Authors: Tyler Stoddard Smith
THE SPANISH BARBARA
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
Fantasy fit rent-boy
CLAIM TO FAME:
Proudly enduring a humiliating execution under the Borgias
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Fifteenth-century Rome
Nobody knows from when or where the Spanish Barbara hailed. One can assume that “Spain” would be a safe guess, but in Borgia Rome, things were ass backward. With a regime that bore more resemblance to a donkey show than a papacy, the Borgias spent many afternoons having enemies of the church burned at the stake all over town, in between sundry orgies and flesh buffets. Luckily for us, a social climbing Alsatian named Johann Burchard was a first-rate chronicler of the era, and provides whorestorians with a trove of haunting anecdotes that illustrate the unspeakable cruelty committed by the papacy. In 1498, Burchard records a harrowing tale of one pioneering transvestite prostitute who stood excruciatingly nude before the draconian Borgia despots.
The whore in question was indeed “The Spanish Barbara,” and his hellish fate is one Abraham Lincoln might have attributed to something he never called, “the shittier angels of our nature.” The following is from Burchard’s
Liber Notarum
, his exhaustive diary recounting the Borgias’s daily debaucheries:
An honest prostitute, named Cursetta, had been thrown into prison because she had a Moor as a friend who went around in women’s clothing under the name of the Spanish Barbara. . . . As a punishment for this outrage, [they] were led around together through the city … the Moor in a woman’s dress . . . in order that everybody might see his private parts and recognize the fraud he had perpetrated.
Can you imagine the daring, the unbridled nerve it would take to be a black tranny prostitute in Borgia Rome? Neither can I. And I also can’t believe that the Spanish Barbara’s client list wasn’t already aware of the “fraud” he had perpetrated. You can just see it:
“Hey, Vito! Do you remember Barbara, that smoking hot Spanish prostitute? Yeah, the one with the penis. Well, you’re never going to believe this—I saw him/her burned at the stake today and guess what? She’s actually a black African
man
. What do you mean ‘how didn’t I know?’”
In another tremendous entry to his
Liber Notarum
, Burchard describes an orgy that’s referred to affectionately as “The Dance of the Chestnuts,” and reveals the scope of indulgences (of all variety) going down on a typical Sunday night at the Borgia’s apostolic palace: “Chestnuts [were] strewn about, which the prostitutes, naked and on their hands and knees, had to pick up as they crawled in and out amongst the lampstands. Finally, prizes were offered—silken doublets, pairs of shoes, hats and other garments—for those men who were most successful with the prostitutes.”
Damn. Some popes have all the fun.
It’s awfully curious how one can become inured to violence and torture. Take Guantanamo Bay, Torquemada, and Houston Astros baseball. People come to expect the lowest common denominator, and Burchard was no different. His depiction of the following horrors committed against the Spanish Barbara and his fellows is almost clinical:
The Moor was put in prison, and finally led . . . together with two other brigands with a Sbirre [a Roman policeman] riding before them on an ass carrying on the point of a stick two testicles, which had been cut out from a Jew because he had had intercourse with a Christian woman. . . . The Moor was placed on a pile of wood, and was killed on the pole of the gallows. . . . Then the pile was lighted, but on account of a downpour of rain it did not burn well and only his legs were charred.
Are you fucking kidding me? Somewhere, there should be a monument to the memory of the Spanish Barbara, an enduring reminder of the suffering and revolutionary spirit exhibited by one of history’s great iconoclasts. Well, that somewhere is my kitchen, and that monument is gradually emerging from these mashed potatoes in front of me, which I am sculpting to create an effigy of the Moorish transvestite prostitute at the gallows.
I apologize. I hadn’t anticipated that my inurement to violence and torture would kick in so soon. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve eaten mashed potato Spanish Barbara and will strongly consider writing a letter to Rome to see about a real statue, assuming I’m not too inured to sloth to do so.
MILLY COOPER
PRO
FILE
DAY JOBS:
Prostitution,
éminence grise
CLAIM TO FAME:
The oldest whore alive
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
London; Las Vegas
“Life,” wrote William Butler Yeats, “moves out of a red flare of dreams into a common light of common hours, until old age bring the red flare again.” And sometimes, old age bring not only the red flare again, but the red
light
again. In 2011, the
Daily Mail
reported that ninety-six-year-old Milly Cooper was still making around $80,000 a year working as a prostitute.
Well, go ahead and laugh, but Ms. Cooper’s slow thighs still command top dollar for those of us slouching toward Bethlehem heavy into old-school, or just kind of curious about what it would be like to have sex with a person born prior to Prohibition. But Cooper’s tale is far from over and one that begins on the other side of the Atlantic.
“In America you can get away with murder, but not with sex.”
—Xaviera Hollander
A scrappy woman from London’s East End, Milly Cooper met a wealthy American man who soon translated her to Las Vegas, where she found work as a showgirl. The happy couple had a child together, but then in 1945, her beau was killed in action during World War II, leaving Cooper destitute and stuck in Vegas. There are a frustratingly finite number of activities one can do to scrape by in Vegas, and the easiest is probably rolling drunks or selling dope. After that, the allure and convenience of call-girling probably seemed like the next logical step for an Englishwoman in the sexual slot machine that was postwar Sin City.
What makes Cooper’s career so remarkable is the fact that it has endured for so unbelievably long. Despite what must have been a stultifying whoring hiatus while married to an accountant from 1955 to 1979, Cooper eased back into the game and has been going strong ever since. Today, Cooper meets with her clients twice a week (sessions run around $1,250), a robust business for any nonagenarian, especially one who opts for boingo over bingo. Cooper claims to have serviced over 3,500 satisfied customers whose ages run the generational gamut, with Johns ranging from 29 to 92. Of course, Cooper does have some harsh venom to spit about the direction the business has taken over the past century. In particular, the competition today disgusts her. According to Ms. Cooper:
Nowadays, the girls have vast boobs and skinny bodies and parade around half-naked. In my day, we would call those girls “trollops.” The industry’s become mucky. At least I am maintaining standards. I always dress elegantly and my clients are gentlemen.
Prostitutes today! There was once a time when America had some dignity.
THE PAINTED WOMEN
PRO
FILE
DAY JOBS:
Prostitution, mostly
CLAIM TO FAME:
Models and muses to some of the great art and artists of all time
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Spain; France; most of Europe
If it weren’t for prostitutes, we’d be deprived of some of our most cherished artwork. Perhaps it is the prostitutes’ willingness to appear nude for long periods of time that make them such popular canvas characters for artists. Whatever the reason, our art history illustrates a long-standing affair between many of our most celebrated painters and their sultry, street-jiving subjects. It’s high time we meet some:
Rosa La Rouge
The ginger-headed Rosa was the favorite model of Toulouse-Lautrec. Rosa is the prostitute who is pictured in Toulouse-Lautrec’s haunting
À Montrouge
(1886–87). She stands in a doorway with a menacing countenance of curiosity—or is it disgust? It could be disgust over the fact that she was asked to keep her clothes on for
À Montrouge
. Or, she could be curious as to whether or not she’d given Toulouse-Lautrec syphilis, which she had.
Victorine Meurent
There remains great debate as to whether or not the model for many of impressionist painter Edouard Manet’s masterworks was a prostitute. For many years, the subject of Manet’s universally known
Olympia
and
Le déjeuner sur l’herbe
was said to have ended up shit-faced in a brothel, dying young of the syphilis that would afflict Manet. In the end, it was discovered that Victorine was an accomplished painter in her own right—her work was accepted to the Paris salon in 1876, a year when Manet failed to make the cut. How do we account for this sin of omission? Sexism, mostly. God forbid a
coquette
knows her way around anything more artful than a cock. I’d like to see
you
try and make a living as an eighteen-year-old female painter in Paris in the 1860s without pawning your parts. Trust me, it’s near to impossible, no matter what knowledge and equipment you’ve brought from the future.
The Young Ladies of Avignon
While it’s disconcerting how one young lady’s vagina is creeping up and seems to be eating her belly button, not to mention the rhombus nose located on another demoiselle’s knee and the ominous googley eyes of them all, staring at us like a Euclidian train wreck, this piece remains a masterpiece of modern whore art. In Picasso’s legendary
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
the ladies of the night are actually pretty sexy, although the
racoleuses
do carry eyes too wise for young women, and one in particular appears to have a hair weave. Sometimes considered the seminal work that pushed the art world into “modernism,” according to noted art critic John Berger,
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
continues to endure because of its “shock” value. Berger writes in
The Success and Failure of Picasso
that:
A brothel may not in itself be shocking. But women painted without charm or sadness, without irony or social comment, women painted like the palings of a stockade through eyes that look out as if at death—that is shocking.
I disagree. What is shocking is not the creepy memento mori aspect of the piece. What is shocking is the figure squatting in the lower-right corner of the canvas that appears to be a naked man with a sunburned crotch wearing an African tribal mask. One assumes the actual young ladies of Avignon were better represented in person, as one look at this masterpiece makes one wonder how Avignon ever got
any
revenue from horny revelers on holiday.
ASPASIA
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
Hetaira
CLAIM TO FAME:
“First Lady of Athens”
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Classical Athens
Born in Ionia around 469
B.C.
, Aspasia, “The First Lady of Athens,” lover of Pericles, the only woman invited to the tailgate at the death of Socrates, member of the fabled
hetaira
(a kind of Greek sorority of nympho call girls) and ardent feminist, has been described alternately as (1) one of the most beautiful and educated women of her era, a gifted diplomat, speech writer, rhetorician, and real boogie-down in the bedroom; and (2) a gold-digging whore who was responsible for the Peloponnesian War, God bless her. What is it with the Greeks blaming women for their wars?
Read from Aristophanes’s play,
The Archarnians
:
Some young drunkards go to Megara and carry off the courtesan Simaetha; the Megarians, hurt to the quick, run off in turn with two harlots of the house of Aspasia; and so for three whores Greece is set ablaze. Then Pericles, aflame with ire on his Olympian height, let loose the lightning, caused the thunder to roll, upset Greece and passed an edict, which ran like the song, “That the Megarians be banished both from our land and from our markets and from the sea and from the continent.
Nice going,
Aspasia
. You’ve ruined Christmas—again. The truth is, Aspasia was a well-bred girl from neighboring Miletus, but she was beset by that enduring confederacy of audible feces:
player
haters
.
“It’s easy to fool the eye but it’s hard to fool the heart.”
—Al Pacino
Soon after her arrival in Athens, Aspasia became initiated into the
hetaira
, that sexy sorority of courtesans. Hearing rumors around town of a free-loving, liberated female with a nice, fat fanny, none other than Pericles, the leader of democratic Athens, stopped over to see Aspasia for himself. Pericles’s and Aspasia’s ensuing relationship provoked the scandal du jour in Athens, not because Pericles ditched his wife and two kids to shack up with Aspasia, which he did, but more because Aspasia assumed equal rights as a citizen of Athens. You can image the backlash.