The Guide to Getting It On (151 page)

How the Whores Lined Up

Prostitution had its pecking order. At the top were the courtesans or mistresses to the wealthy. These select, educated, charm-school graduates could turn a phrase as elegantly as they could turn a trick.

Then were the Parlor Girls who worked in the upscale brothels or parlor houses. They were followed by the girls who worked in the public houses. These ladies didn’t earn as much per poke, but turned more tricks per night.

Next were the cribs, which were rows of tiny shacks that were rented to prostitutes. Cribs were the horse stalls of commercial sex, often populated by former brothel girls who had grown too old or who were in poor health, or who didn’t have the minimal looks or social graces to work in a brothel.

Lower yet in the ranks of whoredom were the streetwalkers. Streetwalkers were the dregs of commercial sex. They lived in sleazy hotel rooms or wretched apartments. They were not known for their cleanliness or good health. Life for streetwalkers was difficult.

At the very bottom of the whore barrel were the signboard girls. These girls lived on the streets and did their tricks in back alleys or behind billboards or large street signs. They didn’t have a single good thing going for them.

Some of the occasional prostitutes in the cities ran in packs of teenage girls. They would hook up with men for a quick hit of cash or for a date to see the kinds of entertainment that they couldn’t otherwise afford. These young women became such a visible part of popular culture that they earned the name “charity girls.”

Economics and Inclination

When Dr. William Sanger did his study of prostitutes that was first published in 1858, he had expected to find poverty as the main reason for why a woman would do this kind of work. What he didn’t expect to find was that the second most common reason the women gave for why they were working as prostitutes was “inclination” or sexual desire. In the minds of white Christians from the better classes, this was a frightening and perplexing finding. They wanted to believe that a woman’s place was in the home, with her husband supporting her. They were also trying to convince themselves that women weren’t interested in sex. To realize that thousands of prostitutes were not only supporting themselves financially, but weren’t exactly hating their jobs, was a curve ball that threatened their very view of the world.

It’s a Whore’s Life

A full-time prostitute’s best chance of finding friendship was from a fellow whore. But how many prostitutes had rewarding relationships with other prostitutes—either as friends or as sexual partners—is not known. For instance, there were plenty of brothel customers who paid to watch two prostitutes have sex with each other. Some of these situations evolved into same-sex relationships, but actual accounts are rare.

For many full-time prostitutes, the main source of companionship was their pets or their children. Long hours and boredom made for high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction. Some prostitutes did themselves in with overdoses of morphine, opium, cocaine and/or laudanum. Pregnancies were frequent, and venereal disease went with the territory as did abuse from police, pimps, customers and fellow whores. Tuberculosis, pneumonia, infected tonsils and poisoning from abortion-causing drugs were not unusual.

Prostitutes were sometimes a jealous, competitive, socially challenged lot whose only chance to feel good about themselves was at the expense of the women they were working with. Arrest records from the 1800s show that more whores were arrested for public drunkenness and fighting among themselves than for pandering.

Also, before 1885, the average age of consent for American girls was ten to twelve. It was not unusual for brothels to have young girls working as full-time whores. Most girls in the 1800s did not begin to menstruate until they were fifteen years of age. So a young prostitute of twelve to fifteen years of age had “the advantage” of not having to worry about pregnancy.

As for America’s concern about its teenage girls, Alexis de Toqueville wrote in 1835 that there was no country in the world where he had seen girls turned out at such a young age. There was also a high demand for virgins. A virgin could get as much as $50 to $500 for her first time, which was a tremendous incentive when you consider that she might only make $1 to $2 a day for full-time employment, if she could find it.

Sex in Brothels

By the end of the 1800s, the brothel in America was a one-stop multiplex of sexual excess. To put it in perspective, there were at least as many neighborhood brothels as there are neighborhood gyms today. The main difference is in the body parts that were being exercised.

Brothels were dedicated centers of prostitution and were run by madams. They tended to be one of two kinds—private or public.

Private houses, which were also known as parlor houses, were the forerunners of today’s upper-end country club. Only the wealthy could afford them. Membership was restricted to regular, well-known customers of the better classes. The furnishings were finely appointed, and everything from the food to the women were five-star. Members of private houses might be influential businessmen or lawyers, puffing on the finest cigars from Cuba and drinking the best whisky.

Public houses were the Pizza Huts of prostitution. The average stiff was welcome. There were often long, loud lines of drinking and drunken men, especially from Saturday night to Monday morning, given how this was the only time that men from the working classes had off from work.

The better of the public houses were known as dollar-houses, where men from middle class dropped their drawers. There were also fifty-cent houses that catered to the working class. These places often smelled bad and were infested with cockroaches and rats. In the working-class brothels, there might be a bench in the waiting area where men lined up next to each other. A voice from another room would yell, “Next!”

The one sex venue that a man absolutely wanted to avoid was called a panel house. A panel house was a room designed to help prostitutes rob their customers. There would be a false wall or panel that another prostitute or pimp would hide behind. Once the customer had his pants off, the accomplice would quietly relieve his wallet of all cash. Good luck finding a sympathetic policeman when you’d been robbed while doing business with a whore.

The Madam

The person who ran and sometimes owned the brothel was the madam. Madams were often former prostitutes who knew the business from their bottoms up.

The madam was one of the best management positions a woman could hold in the 1800s. Put in today’s terms, she was a combination of hotel and restaurant manager, personnel director, head of marketing and publicity, nurse, counselor, bookkeeper and director of customer relations.

Besides being venues for sex, the better brothels were often places where business deals were made and where political wheeling and dealing occurred. When a well-known businessman or politician suffered a coronary at the brothel, the better madams would have the still-warm corpse moved to a more respectable location before the authorities were notified.

Storyville, the Sinful, Sexual Sapphire of the South

“In 1897, New Orleans city officials, acknowledging their belief that sins of the flesh were inevitable, looked Satan in the eye, cut a deal, and gave him his own address.”
—
Alecia P. Long, author,
The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920,
LSU Press, (2005)

By the late 1800s, city governments all over the country were talking about establishing legally-controlled red-light districts. Prostitution would be allowed within these districts, but nowhere else. The most famous and longest enduring of the municipal vice districts was in New Orleans. It was called Storyville, and it was the nineteenth century’s most successful attempt at harm reduction.

By 1890, the city of New Orleans was becoming a massive, municipal gumbo of sexual excess. To help save the city, a reform-minded, classical-music loving alderman named Sidney Story drafted an ordinance to create a red-light district at the edge of New Orleans’ French Quarter. This was to be the only place in all of New Orleans where prostitution was allowed. The concept worked well for more than fifteen years. Naturally, “Storyville” was the last place on earth that a man like Sidney Story would want as his namesake.

By 1900, only two years after its official creation, Storyville housed more than 2,000 prostitutes in 230 brothels and houses of assignation. It was also home to a generous number of dance halls, concert saloons, gambling dens and firing ranges. Particularly popular in Storyville were the brothels that promised girls who were octaroons and quadroons. These were light-skinned, mixed-race beauties. They were the product of “almagamation” or sex between the white and negro. An octaroon was theoretically one-eighth black, while a quadroon was one-quarter black.

Octaroons were thought to be the genetic superstars of Southern whores. They had just enough black in them to make them drip with a primitive, unrestrained, animal desire for sex that people believed the negro possessed, but with enough white to have the supposed intelligence, personality, creativity and beautiful physical features of the Aryan races. Sex with an octaroon was thought to win a man the best of both worlds, and he often paid more to fulfill his racist fantasy.

As the rest of America has recently become aware, Storyville and New Orleans were built over a swamp. Indoor plumbing and sewer pipes were rare in Storyville. The streets were flats of mud mixed with excrement from freshly-emptied chamber pots and the remains of decaying rodents. The smell was putrid, but a nose for whoring could ignore the wicked odors that steamed up from the streets below.

The sounds of Storyville were not tranquil. Trains ran along the main street, shooting galleries operated at all hours and music blared from the dance halls and concert saloons. A loud chorus of barkers, pimps and whores wooed the wads of the passersby.

Storyville did big business during winter, when tourists from the North could warm themselves before the fires of Satan. They could gamble, bet on horses and go on sexual rampages that made the offerings of their hometown red-light districts look like church socials.

At the height of Storyville’s existence, the possibilities for excess ranged from visits to expensive, elaborate brothels and bars that were the Las Vegas casinos of their day, to tiny, dark, foul-smelling cribs, which were little more than livestock pens with beds. In addition to selling sex, some claim Storyville was the birth place of jazz. But jazz was born long before Storyville. What Storyville did, however, was employ as many as fifty musicians a night, including some of the early jazz greats like Clarence Williams and Jelly Roll Morton.

Jelly Roll Morton played piano at Emma Johnson’s during her notorious, live sex-circus shows. And in addition to tickling the ivories, Clarence Williams was a cabaret manager who invented the “Ham Kick.” The Ham Kick was a contest for willing females. A ham was suspended from the ceiling, and if a woman was able to kick it, she got to take it home. But it needed to be obvious to the audience that the woman wasn’t wearing any underwear.

Did the Customer Always Come First?

According to the few lasting memoirs from nineteenth-century madams, the men who arrived at their brothels were often lonely, feeling like aliens in a changing society that offered few comforts. Their hope was to find a moment of connectedness with a kind and caring woman. But even in the rare situations when a prostitute did pretend to be kind and caring, she was often getting ready to service her next customer before the man had finished his final thrust.

When Al Rose (author of
Storyville, New Orleans
) interviewed men who had been frequent customers of the prostitutes of Storyville, similar stories were told in different words:

“She’d take hold of your prick and milk it to see if you had the clap. I think the girls could diagnose clap better than the doctors at that time. She’d have a way of squeezing it that if there was anything in there, she’d find it.... Then she’d fill the basin with water and put in a few drops of purple stuff—permanganate of potash, it was... Then she’d wash you with it. She’d lay on her back and get you on top of her so fast, you wouldn’t even know you’d come up there on your own power. She’d grind so that you almost felt like you had had nothing to do with it. Well, after that, she had you. She could make it go off as quickly as she wanted to—and she didn’t waste any time, I’ll tell you. How did I feel about it?... I was never satisfied. I don’t mean that I thought that the girls of the district had cheated me... They’d drain me off. I’d be depleted and enervated—but I never had the feeling of satisfaction that I was always looking for. The truth is that a man wants something more from a woman than that... No, I can’t say I have happy memories of the District. I just had a weakness for those whores—and they were so easy to get.”

The next Storyville veteran interviewed by Rose had frequented the more expensive brothels in Storyville and had the added perspective of comparing American prostitutes with those in other parts of the world:

“She approached me and seized my genital organ in one hand, wringing it in such a way as to determine whether or not I had the gonorrhea. She did this particular operation with more knowledge and skill than she did anything else before or after.... She washed me with some foul-smelling disinfectant and lay down on the bed, inviting me to mount her. This I proceeded to do, and the mechanical procedure that followed endured for perhaps a minute.... I’ve been in whorehouses all over this globe. I’ve been in the cheap brothels of Montmartre and in the House of Seven Stories in Tokyo. I’ve been fucked in Singapore, Kimberly, San Juan, Buenos Aires, and Calgary... The foreign whores, somehow, manage to feign an attitude that leads you to believe, at least for the moment of intercourse, that you have their attention and that they are interested in seeing that you have a pleasant time. While they never do it free, they always seem just a little surprised when you hand them the money—as though they’d forgotten about this crass detail... Storyville whores, no matter how well-dressed or how gaudily expensive the whorehouse, were avaricious, greedy, and uncouth.... No house in the District could, with their practices, survive for a month in Paris.... It took much time and trouble to seduce the young ladies of our social circle, though I sometimes took the time and trouble. These experiences, few and far between, were much more satisfying—but it was difficult to make the effort with the District so near.”