This film! Gene Kelly, Red Skelton, and Lucille Ball (who is a most epic redhead in color, I have to say) star in this musical where a hat check boy busts his head and dreams he is Louis XV, and Lucy is his Madame Du Barry. Sex work is, obviously, never mentioned. I mean, this film was made in 1943 y’all, I’d be expecting quite a lot if I needed them to say she was what she was. But. BUT. Anyone who knows their Ho-story knows that Madame Du Barry was a Courtesan. Courtesans fucked for cash . . . among other things, obviously.
If she were still alive, radical feminist author and prostitute Valerie Solanas would celebrate her 75th birthday today. Instead, she died of pneumonia at a seedy Tenderloin hotel while she was a streetwalker in the late ’80s. If you’re not familiar, Solanas was most famous for the attempted murder of Andy Warhol in 1968 after he both rejected and lost the script for a play she had written and asked him to produce. The play, Up Your Ass, was discovered again after Solanas’ death and finally made it to the stage in 2000.
What I love her most for, though, is the SCUM manifesto, her 1968 anti-capitalism and anti-patriarchy treatise, which advocates for male gendercide and the establishment of an all-female society. Most of her readers today consider her advocacy of mass murder to be satire—Solanas has stated that it was not to be taken literally, but this was after she was imprisoned and institutionalized multiple times, so who really knows.
Did everyone else know this? Have I been in the dark? Apparently so because this interview didn’t seem to make waves at all, but when I read it I got legitimately creeped out by this legitimately creepy portrayal of a man who is, apparently, legitimately creepy.
It’s not even the beginnings as a “hillbilly” or him losing his virginity to a chicken that he later killed. It’s not even his anger at his mom’s alleged promiscuity that creeps me out. OK, that does creep me out, because I never understand how kids know about these things or how they come to the conclusion that it’s something they should be upset about.
This is an interview with well, a shell of a man. From what I have read about Mr. Flynt and his rage and his tantrums and feelings of entitlement, he seems to be all burnt out by this point. A lot of the first part of this centers on a description of him that bears witness to that: “Now he is lolling almost lifelessly in a chair. His head is barely able to look up at mine, and his hand is barely able to reach up to shake mine” or “His face is round and entirely unlined, making him appear to be a gigantic, gnarled baby.” Take your pick. Either way you end up with a huge version of this:
“Vampire Days,” a self-portrait by Leslie Feinberg on hir 60th birthday. (Photo via Feinberg’s Flickr account)
Trans/queer writer and socialist hero Leslie Feinberg died last week. The event rekindled my memories of squatting on the floor of Barnes and Nobles at the age of 17, reading the work zie’s1 most known for, Stone Butch Blues, a bildungsroman set in the lesbian working class bar scene during the Stonewall era. I was blown away by the novel and the way it brought together class politics, trans rights, and queer rights so explicitly. I’m not the only sex worker for whom the book was important. When I wrote to him about Blues, St. James Infirmary program director and sex working trans man Cyd Nova responded:
When I read Stone Butch Blues nine years ago I was just beginning to understand my gender as something other than female, while working as a stripper and seeing the club as the only place that I felt a sense of home…The way it illustrated feeling at odds with the world and the precise quality of needing to find a community who could guide you to your ultimate true self, navigating the path against the tide, was such an important read for me at that point…I would say that this book gave me some of building blocks to understand my desire to transition, before the internet was such a bastion of resources for trans folks.
In fact, my Facebook feed was awash with queer and trans sex workers linking to obituary pieces on Feinberg last week. So many of us could identify with hir writing about finding one’s people and working along with them in factories, bars, clubs, and the street to keep ourselves afloat. That’s why I was aghast at learning from The Toast that Stone Butch Blues is actually permanently out of print. (“How is that possible, when every dyke in America has at least two copies on her bookshelf?” inimitable Toast editor Mallory Ortberg opined.) But what I remembered most clearly was my rereading of the book in my mid-twenties, when I realized just how much of it was about valorizing femme sex workers as an integral part of the queer community.
When I came across (on tumblr) this old photo of a proud stripper, showing off her turquoise fringe satin jacket and the matching chaps that bare her French-cut tan lines, I had to know where and who it came from. These days, Rhonda B-Chaparro, aka Odd Artist, works more with melting and painting found plastic objects, but she used to have a business sewing exotic dance costumes.
