Sex Work

by Frédérique Delacoste

  These indoor prostitutes are on the rise. Captain Jerome Piazza of the Manhattan South Public Moral Division estimates that there are at least 10,000 inside pros’ in the city. Women Against Pornography contends that there are 25,000 prostitutes working inside and outside the city, over 9,500 of them on the West Side alone. (West Side Spirit, June 17, 1985.)

  To prepare for the United Nation’s Conference on Women, the Kenyan government put new benches in the parks, filled in the potholes and swept the prostitutes off the streets. (New York Times, 1985.)

  The original impulse behind this essay was to show how lesbians and prostitutes have always been connected, not just in the male imagination but in the actual histories of both. I hoped that by putting out the bits and pieces of this shared territory I would have some impact on the contemporary feminist position on prostitution as expressed by the feminist anti-pornography movement. But in doing my reading and listening for this work, a larger vision formed in me, the desire to give back to working women their own history, much as we have been trying to do in the grassroots lesbian and gay history projects around the country.

  Whores, like queers, are society’s dirty joke; to even suggest that they have a history, not as a map of pathology but as a record of a people, is to challenge sacrosanct boundaries. As I read of the complicated history of whores, I realized once again I was also reading women’s history with all its contradictions of oppression and resistance, of sisterhood and betrayal. In this work I will try to honor both histories — that of the woman whore and the woman queer. First my own starting point. In the bars of the late fifties and early sixties where I learned my lesbian ways, whores were part of our world. We sat on barstools next to each other, we partied together and we made love together. The vice squad, the forerunners of the Moral Division with whom Women Against Pornography have no qualms collaborating, controlled our world, and we knew clearly that there was little difference between whore and queer when a raid was on. This shared territory broke apart, at least for me, when I entered the world of lesbian feminism. Whores, and women who looked like whores, became the enemy or, at best, misguided oppressed women who needed our help. Some early conferences on radical feminism and prostitution were marked by the total absence of working women in any part of the proceedings. The prostitute was once again the other, much as she was earlier, in the feminist purity movements of the late nineteenth century.

  A much closer connection came home to me when I was reading through my mother’s legacy, her scribbled writings, and discovered that at different times in her life, my mother had turned tricks to pay her rent. I had known this all along in some other part of me, particularly when I had shared her bed in the Hotel Dixie in the heart of Forty-Second Street during one of her out of work periods, but I had never let the truth of my mother’s life sink in.

  Finally, I have recently entered the domain of public sex. I write sex stories for lesbian magazines, I pose for explicit photographs for lesbian photographers, I do readings of sexually graphic materials dressed in sexually revealing clothes, and I have taken money from women for sexual acts. I am, depending on who is the accuser, a pornographer, a queer and a whore. Thus, both for political and personal reasons, it became clear to me that this work had to be done.

  One of the oldest specific references that I found to the connection between lesbians and prostitutes was in the early pages of William W. Sanger’s History of Prostitution (1859). Similar to the process of reading early historical references to lesbians, one must pry women loose from the judgmental language in which they are embedded. Prostitution, he tells us, “stains the earliest mythological records.” (p. 2) He works his way through the Old Testament telling us that Tamar, the daughter of Judah, covered her face with her veil, the sign of a harlot. Many of the women “driven to the highways for refuge, lived in booths and tents, where they combined the trade of a peddler with the calling of a harlot.” (pp. 3-7) Two important themes are set out here, the wearing of clothes as both an announcement and an expression of stigma, and the issue of women’s work.

  It is in Sanger’s chapter on ancient Greece that we find the first concrete reference to lesbian history. Attached to the Athenian houses of prostitution, called dicteria, “were schools where young women were initiated into the most disgusting practices by females who had themselves acquired them in the same manner.” (p. 48) Here is evidence of intergenerational same sex activity which is also used for the transmission of subculture survival skills. A more developed connection is revealed in his discussion of one of the four classes of Greek prostitutes — the flute players known as Auletrides. These gifted musicians were hired to play and dance at banquets, after which their sexual services could be bought. Once a year, these women gathered to honor Venus and to celebrate their calling. No men were allowed to attend these early rites, except through special dispensation.

  Their banquet lasted from dark till dawn with wines, perfumes, delicate foods, songs and music. Once a dispute broke out between two guests as to their respective beauty. A trial was demanded by the company and a long and graphic account is given of the exhibition (by the recording poet) but modern tastes will not allow us to transcribe the details... It has been suggested that these festivals were originated by or gave rise to those enormous aberrations of the Greek feminine mind known to the ancients as lesbian love. There is grave reason to believe something of the kind. Indeed, Lucius affirms that, while avarice prompted common pleasures, taste and feeling inclined the flute players toward their own sex. On such a repulsive theme it is unnecessary to enlarge. (Sanger, p. 50)

  Oh how wrong the gentleman scholar is. This passage, far removed from the original, may be a mixture of some Greek history and much Victorian attitude, but it is provocative both in its tidbit of information and the language it uses to express it. In 1985, I attended my first Michigan Women’s Music Festival and all during the festivities I kept thinking of those early flute players pleasuring each other; I wondered if it would change some of the themes of cultural feminism if this historical legacy was recognized.

  Throughout the history of prostitution runs the primacy of dress codes. This drama of how prostitutes had to be socially marked to set them aside from the domesticated woman, and how the prostitute population responded to these state demands, led me to think many times of how lesbians have used clothes to announce themselves as a different kind of women. Prostitutes, even up to the turn of the century, were described as unnatural women, creatures who had no connection to wives and mothers, much as lesbians were called, years later, a third sex. In an 1830 test, we are told, “she (the prostitute) could serve men’s needs because a great gulf separated her nature from that of other women. In the female character, there is no midway. It must exist in spotless innocence or hopeless vice.” (Rosen, p. 6) This view of the prostitute as another species of woman is to continue through the years. In 1954, a popularizer of erotic subcultures will write: “The only thing I was sure about then was that the prostitute is no more like other women than a zebra is like a horse. She is a distinct breed, more different from her sisters under the skin that she — or the rest of society — could possibly realize. . .They have one common denominator, an essential quality that distinguishes them from other women — a profound contempt of the opposite sex.” (Stern, p. 13, p. 15) Both dykes and whores have a historical heritage of redefining the concept of woman.

  To make sure prostitutes did not pass into the population of true women, different states have set up regulations through the centuries controlling her self presentation and physical movements. In Greek times, all whores had to wear flowered or striped robes. At some time, even though no law decreed it, the prostitutes all dyed their hair blond in a common gesture of solidarity. In the Roman period, “the law prescribed with care the dress of prostitutes on the principle that they were to be distinguished in all things from honest women. Thus they were not allowed to wear the chaste sola which concealed the form or the fillet with which Roman w
omen bound their hair or to wear shoes or jewels or purple robes. These were the insignia of virtue. Prostitutes wore the toga like men...some even went a one step further in a bold announcement of their trade and wore over the green toga a short white jacket, the badge of adultery.” (Sanger, p. 75) A provocative point made throughout the history of the state regulations concerning prostitute dress is the inclusion of men’s apparel as part of the stigmatizing process. For instance, in the late fourteenth century, “prostitutes were required to carry a mark on their left arm. . .whereas in Castres (1375) the statutory sign was a man’s hat and a scarlet belt.” (Otis, p. 80) Here, as in lesbian history, cross dressing signals the breaking of women’s traditional erotic, and therefore social, territory.

  For the next three hundred years, prostitutes will be marked by the state, both in being forced to wear a certain kind of clothes or mark like a red shoulder knot, a white scarf or, in a chilling prefiguring of history, a yellow cord on their sleeves. They will be controlled in the places they will be allowed to live and work. As I read of the demanded dress codes, I was reminded of the warning older lesbians gave me in the fifties as I prepared for a night out: Always wear three pieces of women’s clothing so the vice squad can’t bust you for transvestism. We dressed to answer two needs: to avoid the state’s penalties for being women of difference and to announce our own cultural participation.

  The states also drew up litanies of control defining the multitude of ways prostitutes lost their social freedoms. In fifteenth century France, a prostitute faced up to three months imprisonment if she was

  1. to appear in forbidden places

  2. to appear at forbidden hours

  3. to walk through the streets in daylight in such a way as to attract the notice of people passing (Sanger, 150)

  Five centuries later, on another continent, the poetry of control will have the same purpose but be more elaborate in its requirements:

  Rules for Reservation El Paso, Texas, 1921

  Women must keep screen doors fastened on inside and keep curtain on lower half of screen door.

  Must sit back from doors and windows and not sit with legs crossed in a vulgar manner and must keep skirts down.

  Must remain in rooms until after twelve o’clock, and when they come out on the street they must not be loud or boisterous or be playing with each other or with men. They must not be hugging men or women around the street or be trying to pull men into their cribs.

  Must not sit in windows with screens down or stand in doors at any time.

  Must not cross the street in middle of block, but must go to Second or Third Street and cross over.

  Must not yell or scream from one room to the other or use loud, vulgar language.

  Must not wear gaudy clothes or commit any act of flirtation or other act that will attract unusual attention on the streets.

  Must not work with the lights out. (Woolston, pp. 336-337

  I reproduce these decrees of control here because they are the prostitutes’ historical documents of oppression and few, I think, realize how completely the police could infringe on a working woman’s life. They also prefigure the control the vice squad was to have in lesbian bars in the fifties, when even our bathroom habits were under surveillance.

  Yet within these controlled borders some of the women turned their social prisons into social freedoms, becoming the intellectual free women of their day. The history of prostitution has its luminaries, women who used the power of their stigmatized place to become unusual women, women who lived outside of the domestic restrictions that entrapped the vast majority of their sisters. Thus we have the biographies of famous courtesans, extolling their wit and depicting their involvement in literature and politics. Successful prostitution accomplished what passing for men did for some lesbians: it gave them freedom from the rigidly controlled world of women.

  A rich, untapped source of lesbian history is diaries and biographies of courtesans, madams, strippers and other sex workers. Of course, to take these documents seriously, as seriously as the letters of female friends in the 19th century, is going to test the class and attitude boundaries of many feminist scholars. Another problem will be that often fact and fiction are intertwined in these works, but both the fact and the more imaginative creations can be valuable sources in piecing together a fuller lesbian history.

  In Cora Pearl’s Grand Horizontal: The Erotic Memoirs of a Passionate Lady, written in 1873, several mentions are made of female same sex activities. The first takes place in a French convent school for poor girls in the year 1849. The narrator soon discovers that her schoolmates had learned to please each other: “. . . the degree of interest which my companions exhibited not only in their own but in each other’s bodies was something strange to me.” The author then goes on to describe at length a sexual initiation scene in a bathtub, under the careful tutelage of Liane, an older student who brings both of them to orgasm as the rest of the girls watch. At night, the courtesan-to-be says, she “was taught the pleasures of the body which within a year or two became so keen that I was convinced that anyone who neglected them was a dunce indeed. These pleasures were exclusively female.” She carefully assures her reader that these pleasures were never forced on any girl too young or inexperienced to receive them. She goes on to tell how she discovered that the older women, the school mistresses, also enjoyed lesbian sex. “Suddenly going into one of the classrooms to fetch a set of needles I discovered Bette on her knees before Soeur Rose, one of the younger and prettier mistresses, her head thrust beneath her skirts. I had time to glimpse an expression on her face which was familiar to me as that on the faces of my friends at certain times of mutual pleasure.” (Pearl, p. 22)

  The narrator develops both a philosophy of pleasure and of female bonding based on these early sexual encounters. “Our nightly experiments in the dormitory can be imagined. Eugenie, my particular friend, hearing from Bette of the incident with Soeur Rose, determined to introduce me to the pleasure the lips and tongue can give, and I did not find that pleasure at all mitigated by distaste; then as since, I was keenly conscious that one of the greatest joys in life is experiencing the pleasure one can give to one’s lovers. And now I was fully grown, and keen to experience myself the full extent of the pleasure I could give to others. For the most part we fell into pairs, and there grew up between many of us true and real devotion, unmatched since. . . our experiments were by no means without their effect on my later career, for I learned at that time to be wary of no activity which pleasure was the result of.” (Pearl, p. 23)

  Later on in the memoirs, Cora goes to bed with a lesbian wife of a male client, a woman described in what we call today butch terms. “She then invited me to warm her which being a guest I did. She was of a sturdy and muscular build, with breasts which were firm rather than full, indeed no more presenting the chest of a woman than of some men I have known.” The wife asks Cora to share her bed, explaining that, “not long after marriage she discovered that men and their figures were if not entirely repugnant at least unexciting to me, whereas the female admiration for the female figure was what she could not but give vent to.” (Pearl, p. 166) Cora muses as they make love, “another woman must more securely know through pleasuring herself how to give pleasure to a fellow of her sex.” In the world of women’s history research, we often hear the statement, but women did not talk about sex in those days. If we turn to different sources, however, like the writings and records of sexually defined women, we may discover that women of different social positions talked in all kinds of ways. The question is, do we really want to hear their voices, and how will we fit them into what Adrienne Rich calls the lesbian continuum.

  In 1912, a lesbian prostitute anarchist named Almeda Sperry enters both histories by writing a love letter to Emma Goldman that uses a frankness of language we hunger for in our research. “Dearest it is a good thing that I came away when I did — in fact — I would have had to come away anyway. If I had only had the courage enough to ki
ll myself when you reached the climax then — then I would have known happiness for at that moment I had complete possession of you. Satisfied, ah God no. .At this moment I am listening to the rhythm of the pulse coming in your throat. I am surging along with your life blood, coursing in the secret places of your body. I cannot escape the rhythmic spurt of your love juices.” (Falk, pp. 174-175) Emma Goldman, we learn from Candace Falk’s new work, Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman, was no stranger to frank depictions of desire, so it comes as no surprise that she inspired such a passionate response. Almeda Sperry, lesbian and prostitute, should be as much a part of our history as Natalie Barney or the Ladies of Llanglollen. Neither her language nor her profession is genteel; she may not fit easily into academic reading lists but the understanding of our history, of women’s history, will be poorer for the exclusion of such voices.

  In the memoirs of Nell Kimball, a heterosexual madam, many references are made to lesbians. One of the more famous madams of her times was Emma Flegel, born in 1867, a Jewish immigrant from Lubeck, Germany who came to America and worked as a cook’s helper until circumstances forced her to marry and settle in St. Louis. There she opened a highly successful brothel and was known throughout the subculture for her love affairs with her girls. “Emma apparently always had a favorite among her girls, with whom she’d carry on a crush for a year or so before seeking a new favorite.” (information sent to the Lesbian History Archives, New York). Here we see how ethnic lesbian history can interconnect with the general story of both lesbians and prostitutes, as long as shame does not get in the way. This does not mean a history without concepts or conflicts, but it does mean a commitment to opening up new territory, to the inclusion of women who may challenge prevailing lesbian feminist categories.

  * * *

  Besides recognizing the history of prostitutes as a valuable source for lesbian history, another connection that emerges is the lesbian customer and protector of prostitutes. In the wonderful and moving story of Jeanne Bonnet, a passing woman of San Francisco in the 1870s, which was given life by the work of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project and Allan Berube in particular, we meet a woman who first came to the Barbary Coast brothels as a customer but in 1876 decided to enlist some of the women she visited in her all women’s gang. They ended their lives as prostitutes and survived by petty stealing. One of the women she won away from her pimp, Blanche Buneau, became her special friend. But the anger of the scorned man followed the two women into the privacy of their life. In the words of Allen Berube: “After dark, according to Blanche, Jeanne sat in a chair smoking her pipe and drinking a glass of cognac. She took off her male attire, got into their bed and with her head propped up on her elbow, waited for Blanche to join her. Blanche sat down on the edge of the bed and bent over to unlace her shoes when a shot was fired through the window hitting Jeanne, who cried, ‘I join my sister,’ and died.” We are told that her funeral in the year of 1876 in San Francisco was attended by “many women of the wrong class. . . the tears washing little furrows through the paint on their cheeks.” (Berube, LHA).