepare to lure him back into your clean arms.
Nuh-uh. The boyfriend insists on showering after sex because he’s got to get back to the office, and he doesn’t want to reek of Dream Angels, that eau de by-the-hour Victoria Secret fragrance so popular among call girls, and a veritable smoking gun of poor decision making and adultery. This is just the kind of advice column grandstanding that brought Dear Abby down. That’s not entirely true. Alzheimer’s, then death, brought Dear Abby down, but the sentiment remains.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Masseur
CLAIM TO FAME: Blowing the whistle (among other things) on evangelical bowel movement, Ted Haggard
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Denver
On Ted Haggard’s website the disgraced minister invokes the words of Genesis 50:20 where Joseph speaks to his brothers after they sell him into slavery saying, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” The passage, claims Haggard, has “become a source of life to us,” “us” being Haggard and his long-suffering wife. Welcome to the world of people who are plum out of their goddamned minds!
Lucky for us, through all the meth, masturbation, and mendacity, one person emerges from the Ted Haggard sex scandal as a voice of quasisanity: Mike Jones, masseur, muckraker, and drug-dealing prostitute.
In 2006, Mike went on a Denver radio show and “outed” reverend Haggard, a vocal opponent of homosexuality who vigorously supported Colorado Amendment 43, which bans same-sex marriage in the state. Hey, Mike! You can’t go around outing people for being meth-snorting, closeted homosexuals with a thing for Stars and Stripes–patterned he-thongs! I understand your impulse, but Ted Haggard wasn’t just anybody: He had a standing meeting with George W. Bush on Monday mornings to talk about the evangelical movement and what to do about evil gay devils.
Haggard’s church, the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, was thriving, and Ted held sway over legions as president of the 30 million–strong National Association of Evangelicals. Well, if you’re determined to spread hate, bigotry, and intolerance under the guise of, well, anything, I think we can all agree you’ve got a little media scrutiny coming to you.
“Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.”
—W. H. Auden, American poet
Jones outed Haggard at a time of great political importance. “I took the vibrator and greased it up while he put some lube inside his rectum,” reveals Jones in his tell-all, I Had to Say Something: The Art of Ted Haggard’s Fall. How is that grotesque image of Haggard even remotely related to political importance, you ask? Well, while Haggard was dispatching Astroglide into his party portal, Colorado was primed to vote on Amendment 43, with Haggard serving as one of the most influential and fervent supporters of the same-sex marriage ban.
Jones saw through the lube and he felt it was his civic duty to expose Haggard, whose annoying habit of leaving globs of meth under his own nose while roaring, “Jack me off, now!” had become intolerable. Jones elaborates on why he chose to reveal the unctuous underbelly of one of America’s most influential men:
People forget why I exposed him. . . . Not because he was ranting about gays, but because he was a hypocrite . . . and still enjoy[s] the benefits of marriage. What a lucky man. Should gays be so lucky to marry the one they love and be totally devoted.
When the scandal broke, columnist and sex-advice sage Dan Savage hailed Mike Jones as a “Gay American Hero” and Mike was instantly revered throughout the community. No, not just the “gay” community, but also the community of people who are not stark raving mad, right-wing “fundamentalist charismatics.” The ultimate irony, and perhaps the best argument there is that God really doesn’t exist, is that Haggard has established another wildly successful church and made tons of money appearing on Celebrity Wife Swap, while our hero Mike Jones has been reduced to putting on eBay the massage table he used to pleasure Haggard.
Also, Amendment 43 passed with 53 percent of the vote. Now there’s something truly scandalous.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Philosopher; writer
CLAIM TO FAME: Epicurean hardbody; Mademoiselle Libertine
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Paris
Like so many of the French, Ann “Ninon” de L’Enclos’s main occupation was to be artsy. Well, unless you were Marcel Marceau or Cardinal Richelieu or were lucky enough to have been born wealthy, you needed a second line of work so you could eat fromage and buy unfiltered cigarettes. For some the option was taking to the bimbo banks of the Seine in Paris, vying for spots near the Pont Neuf with the other hookers until you found Prince Charming, or if you were not lucky, until the riled-up Reformation gestapo threw you in a gutter. Anne de L’Enclos was one of the fortunate few who had relatively smooth sailing in her ascent to the heady heights of harlotry.
Anne de L’Enclos, born in Paris in 1620, came into a family divided. Her father was a broke nobleman, a neo-Epicurean, lute-playing, early hippie who encouraged “Ninon,” as he called her, to pursue an even more dubious career than his own. This fatherly advice didn’t jibe well with Ninon’s mother, a devout Catholic and a yawn who was trying mightily to bring up her daughter according to the austere and arbitrary moral codes of the Counter-Reformation. Fortunately for history, Ninon listened to her father. She mastered the lute and embraced wholeheartedly the four tenets of Epicureanism:
That pleasure which produces no pain is to be embraced.
That pain which produces no pleasure is to be avoided.
That pleasure is to be avoided which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain.
That pain is to be endured which averts a greater pain, or secures a greater pleasure.
Translation: Let’s slip into something naughty.
As luck would have it Ninon’s beloved father had to hightail it after getting his ass handed to him in a duel. Ninon was left to fend for herself in a convent, from which she escaped after a year for fear she was losing out on the party. But let us be clear about this, Ninon was not just a ditzy party chick; she was Mensa material and could outwit and out-culture you to the point of embarrassment, or orgasm. She was also fluent in half a dozen languages, a skilled musician, and particularly taken with the progressive philosophy of that old moth in the moral molasses, Montaigne.
During her reign in Paris, she was known as “Mademoiselle Libertine,” open and willing to do anything that bumped up hard against the sexual mores of the day, while writing some of the most compelling philosophical tracts of the era. She befriended the dramatists Molière and Racine, and her bedroom talents were reserved for “men of rank and station or of high talents.” But it wasn’t a trick pelvis or some honeysuckle-scented homemade lubricant that kept the men coming back to Ninon. It was her complete familiarity with the best techniques for bursting every sinful cyst of desire, for anticipating every nascent want—conscious or unconscious—that festers in a red-blooded man.
In a letter to one of her paramours, a dense Marquis, Ninon is forced to elaborate because it just isn’t sinking in with this titled buttplug. She writes:
It is women who have taken upon themselves to dissipate these mortal languors by the vivacious gayety they inject into their society, by the charms they know so well how to lavish where they will prove effectual. A reckless joy, an agreeable delirium, a delicious intoxication, are alone capable of awakening your attention, and making you understand that you are really happy; for, Marquis, there is a vast difference between merely enjoying happiness and relishing the sensation of enjoying it. The possession of necessary things does not make a man comfortable; it is the superfluous which makes him rich, and which makes him feel that he is rich.
The “superfluous” could be anything from like a hand job to a jet ski, in case you’re wondering.
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Socialite; queen
CLAIM TO FAME: Hanging Gardens of Babylon honoree; pioneer in the use of eunuchs
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Assyria
Most of what we know about Queen Semiramis is from a Hellenic writer named Ctesias. Ctesias is famous for writing a bunch of semi-plausible “histories,” one of which is called the Assyriaká, which recounts the tale of Queen Semiramis, an ample hussy who married King Ninus, the founder of Ninevah.
Ctesias tells us that Semiramis was born in a city called Ascalon, next to a big lake full of fish. One of these fish had the head of a woman, so she was very much the big deal around town. Her name was Derceto, and she was a ghetto mermaid who wound up pissing off Aphrodite. The Goddess uses her mysterious powers to help Derceto jump the bones of a Syrian peasant, thereby causing the young woman to turn up pregnant, shamed, and pissed. Derceto kills the baby daddy, and she leaves the newborn Semiramis out on some rocks to die. Derceto then jumps into the sea. But a bevy of public-spirited doves “nurtured the child in an incredible and miraculous manner,” and thus kept Semiramis alive.
All right, meat-crease, our more discriminating readers might say, you’ve obviously put this Shama-semi-rami-dingdong piece in the wrong section. What kind of historical document has part-fish sluts and babies fed by doves and then all-of-a-sudden Aphrodite shows up? Please. This account doesn’t reflect the airtight logic of the Bible in which Men are Men, Women are Women, and in Mark 5:10, pigs turn into demons. Okay, two out of three ain’t bad.
Let’s try another story. This one is recounted by an anonymous eleventh-century writer in Harriet Brien’s Queen Emma and the Vikings: Power, Love, and Greed in Eleventh-Century England. In this iteration, we learn of a paradoxical Semiramis, a call girl who is so picky that she only goes for gods and planets (if you’re Roman), but who will endure the indignity of her main john, Zeus (Jupiter), insisting that he morph into a bull for their hourly sessions. No matter. Semiramis took sex columnist and activist Dan Savage’s advice to be “Good, Giving, and Game” (GGG) to new heights, or depths—it’s hard to decide which. Here’s our Norman scribe:
What prostitute in the whole world could have been more debased? His dewlaps make her purple robes seem worthless, in the green grass Semiramis learns to low, under a young moon [she] delights[in] the bull’s mounting.
First of all, it’s great that Zeus has dewlaps. Secondly, don’t you get the impression the writer is maybe just a bit jealous? I mean, it’s Zeus, for crying out loud. And the bull thing? Well, it’s like my dad always yells, “Ah, just eat it! It all goes down the same hole anyway.” I never knew what that meant, and like Semiramis, the beasty-prosty from Babylon, Mt. Olympus, Cleveland—wherever—her meaning and cryptic origins are ripe for endless speculation.
For instance, The Assyriaká may have Semiramis confused with a queen called Shamuramat who lived around 800 B.C. How this mix-up might have occurred, we have no idea. Okay, I have no idea. Does it matter? The point is that in the always-entertaining clash that occurs when East meets West, things get lost in translation. For some, Semiramis remains a sacred prostitute goddess, for others, a bull-banging creep; and still for others, she’s the inspiration for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Dante, in Canto V of Inferno describes her as an
Empress of many tongues [sweet]. With the vice and luxury she was so broken, that she made lust and law alike in her decree, to take away the blame she had incurred. She is Semiramis, of whom we read that she succeeded Ninus, and was his spouse. She held the land which the Soldan rules. The other is she who slew herself in love, and broke faith to the ashes of Sichaeus.
Sichaeus? Soldan? Ninus? Who are these people? Dante is not the only one confused by this tale. Egyptians worshipped Semiramis as Isis, Babylonians called her Ishtar, the Israelites called her Ashtoreth, she hooked as Isi in India, and the list goes on. Perhaps we should just pick one myth and stick with it.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Slam poet
CLAIM TO FAME: Founder of Hook magazine, a publication for male sex workers
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: New York City
It’s true that for some of us, slam poetry remains an enigma, if not the arts and entertainment equivalent of mouth herpes. Why are these poets so peripatetic on the stage? And have you ever seen so many white people with dreadlocks? If you’re going to rap, let us hear some music. And stop making hand gestures that mimic shooting a gun while spouting what you hope will pass for slant rhymes about your devastating breakup sophomore year at Amherst—the disconnect is too great. No one is moved.
On the other hand job, if you get a poet up on the mic who has actually endured some real-world experiences, the poetry slam can take on a decidedly different timbre. Hawk Kincaid is this kind of poet. Born in Illinois, Hawk was a chubby, red-headed kid, who, in an interview with author and activist David Henry Sterry, cops to “terrible memories of getting hard-ons in church.” So I guess it’s not just the priests.
Now, what “made” Hawk a prostitute isn’t a particularly unusual or compelling story. What is compelling is Hawk’s contribution to the improvement of sex worker culture, through Hook, an e-zine for and about the male sex trade (www.hookonline.org), and his slam poetry performances, which are not riddled with the usual doggerel about thug life at Choate. Hawk has played the game and he knows it well. In fact, Hawk is one of those rent-boys who managed to get a grip on that ever-dangling carrot of the business world—the niche market. His milieu was known as B&E, and involves being paid to break in to a paying customer’s home, tie him up, then sex the nonsense out of him. Hawk recounts his ass antics with clinical detachment:
Bondage was definitely my thing. And spanking, paddling and abuse. I preferred bondage, though, because I could tie them up and leave for a bit, come back and be mean, hit them and then leave. Low maintenance.
Do not judge this man too harshly, however. Hawk maintains that all that beating the crap out of folks was just taking care of business. “My real identity is more cuddly and fuzzy. I am softer than I let on, especially when working,” he says. That’s refreshing. Indeed, we can see Hawk’s tender side in his verse. One needs only to peruse Kincaid’s ode to ass equations, “Anal Geometry,” which essentially articulates the prostipoet’s wish to give nice people larger penises than scoundrels.
“The whore and gambler, by the state Licensed, build the nation’s fate.”
—William Blake, English poet, mystic
Using this logic, the nicest person in the world could sport a 75-foot-long penis. This sounds a bit unwieldy to me, but who are we to mine the mind of mathematics? Whether he’s breaking into your house to fuck you, or just stopping by to drop poetry and knowledge and maybe other things on that ass, Hawk Kincaid is a talented artist and a pioneer in bringing male sex work issues and information to the people who need it.