Sex Work
Page 30
In Jonathan Katz’s Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary, we find a mention of a “female care, R., age thirty eight” who “proclaims her characteristics in the most flagrant way through her manner of dress which is always the most masculine, straight tailored hats and heavy shoes. She makes a living by prostituting herself homosexually to various women.” (Katz, p. 339) Here, embedded in the language of Dr. Douglas C. McMurtrie, author of “Some Observations on the Psychology of Sexual Inversion in Women,” we have another clue to lesbian history. Perhaps R. will seem more worthy of our attention when we are told by the doctor: “R. feels absolutely no shame or delicacy regarding her position. In the city. . . she frequents public places dressed in a manner to attract general notice. She is heaped with contempt and scorn by the normal and feminine women who see her. She seems, however, to rather glory in this attention and adverse criticism.” (Katz, p. 339).
Homosexual women visiting lesbian prostitutes is also documented by Frank Caprio, a pop psychologist from the fifties who captures that decade’s combination of prejudice and sensationalism perfectly. “In these brothels, which are referred to as Temples of Sappho,’ lesbian practices consist of intercourse via the use of a penis substitute, mutual masturbation, tribadism and cunnilingus. While many of the clients are passively homosexual, they often assume an active role and in this way they find an outlet for their repressed homosexual cravings. One of these ‘Temples of Sappho,’ in Paris, catering to women clients, is lavishly furnished. A bar occupies a portion of the lower floor where alcoholic beverages may be obtained. The lesbian inmates are attired in transparent, sex appealing undergarments and stimulate their women clients with inviting gestures. Private rooms in an upper floor are devoted to sexual liasons which follow the preliminary acquaintanceship. .” (Caprio, p. 93). It is the challenge of lesbian historians to sort out what is bona fide lesbian culture here and what is Caprio’s imagination but we do know from oral histories that such places existed and not only in “exotic” Paris. Mabel Hampton, for example, a black eighty-four-year-old New York lesbian, tells about a brothel in Harlem during the thirties that catered only to women customers, and whose lesbian madam kept a shotgun by the door to scare away curious men. One important point I would like to make is the need to include questions about prostitution and prostitutes in any oral history done with older lesbian women. If the message is given that this is shameful territory, that the “feminist” interviewer would be appalled by fem whores or butch pimps, or by a myriad of cultural and personal overlappings of these two worlds, then this whole part of our women’s history will again go underground. We will lose insight and understanding about how lesbians in particular, and women in general, who lived outside the pale of domestic arrangements organized their lives.
Lesbians have and still do turn to prostitutes for sexual comfort as well as work as prostitutes themselves. In 1984 in a small town in Tennessee the police set up an entrapment net using a policewoman posing as a prostitute. After the arrests for soliciting were made, the names of the arrested were to be published in the town’s newspaper. In an article entitled, “Police Sex Sting Nets 127,” we hear a woman’s voice, one of the arrested would-be customers:
.and many of them admitted they had made a mistake.
“Some mistakes you can only make one time,” said the only woman charged during the three day undercover operation. “My mother and grandmother are ministers in Missouri. I’m not a low-life.”
The woman, who turned twenty four today, sat in her car and wept after being given her citation. She was convinced she would be fired from her job, which she had only recently gained.
“I do have some girlfriends, but things aren’t great right now,” she told the police decoy.
She later told a reporter that she thought the undercover operation was unfair.
“I think the cops should have said, ‘Hey, don’t do it again,’ and let me live my life.
“You’re talking about a story. I’m talking about my career.”
from The Tennessean, November 22,1984
In the early decades of the twentieth century, lesbians and prostitutes were often confused in the popular and legal imagination. Mabel Hampton tells how she was arrested in 1920 at a white woman’s house while waiting for a friend. Because of an anonymous tip that a wild party was going on, “three bulls” came crashing through the door, and even though Ms. Hampton clearly was a “woman’s woman” she was arrested for prostitution and sent to Bedford Hills Reformatory for two years at the age of nineteen. According to Ms. Hampton, many of the girls arrested for prostitution were, in fact, lesbians. Ms. Hampton, who takes adversity as a challenge, sums up her Bedford Hills experience by commenting, “I sure had a good time with all those girls.” Mabel’s good time was not hers alone; Estelle Freedman has chronicled the scandal over blatant lesbianism that was going to hit Bedford Hills a few years later. Here we have another clue to a fuller lesbian history; we need to go back to prison records and start exploring the lives we will find summarized in the terse sentences of the state.
We know from Ruth Rosen’s work, The Lost Sisterhood, that from 1900-1918, the background period to Ms. Hampton’s arrest, prostitutes were becoming the victims of anti-vice campaigns, campaigns that established practices of harassment, surveillance and arrest that were later to be used against clearly defined lesbians and their gathering places. “The growth of special courts, vice squads, social workers and prisons to deal with prostitution,” (Rosen, p. 19) became the lesbian legacy of the forties and fifties.
A police form used in interrogating arrested prostitutes from this period, the 1920s, lists the following categories under the heading of general health: Use liquor Drugs Perversion Homosexuality. (Wool-ston, p. 331) It is in this decade that police boast of the new methods they have developed to humiliate working women: “a spectacular method for striking terror into the heart of the wrong doers is the sudden and sometimes violent raid. A patrol wagon dashes up to the suspected house. Police scramble out and attack various entrances and exits and round up the inmates.” (Woolston, p. 214). Fifty years later, a prostitute describes a bar raid with these words:
“You can feel them in the air, when you’re in the bar, and sometimes they take the whole bar out, all of the girls sitting at the bar and put them in the wagon and take them downtown and put them through a lot of hassles. They can just walk in and take you for I and D (idle and disorderly persons) if nothing else.” (Turril, p. 8). Any lesbian who has been in a bar raid would recognize this description.
Another striking example of how the two worlds come together is shown in an excerpt from an oral history by Rikki Streicher, owner of a lesbian bar in San Francisco. The time is the forties but the incident has its roots in the early 1900s:
I was working as a waitress at the Paper Doll. Somebody called up and said the cops were on the way. I sent everybody home and stayed. So I was the only one there, so they took me in. If you were a woman, their charges were usually 72 VD which meant they took you in for a venereal disease test and seventy-two hours is how long it took. They took me in but decided not to book me. So a friend came down and got me out. (Streicher, p. 5)
Here the lesbian is being policed with a procedure clearly growing out of the social view of the prostitute as a carrier of a social disease. In the medical records of the state, lesbian and prostitute history often become one. According to Dr. Virginia Livingston, a staff physician of the Brooklyn Hospital for Infectious Disease during WWI, “the hospital had a clinic for prostitutes and many of the prostitutes were lesbians.” (WBAI interview, March 7, 1980). The connection between sex and disease which was to haunt prostitutes during the war years, causing many incarcerations, is once again, in the social air. And once again, whores and queers must be on the alert for the loss of civil liberties in the face of social panic.
Because prostitutes were the first policed community of outlaw women, they were forced to develop a subculture of survival and resistance. W
e have seen some details of this culture in the earlier discussion of clothes and women’s gatherings. But to enter modern times, I suggest much unexplored lesbian history lies in the so-called dens of legalized vice that sprang up in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the famous red light districts of that time, in New Orleans Storyville, in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, in New York’s Five Points and Tenderloin districts, lesbian stories are waiting to be told. An ad from one of the famous blue books of the time included, in its listings of sexual services available, a reference to female homosexual entertainment. (Rosen, p. 82) From the prostitute subculture comes the phrase, “in the life,” the way black lesbians will define their lesbian identities in the thirties and forties. From this world comes the use of a buzzer or light to signal the arrival of the police in the backroom of a lesbian bar, a tradition still strong in the lesbian fifties.
Rosen tells us that “these districts, although in a state of transition, still offered women a certain amount of protection, support and human validation. .The process of adapting to the district, or ‘the life’ as it is called, involved a series of introductions to the new language. . .the humor and folklore of the subculture.” (Rosen, p. 102). A prostitute in Kate Millet’s Prostitution Papers will comment years later, “It’s funny that the expression ‘go straight’ is the same expression for gay people. It’s funny that both these worlds should use that expression.” (Millet, p. 41)
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The final, and perhaps most ironic, connection between these two worlds that I want to discuss is how lesbians and prostitutes are tied together in the psychology literature. One of the prevailing models for explaining the sickness of prostitutes in the fifties was that prostitutes were really lesbians in disguise who suffered from an Oedipus complex and therefore were hostile to men. As Caprio put it in his 1954 work, “While it seems paradoxical to think of.. .prostitutes having strong homosexual tendencies, psychoanalysts have demonstrated that prostitution represents a form of pseudoheterosexuality, a flight from homosexual repression.” (Caprio, p. 93). Helen Deutsch saw the problem in another interesting light. Identification for the prostitute was with the masculine mother and she “has the need to deride social institutions, law and morality as well as the men who impose such authority.” (Bullough, p. 89) Another type of prostitute, Deutsch continues, is “the woman who renounces tenderness and feminine gratification in favor of the aggressive masculinity she imitates,” (Bullough, p. 89) thus making her a latent lesbian. Mixed in with the attempts to explain the sickness of the prostitute, are the stories of hundreds of women’s lives. Caprio, for example, says he had done hundreds of interviews with lesbian prostitutes from around the world. I cannot bear to spend too many words on this connection because I have felt the weight of these theories in my own life. My mother took me to doctors in the early fifties to see who could cure her freak daughter. It is enough to say that prostitutes and lesbians have a shared history of struggle with the law, religion and medicine, all attempting to explain and control the “pathology” of these unusual women. Lesbian prostitutes have suffered the totality of their two histories as deviant women — they have been called sinful, sick, unnatural and a social pollution. In the decade of lesbian feminism, they have not been labeled because they are invisible. Even so astute and caring a gay historian as Jeffrey Weeks feels the need to deny their existence in the service of a patriarchy-free lesbian history. “Even Magnus Hirschfield, whose study of homosexuality aimed to treat both male and female alike, saw a tendency in lesbians to turn to prostitution. It was as if lesbians had to be explained and justified always in terms of a largely male phenomenon.” (Weeks, 88). The existence of lesbian prostitutes is not a blemish on the story of our people; we will lose more than our history if they are judged not worthy of inclusion. In 1985, the lesbian feminist community profusely welcomed the world of lesbian nuns into the lesbian continuum with the publication of Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence. I see a close connection between these three groups of undomesticated women — the prostitute, the nun and the lesbian. And recent research done on prostitution in medieval society by Leah Lydia Otis bears out a profound connection between at least two of these groups. In the fifteenth century it was not unusual for whole houses of prostitutes, run by women, to turn themselves into a convent when they reached the age of retirement. Thus the sisterhood was preserved and the women could continue to live in one version of medieval separatism. As always, the same sex documentation is harder to find, but we do have a glimmer. “In Grasse in 1487 a prostitute was sentenced to pay a fine for having disobeyed the vicar’s regulation forbidding prostitutes to dance with honest women.” (Otis, 81)
Four centuries later, prostitutes and nuns will be joined once again by a historical tragedy that called for the highest acts of human courage. Vera Lasker in her passionate work, Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses, tells us that some of the best safe houses for resistance fighters were brothels and convents. (Lasker, 6) She also asserts that some of the most daring women in the service of the resistance were prostitutes. The full story of the fate of prostitutes both in the resistance movement and in the concentration camps still has to be told and I hope the one who does it is a whore. I am sure that in the telling of this history, we will also find lesbian women who wore the black triangle of the asocials.
“Among the first women in Auschwitz were German prostitutes and Jewish girls from Slovaka. These women were issued evening gowns in which they were forced to help build Auschwitz in rain or snow. Of the hundreds, only a handful survived by 1944.” (Lasker, 15) Nun, queer, whore — think of the challenge posed to the unrestricted feminist historian and to all of us in our imaginations.
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Both lesbians and prostitutes were and are concerned with creating power and autonomy for themselves in seemingly powerless social interactions. As one interviewer of working women has said, “From the point of view of the prostitute, power and control must always be in her hands in order to survive.” (Cohen, 97) A lesbian prostitute wrote in 1982, “I’ll make sure I’m out of there in ten or fifteen minutes. I’m always keeping my eye on the time and I decide how long I’ll stay depending on the amount of money and what the guy is like. . They want more, but in the end we set the terms of the relationship and the Johns have to accept it.” (Richards, LHA)
The class structure that exists for prostitutes also exists for lesbians. Call girls and professional lesbian women have things in common. They both have more protection than the street walker or the bar dyke, but coming on to the wrong people can deliver them both into the hands of the state. Both are often in a hurry to disconnect themselves from their sisters in the street in an effort to lighten their own feeling of difference.
The irony, at this point, is that lesbians have more legal protection than prostitutes because of the power of the gay rights movement. We have lesbian and gay elected public officials, but no politicians who clearly claim their public sex past. A spokesperson for Prostitutes of New York (PONY) said in 1980 if the hookers and the housewives and the homosexuals got together “we could rule the world.” (Stout, 3) But in order to do this, we must face the challenge of our own history, the challenge to understand how the “lesbian” world stretches from the flute players of Greece to the Michigan festival of lesbian separatists. Why has this seemingly obvious connection between lesbians and prostitutes gone unspoken in our current lesbian communities? What impact has cultural feminism and classism had on this silence? And will a reunion of these two histories give us a stronger political grasp on how to protect both prostitutes and lesbians in this fearful time? If we can make any part of our society safer for these two groups of women, we will make the world safer for all women because whore and queer are the two accusations that symbolize lost womanhood — and a lost woman is open to direct control by the state.
The reclamation of one’s history is a direct political act that forces the birth of a new consciousness; i
t is work that changes both the hearer and the speaker. I saw this very clearly when I attended the ground breaking conference in Toronto last year, “The Politics of Pornography, the Politics of Prostitution,” and heard one of the keynote speakers, a stripper in Toronto’s sex district, document the history of her art form in Toronto. Her telling created history as it communicated it. In her soft voice, she outlined the development of her profession and the oppression she and the others had to fight. It was a straight-forward history filled both with pride and problems; I was sitting with two other strippers, and as Debbie documented the changes and challenges in their work, they sat on the edge of their seats. They told me later they had never heard it put that way. Out of dirty jokes and scorn, a history was born. I hope that more and more women who perform or work in the worlds of public sex will choose to tell their peoples story.