<\/p>\n
Photographing The Whores of Storyville<\/strong><\/p>\n Nobody knows much about E. J. Bellocq, an unexceptional commercial photographer who lived in New Orleans shortly after the turn of the century.\u00a0 He took a lot of pictures of boats to pay the rent.\u00a0 He was an odd, indrawn, misshapen man, hydrocephalic and a dwarf.\u00a0 According to another photographer who knew Bellocq, \u201che had a terrific [French] accent, spoke in a high-pitched voice, staccato-like, and when he got excited he sounded like an angry squirrel.\u201d<\/p>\n The one thing that is known about Bellocq for sure is that he liked to hang out in Storyville, New Orleans\u2019s legalized red light district that thrived from 1896 (when it was set up by an anti-vice New Orleans alderman, Sidney Story, in an attempt to limit prostitution to one section of town) until it was closed down in 1917.<\/p>\n Bellocq, the misshapen outcast, seems to have found a home of sorts in the unpretentious and forgiving surroundings of red light counterculture.\u00a0 According to one woman who worked in Storyville and was interviewed about Bellocq some fifty years later, \u201che always behaved nice.\u00a0 You know, polite….\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if he ever wanted to do nothing but look.\u201d<\/p>\n In any case, around 1912 Bellocq took a remarkable series of portraits of various prostitutes from Storyville.\u00a0 The glass plates were discovered after Bellocq\u2019s death and eventually purchased by photographer Lee Friedlander, who found them quite remarkable.\u00a0 In 1970 Friedlander curated a show of Bellocq\u2019s Storyville photos for New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art.\u00a0 A book of the photos, Storyville Portraits<\/em>, was also published by the Museum at that time.\u00a0 This fall, fifteen of the photos were shown again at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, commemorating the publication of a beautiful new, enlarged printed edition of Bellocq\u2019s images, Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleans<\/em> (Random House, 84 pages, $60).<\/p>\n There is nothing particularly glamorous or titillating about Bellocq\u2019s photographs and, indeed, nothing particularly glamorous or titillating about the women who are its subjects.\u00a0 This is precisely what makes the photos so extraordinary.\u00a0 We see the women of Storyville, not all dolled up for their clients, but simply at home, being themselves.\u00a0 We see a variety of women — younger, older, heavier, thinner, clothed, unclothed, seductive, distant, joyous, troubled, relaxed in front of the camera, decidedly ill-at-ease.\u00a0 We see the uninflated, yet powerful, presence of a group of women who, simply enough, worked as prostitutes in New Orleans shortly before World War I.\u00a0 We see these women photographed honestly and respectfully, appreciated for simply being who they are, notably separate from the glamorization and vilification, the whore stigma, through which prostitutes are constantly distorted by mainstream culture.<\/p>\n A woman lies on an ironing board set up behind her house, dressed in a loose shirt, knickers, and dark stockings, kicking her heels while playing with her miniature dog.\u00a0 Two women sit on a flowered rug, sharing a bottle of wine and playing cards.\u00a0 A pretty woman sits in her window, nude and relaxed, smiling at the camera.\u00a0 A woman sits quietly in a plain wooden chair against a rumpled, makeshift backdrop, her smock off her shoulders, her hands tucked protectively under her arms, looking thoughtfully off to one side.<\/p>\n The surroundings in the photos are generally meager, even dismal –plain rooms with flowered wallpapers, sometimes minimally decorated with college pennants or small mementos.\u00a0 The quality of the photographic plates reinforces the mood.\u00a0 Many are scratched, peeling, stained, or broken.\u00a0 Some have sections that are missing entirely.\u00a0 In most of the nude photographs, the women\u2019s faces have been crudely, almost violently, scratched away entirely — perhaps by Bellocq himself, perhaps to protect their identities.\u00a0 And yet there is a basic kind of grounded sensuality that the women in these photos convey, quite different from the affectedly mirthful conventions of the classic pinup or the coy French postcard.\u00a0 It is the sensuality of women at ease with themselves and with the sexuality of their bodies, an ease that was hardly typical of women of their time.<\/p>\n Women in 1912, after all, did not sit around, quietly nude and relaxed, before a camera, before a stranger, before anyone — generally not even before their husbands.\u00a0 Except, of course, in Storyville.\u00a0 Except when they were sitting for Bellocq.\u00a0 Women did not lie in front of others, their calves covered only in dark stockings, kicking their feet in the air, playfully cuddling their pets, as purely innocent as this may seem today.\u00a0 Except in Storyville, for Bellocq.\u00a0 Only here could a woman in short dress and dark stockings display her bare thighs without embarrassment while looking straight ahead and saying with no apology, \u201cHere I am, with my body, with my sexuality, what of it?\u201d<\/p>\n However strange Bellocq may have been — maybe precisely because he was so strange, because he was so much of a fellow outcast — he had the sensitivity, the unequivocal acceptance, the appreciation, to allow these women to feel at home being seen through his eye and through his lens.\u00a0 And as a result, eighty years later, we have the opportunity to see these women, to see something about who they were, that would otherwise have disappeared with them into the grave.<\/p>\n Bellocq is not the first artist to be fascinated by prostitutes, by the subculture of the sex for money underworld.\u00a0 Toulouse-Lautrec is well known for hanging around Parisian whores, as is Henry Miller, but there are dozens of others as well.\u00a0 It was often only prostitutes who would pose nude and who thus came to be immortalized by painters and photographers alike.\u00a0 And innumerable prostitutes have become major characters in literature because they have been significant figures in a writer\u2019s life.<\/p>\n This is hardly surprising.\u00a0 Separate from affected glamour and separate from the public\u2019s horrified reaction, prostitution (like pornography) has always been an arena in which people are given permission to acknowledge and explore their sexual and sensual natures free of the tight constraints of cultural propriety.\u00a0 Throughout Western history, it is prostitution that has provided — together with its very real and undeniable problems, difficulties, and abuses — a relatively judgment-free, sex-affirming alternative to a culture that continuously drives unapologetic sexual existence and expression underground.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Soiled Doves of the Western Frontier<\/strong><\/p>\n Another unique and delightful factotum of prostitution history that happens to have crossed my path is a wonderfully folksy and unpolished little volume by a woman named Anne Seagraves, Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West<\/em> (Wesanne Publications, P.O. Box 428, Hayden, Idaho 83835, 176 pages, paperback, $11.95 postpaid and autographed).\u00a0 My partner, Helen, discovered this unpublicized gem of a book in a store at the Reno airport (of all places) and brought it home to me as an affectionate acknowledgment of my ongoing fascination with sex-for-money issues, culture, and practice.\u00a0 And what an utterly unique and delightful gem Soiled Doves<\/em> turns out to be.<\/p>\n I know as little about Anne Seagraves as the world knows about E. J. Bellocq, except that she lives somewhere in Idaho, looks like she could be anybody\u2019s very proper rural aunt or mother, and has written a number of other books about frontier women, with titles like High-Spirited Women of the West, Women Who Charmed the West, <\/em>and Women of the Sierra<\/em>.\u00a0 But if Soiled Dove<\/em>s is any indication, Seagraves is the kind of undogmatic, inherent feminist that has always been the real backbone of the movement for women\u2019s rights, the sort of woman\u2019s women who puts self-consciously politically correct, Feminist-with-a-capital-F sorts to shame, at least in my book.<\/p>\n Soiled Doves<\/em> is a collage of historical fragments, anecdotes, and tidbits about prostitution on the Western frontier, which is to say, about the culture of frontier women, period, since most of the women on the frontier before it was tamed, settled, and made safe for properly genteel women were indeed prostitutes.<\/p>\n To Seagraves, prostitution was very much a vibrant part of frontier culture and commerce, a part of the story of the West and a part of women\u2019s history that has been rudely obliterated as a result of its supposedly \u201cunseemly\u201d nature.\u00a0 \u201cThe \u2018soiled doves\u2019 and red light districts,\u201d she proclaims proudly, \u201cwere as much a part of the early West as the piles of mine tailings, canvas shacks and garish saloons that dotted the landscape….\u00a0 These colorful, if not socially acceptable, \u2018ladies\u2019, dressed in black silk stockings with scanty costumes [or] in elaborate gowns with jewels… brightened the drab frontier with their female chatter and drove the male population wild.\u201d<\/p>\n Frontier prostitutes, Seagraves notes, came West for the very same reasons that men did:\u00a0 in search of adventure and riches, or to escape the claustrophobic rules of the East.\u00a0 As far as Seagraves is concerned, these are brave, spirited women who deserve to have their stories told as richly and flamboyantly as the stories of their better known male counterparts.<\/p>\n And tell their stories she does, in excited and dramatic tones, whether the stories are triumphant or, more typically, tragic.\u00a0 Some of Seagraves\u2019s celebrated doves are shrewd businesswomen who built financial empires providing services to men in elegant surroundings, and who often went on to make generous contributions to their communities, establishing schools, churches, and hospitals with their garnished wealth.\u00a0 Others are flamboyantly rebellious and often self-destructive characters who lived wild and loved wild, took advantage of some while being taken advantage of by others, and who, more often than not, died penniless.\u00a0 Yet others are the legions of pathetically broken souls whose uncertain lives funneled steadily downward from early moments of high adventure through declining years of alcohol and physical abuse, to destitution or suicide.\u00a0 There are even the young girls bought from their parents in China and then sold to the highest bidder in California, condemned to brutal abuse for their entire lives.<\/p>\n Seagraves does not paint a pretty picture of frontier prostitution.\u00a0 She is certainly no romantic.\u00a0 But she does convey a sense of heroic appreciation for all these women, wise and foolish, exiled from even the bastard proprieties of the frontier, making their way while \u201ccaught in a situation over which they had no control.\u201d\u00a0 Women on the frontier, she notes sympathetically, \u201cwere offered only the most menial and lowest paid work.\u00a0 For a young woman who was all alone, over-worked and desperate, prostitution was the logical solution.\u201d<\/p>\n Although this book is neither sophisticated nor polished nor overtly ideological, it consistently puts its attention where socially conscious attention is due, pointing out the gender bias and cultural hypocrisy that prostitute rights advocates are constantly decrying.\u00a0 Seagraves notes, for example, that:<\/p>\n “although the madams were among the early entrepreneurs, historians often fail to recognize their significant contributions to the Western economy.\u00a0 These enterprising women, who played an important role within their communities, were never invited to join or attend a commercial club.\u00a0 They were not accepted by society, and, in most case, denied the protection of the law, due to their profession.\u00a0 [Yet] collectively their businesses employed the largest group of women on the frontier.\u00a0 They supplied a home for thousands of females who would otherwise have been forced to live on the streets.”<\/p>\n And further that:<\/p>\n “from the parlor house at the top of the profession, to the moral and physical decay of the streetwalker, the western prostitute always walked a lonely path.\u00a0 Although these women were considered immoral, it must be remembered that it was acceptable for a man to visit a prostitute, but the woman was condemned for being one.”<\/p>\n No academic tome, Soiled Doves<\/em> reads more like a collection of old family tales told on a winter night around a warm fire.\u00a0 Here is the story of Molly b\u2019Dam, the fiercely independent and universally adored madam of Murray, Idaho, who was known to nurse sick miners when they were ill, who was the one person with the courage to deal with the scourge of smallpox when it came to the town.<\/p>\n Here is the explanation of why houses of prostitution identify themselves red lights.\u00a0 (When men went to brothels, \u201cthey would leave their red lanterns outside so they could be located in case of an emergency.\u00a0 The madams soon realized that a red light was an excellent way to advertise, and the custom spread.\u201d)<\/p>\n Here is the story of how the Episcopal Church in Tombstone, Arizona, was built with money contributed by the towns madams, as was the church in Amarillo, Texas, that thereafter welcomed both the madam and her \u201cmodestly dressed\u201d prostitutes to pray in the house of the Lord each and every Sunday.<\/p>\n Famous names of the West play their parts in Seagraves\u2019s stories — ranging from Calamity Jane to Wild Bill Hickock to Bat Masterson to Wyatt Earp.\u00a0 But the real heroes are the women who have never made it into Western historical lore:\u00a0 Mammy Pleasant, San Francisco\u2019s \u201clady of mystery\u201d; Lottie John, the fallen woman of Bodie, California, crowned queen of the town masquerade ball until she removed her mask and revealed her true identity; Mattie Silks, the elegant queen of Denver\u2019s Holladay Street, \u201cthe wickedest thoroughfare in the West\u201d; Julia Bulette,\u00a0 the beloved prostitute of Virginia City, Nevada, whose murderer was so hated that he had to be escorted to the gallows by \u201cforty deputies and the National Guard;\u201d Mary Katherine Horony (\u201cBig Nose Kate\u201d), mistress of Doc Holliday and the only witness to the shootout at the O.K. Corral.<\/p>\n Soiled Doves<\/em> successfully mixes these tales of exceptional women with more mundane descriptions of the lives and conditions of the thousands of women who worked in the fancy brothels and elegant parlor houses, the volume brothels and the saloons, the lowly \u201ccribs\u201d and \u201chog ranches\u201d throughout the West.\u00a0 What emerges is a sympathetic, unglorified picture of women struggling uphill against gender and sexual bias, a piece of women\u2019s history and sexual history happily rescued from the silence of obscurity.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Avatar of Eros<\/strong><\/p>\n January 14th is the eighth anniversary of the death of Marco Vassi — Marco Ferdinand William Vasquez-d\u2019Acugno Vassi, to be exact — one of the great sexual explorers, pioneers, writers, and philosophers of what some are now calling the Golden Age of the Sexual Revolution, meaning the late 60\u2019s, the 70\u2019s, and the early 80\u2019s.<\/p>\n Marco, who with a characteristic lack of humility dubbed himself the Avatar of Eros, devoted his life to the Blakean principle of wisdom through excess.\u00a0 By the time he died, Marco claimed to have had sex with 1000 women and 2000 men.\u00a0 But that was the least of Marco\u2019s story.\u00a0 Marco, who was at once brilliant and idiotic, profound and trite, loving and abusive, was the ultimate lover of irony and contradiction, the ultimate coyote trickster, and thus the ultimate embodiment of the unfathomably complex life force we conveniently reduce to the word \u201csex.\u201d<\/p>\n Vassi\u2019s writing included 13 novels, hundreds of articles and short stories, as well as assorted plays and poems.\u00a0 Al Pacino got what I believe was his acting debut in one of Marco\u2019s plays, \u201cWhy Is a Crooked Letter,\u201d in 1967.\u00a0 Marco\u2019s novels, long out of print, are now available again, as a complete set from The Permanent Press.\u00a0 Several are more conveniently available from Masquerade Books.\u00a0 His memoir, The Stoned Apocalypse<\/em>, now also back in print, is a wonderful excursion through the erotic and psychedelic wonders of that window in time after the universal availability birth control and before the advent of AIDS.<\/p>\n Sometime after Marco learned that he had AIDS, while he was still in good physical health, he effectively committed suicide by walking around wintry New York in nothing more than shorts, catching pneumonia, and then secluding himself and refusing to answer his phone for several weeks.\u00a0 By the time friends discovered where he was, he was pretty far gone.\u00a0 He was taken to a hospital but it was clear pretty quickly that he was going to die.<\/p>\n Andrea Ossip, an important woman in Marco\u2019s life, grappled with the question of whether to sign a DNR (\u201cdo not resuscitate\u201d) form, meaning that if Marco went into respiratory arrest, no extraordinary measures would be taken to keep him alive.\u00a0 She held a paper from Marco asking that \u201cno heroic measures\u201d be taken to prolong his life, but she wanted the doctors to ask Marco directly what he wanted.\u00a0 Oddly, it was a first year resident who was sent to assess Marco\u2019s mental ability to decide for himself.<\/p>\n When the resident asked Marco if he wanted to live, Marco answered no.\u00a0 When the resident then asked Marco if he wanted to die, Marco again answered no.\u00a0 Undoubtedly he had a twinkle in his eye, since the resident had unwittingly identified Marco\u2019s quintessential dilemma.\u00a0 Prior to the pneumonia episode Marco had twice tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide directly, only to discover the obvious:\u00a0 that although he wanted to be dead, dying meant that he would have to kill his body, something he realized he was incapable of doing in so straightforward a manner.<\/p>\n The resident, entirely missing the irony, simply concluded that Marco was unable to understand the questions being put to him and was therefore incompetent to decide his fate.\u00a0 If it were one of Marco\u2019s novels, he would have written it exactly so.\u00a0 While Ossip tried unsuccessfully to get hospital administators to understand what the resident had not, Marco coded and was put on a respirator.\u00a0 He stayed connected to the machine for a week.\u00a0 On January 14, 1989, he died.<\/p>\n If he were alive today he would be 59.<\/p>\n January 10, 1997<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1997 David Steinberg<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n Photographing The Whores of Storyville<\/p>\n Nobody knows much about E. J. Bellocq, an unexceptional commercial photographer who lived in New Orleans shortly after the turn of the century. He took a lot of pictures of boats to pay the rent. He was an odd, indrawn, misshapen man, hydrocephalic and a dwarf. According to another […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comes-naturally","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}