Whore Stories (14 page)

In his new iteration as a Pentecostal minister, Swaggart has come forward to claim that the prophet Mohammed was a “pervert” and a “sex deviant.” Ever the hypocrite, this perverted con artist and would-be Christian asserts that gay marriage is an “abomination” and that if a gay person ever “looks at me like that” he plans to “kill him and tell God he died.” So things are actually pretty much as they were, I guess.

As for Debra, you can’t even track her down on Facebook or Linkedin, for Christ’s sake. Swaggart, now seventy-seven years old, continues to broadcast his
Jimmy Swaggart Telecast
to 104 countries around the world. God, why art thou so far from helping us, and from the words of our roaring? You’re not even listening, are you?

RAVEN O

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Performance artist; hustler

CLAIM TO FAME:
Being famous

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
New York

Be it ballet, traditional hula, or whoring, Raven O is a man of many talents. A one-time member of the pliable
Cirque du Soleil
, Raven O hit the streets of New York at age eighteen, a fresh-faced, Hawaiian Adonis, ready to conquer the world. About an hour or so later, Raven-O found himself addicted to crack and whoring himself, while go-go dancing at the now-defunct Limelight Club. In an interview with
OutinJersey.net
, Mr. O explains, “I began my career as a singer-actor-dancer and fell into whoring to pay for my drug habit,” but luckily for us, he adds, “where there is the elite, there are whores. Both worlds are one in the same. [sic] As I say in my show, everyone’s a whore one way or another.”

Proving his point, Raven O eventually hooked up with the likes of Keith Haring and Grace Jones, and joined that ethereal realm of the “artist” whose precise talents appear to lie primarily in their ability to consume vast quantities of cocaine, though who can forget Grace Jones’s stunning performance as “May Day” in the third-best James Bond 007 movie,
A View to A Kill
?

“It is a poor family that hath neither a whore nor a thief in it.”

—Proverb

Raven O’s prodigious talent, along with his remarkable networking skills, drew him out of New York’s druggy underbelly and put him on the path to regional stardom. Blessed with a beautiful voice and a willingness to showcase it while wearing devil horns and a cock ring, Raven O eventually wound up at the Box, a Lower East Side nightclub where confused frat boys go to be gay, but was once an interesting venue for performance art and celebrity sightings. There, he captivated audiences with provocative stage acts and an impressive boner. Talking to the
NY Press
, he elaborates:

When I was at The Box, we wanted to do a number to say “fuck you” to the press . . . to the Nirvana song “Rape Me.” When the curtain opened, my back was to the audience and I was completely naked. I decided to be completely erect, so when I turned around I was singing with a hard on. I’ve always been about going for it. Nothing’s off limits with me.

In 2010, Raven O’s one-man, off-Broadway production,
Raven O: One Night with You
, opened to critical acclaim, and then closed to critical acclaim. As of this writing, the artist is spending way too much time on Facebook: “I realize I don’t have a ‘job,’” writes Mr. O in a recent Facebook post, but he’s writing from Cannes, Ibiza, and London, and it’s hard to sympathize with that kind of frictional unemployment. Raven O nevertheless remains an electrifying performer and an accomplished vocalist, although I might add that it’s not really that daring to expose yourself if you are possessed of an outsized penis. Where is the fear?

NEAL CASSADY

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Merry Prankster; thief; oral historian

CLAIM TO FAME:
Inspiration to the Beats

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Pretty much anywhere “On the Road”; Mexico

If you could bottle up all the outrageous plaudits, moony remembrances, and bong-loaded questions surrounding the life and times and death and drugs of Neal Cassady, you would have a bottle filled with a pestilent clash of truth and myth, and it would most likely taste like gnatty communion wine and camphor. Let’s drink it!

That’s the kind of initiative a guy like Neal really would have appreciated—and the reason why nobody ever had a clue as to what in the smash he might be going on about. But it doesn’t matter. Neal Cassady was fast, beautiful, and real, and you were lucky enough just to have him gust through your groovy transom. Cassady was the inspiration for countless depictions of hipster-speak, gigolo swagger, blasted genius, and what Kerouac called the “energy of a new kind of American saint.” In fact, for the uninitiated, the character of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic,
On the Road
(still the standard-bearer of puff-puff-give hipster quips and New Age dharmic ooga-booga) was based entirely on Neal Cassady.

Born in 1926 in Salt Lake City, after Cassady’s mother died when he was only ten he was left with an alcoholic father, who eventually zigzagged the family across America to Denver, where Neal began a life of car thefts and prostitution in earnest. According to some, Cassady just couldn’t get enough sex, and the money was a nice perk for satisfying his satyriasis. Others attribute Neal’s flesh-life to his living purely “in the moment,” attracted to the basic urges of human functioning, led by what Kerouac dubbed his “enormous dangle.” Allen Ginsberg, completely and desperately smitten (Ginsberg and Cassady would remain occasional lovers for twenty years) wrote in his poem “Many Loves” that Cassady, “brought me to my knees/and taught me the love of his cock and the secrets of his mind.”

Neal was one of those visionaries who not only had a huge dong, but a huge intellect, as well. Even when money was not in short supply, Cassady would prostitute himself for “knowledge” and tutoring, writing once to Ginsberg that he slept with the poet only “as a compansation [
sic
] to you for all you were giving me,” which caused Ginsberg to call Cassady a “dirty, double-crossing, faithless bitch.” Lesson: You can take the man out of the dirty truck stop, but you can’t take the dirty truck stop out of the man.

Dad was right when he chastised, “Moderation in all things.” Too much of a good thing—including solo sex play—can turn
deadly
. Consider the story of Rev. Gary Aldridge, pastor of Montgomery, Alabama’s Thorington Road Baptist Church and one of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s bosom buddies. The holy man met a particularly diabolical end when, in 2007, police discovered his body “clothed in a diving wet suit, a face mask . . . a second rubberized suit with suspenders, rubberized male underwear. . . . There are numerous straps and cords restraining the decedent. . . . The hands are bound behind the back. The feet are tied to the hands. . . . There is a dildo in the anus covered with a condom.

Call me crazy, but wearing
two
wetsuits smacks of overkill.

Jack Kerouac would state that, for Neal, “sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life.” Indeed, Neal’s sexual appetite was so gargantuan that he was often forced (perhaps “forced” isn’t exactly the right word) to masturbate six or more times a day, in addition to his normal sex load. Neal Cassady was many things to many people. In “Howl,” Ginsberg writes of Cassady that he is the

secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too.

Today, Neal is still celebrated, venerated, and occasionally reviled as a crank and a druggie loser, but “The Holy Goof” serves as a veritable avatar for an entire generation of dispossessed Americans. Neal Cassady seemed to have done it all, and at the age of forty-two, he lay down on some train tracks outside of San Miguel de Allende and died, finally and completely beat.

BELLE DE JOUR

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Forensic pathologist; child health researcher

CLAIM TO FAME:
Blogstitute

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
London

For years the question remained: Who is this mysterious “Belle de Jour,” and does she take Diner’s Club? For the better part of the 2000s, the blogosphere was abuzz with chatter about
Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl.
The book is a wildly popular account of a hardworking British university graduate who ditches the daily grind for a life of gaping and rimming and occasionally beating the shit out of people for the low, low price of $400 (and sometimes maybe a little more) per hour. More bestselling books were to follow, including
The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl
, and
The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl
, and each was adapted into a hit TV series. But who was this duplicitous demimondaine?

In 2009, Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a forensic pathologist, child health researcher, and Yank no less, outed herself as the Belle de Jour. After years of speculation and threats from an ex-boyfriend, Dr. Magnanti succumbed to pressure and revealed that for fourteen months during her postgraduate studies at the University of Sheffield, she’d arched it for an escort service in order to pay for her studies, and she admitted to being the author of the bawdy blog. After an interview with the
Sunday Times
in which Magnanti revealed her true identity, she posted on the Belle de Jour blog:

It feels so much better on this side. Not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about. To be able to defend what my experience of sex work is like to all the skeptics and doubters. Anonymity had a purpose then—it will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on.

We all owe Dr. Magnanti, the Belle de Jour, an enormous debt of gratitude. Since revealing her identity, she remains active in research medicine, while continuing to address important issues relevant to the sex-trade industry. Through her blog and subsequent writings, she has been instrumental in dispelling puritanical myths about sex and pornography, and she has lobbied for sex education and the unbiased study of sexuality through science.

LUPE VÉLEZ

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Actress

CLAIM TO FAME:
Married Tarzan, died with her head in a toilet

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Mexico, Hollywood

Lupe Vélez is a difficult woman to get a grip on. Christened María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, sometime around 1908, her father was a strict military man who died when Lupe was in her early teens, while her mother appears to have been an opera singer, a prostitute, or both. Vélez was a difficult, rambunctious child, and for a time her parents sent her off to a convent school in Texas, which they expected would force her to reform. Lupe, however, would have none of it. According to Kenneth Anger’s sensational
Hollywood Babylon
, Lupe was a sex leviathan: “Whenever I see a man,” says Vélez, “there is something in here which must make me winkle my eyes at him…. When I cannot flirt with some mens, I get a fever.” You wonder what exactly Lupe meant by “winkle my eyes,” but you get the impression her temperature ran a pretty consistent 98.6°F.

After Lupe’s father died, young Lupe’s mother suggested her daughter carry on the family tradition. In his autobiography
Moving Pictures
, the Academy Award–winning screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg writes,

Lupe’s mother had been a walker of the streets. . . . Lupe herself had made her theatrical debut in the raunchy burlesque houses of the city. Stagedoor Juanitos panted for her favors and Mama Velez would sell her for the evening to the highest bidder. Her price soared to thousands of pesos.

Moreover, Anger, in
Hollywood Babylon
, calls Vélez, “the gyrating cunt-flashing Hollywood party girl.” Yeowch! Vélez was also known as “The Mexican Spitfire” and remembered as a pioneer who brought Latinos to the silver screen, advanced the feminist cause, and boned just about everyone in Hollywood. Gary Cooper? Check. In
Lupe Velez and Her Lovers
, author Floyd Conner quotes Vélez as saying “[Cooper] has the biggest organ in Hollywood but not the ass to push it in well.”). Errol Flynn? Check. Johnny Weissmuller, aka Tarzan the Ape Man? Check. And the list goes on.

Vélez’s first screen appearances were bit parts in Hal Roach comedies, but soon she found her niche onscreen as the recurring Mexican Spitfire; her character, like she herself, was vulgar, voluptuous, and occasionally violent. Of course, her act provided endless entertainment for those of the quasi-racist, moviegoing public who (like now) found the shortcomings and malapropisms of a vixen speaking English as a second language rather humorous. But offscreen, Lupe Vélez’s life was one of torment. In 1944, Spitfire found herself pregnant with the child of a B-list actor who rejected the idea of marriage. Devastated, Lupe made up her mind to kill herself. She arranged flowers and scented candles, and she went to get her hair and nails done—an elegant exit for an eccentric young woman. She took a lethal dose of barbiturates and wished her life away.