Authors: Tyler Stoddard Smith
Anne de L’Enclos, born in Paris in 1620, came into a family divided. Her father was a broke nobleman, a neo-Epicurean, lute-playing, early hippie who encouraged “Ninon,” as he called her, to pursue an even more dubious career than his own. This fatherly advice didn’t jibe well with Ninon’s mother, a devout Catholic and a yawn who was trying mightily to bring up her daughter according to the austere and arbitrary moral codes of the Counter-Reformation. Fortunately for history, Ninon listened to her father. She mastered the lute and embraced wholeheartedly the four tenets of Epicureanism:
That pleasure which produces no pain is to be embraced.
That pain which produces no pleasure is to be avoided.
That pleasure is to be avoided which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain.
That pain is to be endured which averts a greater pain, or secures a greater pleasure.
Translation: Let’s slip into something naughty.
As luck would have it Ninon’s beloved father had to hightail it after getting his ass handed to him in a duel. Ninon was left to fend for herself in a convent, from which she escaped after a year for fear she was losing out on the party. But let us be clear about this, Ninon was not just a ditzy party chick; she was Mensa material and could outwit and out-culture you to the point of embarrassment, or orgasm. She was also fluent in half a dozen languages, a skilled musician, and particularly taken with the progressive philosophy of that old moth in the moral molasses, Montaigne.
During her reign in Paris, she was known as “Mademoiselle Libertine,” open and willing to do anything that bumped up hard against the sexual mores of the day, while writing some of the most compelling philosophical tracts of the era. She befriended the dramatists Molière and Racine, and her bedroom talents were reserved for “men of rank and station or of high talents.” But it wasn’t a trick pelvis or some honeysuckle-scented homemade lubricant that kept the men coming back to Ninon. It was her complete familiarity with the best techniques for bursting every sinful cyst of desire, for anticipating every nascent want—conscious or unconscious—that festers in a red-blooded man.
In a letter to one of her
paramours
, a dense Marquis, Ninon is forced to elaborate because it just isn’t sinking in with this titled buttplug. She writes:
It is women who have taken upon themselves to dissipate these mortal languors by the vivacious gayety they inject into their society, by the charms they know so well how to lavish where they will prove effectual. A reckless joy, an agreeable delirium, a delicious intoxication, are alone capable of awakening your attention, and making you understand that you are really happy; for, Marquis, there is a vast difference between merely enjoying happiness and relishing the sensation of enjoying it. The possession of necessary things does not make a man comfortable; it is the superfluous which makes him rich, and which makes him feel that he is rich.
The “superfluous” could be anything from like a hand job to a jet ski, in case you’re wondering.
QUEEN SEMIRAMIS
PRO
FILE
DAY JOBS:
Socialite; queen
CLAIM TO FAME:
Hanging Gardens of Babylon honoree; pioneer in the use of eunuchs
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Assyria
Most of what we know about Queen Semiramis is from a Hellenic writer named Ctesias. Ctesias is famous for writing a bunch of semi-plausible “histories,” one of which is called the
Assyriaká
, which recounts the tale of Queen Semiramis, an ample hussy who married King Ninus, the founder of Ninevah.
Ctesias tells us that Semiramis was born in a city called Ascalon, next to a big lake full of fish. One of these fish had the head of a woman, so she was very much the big deal around town. Her name was Derceto, and she was a ghetto mermaid who wound up pissing off Aphrodite. The Goddess uses her mysterious powers to help Derceto jump the bones of a Syrian peasant, thereby causing the young woman to turn up pregnant, shamed, and pissed. Derceto kills the baby daddy, and she leaves the newborn Semiramis out on some rocks to die. Derceto then jumps into the sea. But a bevy of public-spirited doves “nurtured the child in an incredible and miraculous manner,” and thus kept Semiramis alive.
All right, meat-crease
, our more discriminating readers might say,
you’ve obviously put this Shama-semi-rami-dingdong piece in the wrong section. What kind of historical document has part-fish sluts and babies fed by doves and then all-of-a-sudden Aphrodite shows up?
Please. This account doesn’t reflect the airtight logic of the Bible in which Men are Men, Women are Women, and in Mark 5:10, pigs turn into demons. Okay, two out of three ain’t bad.
Let’s try another story. This one is recounted by an anonymous eleventh-century writer in Harriet Brien’s
Queen Emma and the Vikings: Power, Love, and Greed in Eleventh-Century England
. In this iteration, we learn of a paradoxical Semiramis, a call girl who is so picky that she only goes for gods and planets (if you’re Roman), but who will endure the indignity of her main john, Zeus (Jupiter), insisting that he morph into a bull for their hourly sessions. No matter. Semiramis took sex columnist and activist Dan Savage’s advice to be “Good, Giving, and Game” (GGG) to new heights, or depths—it’s hard to decide which. Here’s our Norman scribe:
What prostitute in the whole world could have been more debased? His dewlaps make her purple robes seem worthless, in the green grass Semiramis learns to low, under a young moon [she] delights[in] the bull’s mounting.
First of all, it’s great that Zeus has dewlaps. Secondly, don’t you get the impression the writer is maybe just a bit jealous? I mean, it’s Zeus, for crying out loud. And the bull thing? Well, it’s like my dad always yells, “Ah, just eat it! It all goes down the same hole anyway.” I never knew what that meant, and like Semiramis, the beasty-prosty from Babylon, Mt. Olympus, Cleveland—wherever—her meaning and cryptic origins are ripe for endless speculation.
For instance, The
Assyriaká
may have Semiramis confused with a queen called Shamuramat who lived around 800
B.C.
How this mix-up might have occurred, we have no idea. Okay, I have no idea. Does it matter? The point is that in the always-entertaining clash that occurs when East meets West, things get lost in translation. For some, Semiramis remains a sacred prostitute goddess, for others, a bull-banging creep; and still for others, she’s the inspiration for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Dante, in Canto V of
Inferno
describes her as an
Empress of many tongues [sweet]. With the vice and luxury she was so broken, that she made lust and law alike in her decree, to take away the blame she had incurred. She is Semiramis, of whom we read that she succeeded Ninus, and was his spouse. She held the land which the Soldan rules. The other is she who slew herself in love, and broke faith to the ashes of Sichaeus.
Sichaeus? Soldan? Ninus? Who are these people? Dante is not the only one confused by this tale. Egyptians worshipped Semiramis as Isis, Babylonians called her Ishtar, the Israelites called her Ashtoreth, she hooked as Isi in India, and the list goes on. Perhaps we should just pick one myth and stick with it.
HAWK KINCAID
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
Slam poet
CLAIM TO FAME:
Founder of
Hook
magazine, a publication for male sex workers
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
New York City
It’s true that for some of us, slam poetry remains an enigma, if not the arts and entertainment equivalent of mouth herpes. Why are these poets so peripatetic on the stage? And have you ever seen so many white people with dreadlocks? If you’re going to rap, let us hear some music. And stop making hand gestures that mimic shooting a gun while spouting what you hope will pass for slant rhymes about your devastating breakup sophomore year at Amherst—the disconnect is too great. No one is moved.
On the other hand job, if you get a poet up on the mic who has actually endured some real-world experiences, the poetry slam can take on a decidedly different timbre. Hawk Kincaid is this kind of poet. Born in Illinois, Hawk was a chubby, red-headed kid, who, in an interview with author and activist David Henry Sterry, cops to “terrible memories of getting hard-ons in church.” So I guess it’s not just the priests.
Now, what “made” Hawk a prostitute isn’t a particularly unusual or compelling story. What is compelling is Hawk’s contribution to the improvement of sex worker culture, through
Hook
, an e-zine for and about the male sex trade (
www.hookonline.org
), and his slam poetry performances, which are not riddled with the usual doggerel about thug life at Choate. Hawk has played the game and he knows it well. In fact, Hawk is one of those rent-boys who managed to get a grip on that ever-dangling carrot of the business world—the
niche
market. His milieu was known as B&E, and involves being paid to break in to a paying customer’s home, tie him up, then sex the nonsense out of him. Hawk recounts his ass antics with clinical detachment:
Bondage was definitely my thing. And spanking, paddling and abuse. I preferred bondage, though, because I could tie them up and leave for a bit, come back and be mean, hit them and then leave. Low maintenance.
Do not judge this man too harshly, however. Hawk maintains that all that beating the crap out of folks was just taking care of business. “My real identity is more cuddly and fuzzy. I am softer than I let on, especially when working,” he says. That’s refreshing. Indeed, we can see Hawk’s tender side in his verse. One needs only to peruse Kincaid’s ode to ass equations, “Anal Geometry,” which essentially articulates the prostipoet’s wish to give nice people larger penises than scoundrels.
“The whore and gambler, by the state Licensed, build the nation’s fate.”
—William Blake, English poet, mystic
Using this logic, the nicest person in the world could sport a 75-foot-long penis. This sounds a bit unwieldy to me, but who are we to mine the mind of mathematics? Whether he’s breaking into your house to fuck you, or just stopping by to drop poetry and knowledge and maybe other things on that ass, Hawk Kincaid is a talented artist and a pioneer in bringing male sex work issues and information to the people who need it.
Chapter IV
SURPRISE STREETWALKERS
What could be more satisfying than discovering that many of your idols, at some point in their ultra-glamorous careers, were compelled to do a little whoring? This storied crew does not disappoint. From rock stars to revolutionaries to Roseanne Barr (WTF?), history is riddled with accounts of our most venerated figures going horizontal to keep the heat on. The road to hell is paved with untapped talent, but no one in this group ever gave up. They all bared their flesh to ensure a place in the pantheon, and then they bared their souls about what they did to get there. Be surprised. Be very surprised . . .
AL PACINO
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
Thespian
CLAIM TO FAME:
Perennial Oscar contender (1 win); screaming some of the most famous lines in cinema
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Sicily
Dog Day Afternoon
,
The Devil’s Advocate, Scent of a Woman
,
The Insider, Sea of Love
. . .
Cruising
? Perhaps it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that at one time, the uber-actor Al Pacino made his daily bread by slanging himself as a sexual
spazzino
on the island of Sicily. That’s right, before the accolades and before his acting “style” devolved into either whispering or screaming his lines, Pacino the prostitute was a lead role.
In the 1980 flop
Cruising
, Al Pacino plays a sexually confused NYPD undercover officer out to catch a serial killer terrorizing the Meatpacking District, specifically the call-boy community. Pacino may have drawn heavily from his gigolo days in Sicily to prepare for the role (in which he goes under covers to go undercover), though if he did, who knew the halcyon days of Palermo were full of so much fisting, amyl-huffing, and whatever that tempo-thrashing “dance” is Pacino insists on doing during the disco scene?
Born in 1940 in New York City, young Alfredo grew up on the rough streets of east Harlem, mostly acting like an asshole, flunking his classes, dropping out of high school, his application to the famed Actors Studio rejected. But did Pacino give up? Hell no. “I’ll show
you
out of order!” he surely yawped, as he packed up, moved to Sicily, and suggested that anyone willing to pay might enjoy saying hello to his little friend.
Pacino revealed in a 2009 interview in the
San Francisco Chronicle
that “at 20, I lived in Sicily by selling the only asset I had—my body. An older woman traded food and housing in return for sex. I woke mornings not really loving myself.” We all know the feeling: You’re a twenty-year-old flesh peddler, you’re living in Sicily
shtupping
a bronzed, well-seasoned Mediterranean woman who pays you for it, and you feel like the whole world is conspiring against you. It’s like
Serpico
, without the beard and the hole in the head. But bedding down with elderly Sicilian women who pay you and keep you in cigarettes, alluring as it may be, does not get you your Broadway break, much less the iconic Hollywood roles for which Pacino would come to be known.