Whore Stories (4 page)

Aspasia was no milksop. She gave the finger to the bigotry and hatred directed her way, and like an ancient Greek whore Wonder Woman, Aspasia used her magic bracelets and/or perseverance to deflect criticism and emerge as one of the most celebrated figures of Classical Greece, blowing the minds and members of an elite group of philosophers and politicos, ranging from Plato and Socrates to Xenophon and Cyrus (the Younger, of Persia). After Pericles’s death from plague, Aspasia eventually remarried and settled down, managing to die at a relatively old age of something other than the plague—no small achievement back then.

FEBO DI POGGIO

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
High school

CLAIM TO FAME:
Michelangelo’s boy toy

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Sixteenth-century Italy

The painter Raphael claimed that Michelangelo was “lonely as a hangman.” Well, Michelangelo may have had some of the tortured artist in him, and he was certainly ugly as sin, but he was hardly lonely when it came to matters of the flesh. Michelangelo made sure that he always surrounded himself with young men of questionable account, but he took to one in particular: Febo Di Poggio.

Knowing the company Michelangelo kept, it should come as little surprise that the figures portrayed in
The Last Judgment
may have been inspired by his frequent jaunts to gay bordellos and Turkish baths. In fact, Elena Lazzarini, an art historian from Pisa University, asserts that the Sistine Chapel’s soaring fresco is just one giant celestial orgy. Author of the book,
Nudity, Art and Decorum: Aesthetic Changes in the Art of the 16th Century
, Lazzarini notes, “One of the damned is dragged down to Hell by his testicles, and amongst those who are blessed there are kisses and embraces, undoubtedly homosexual in nature.” Judge not, lest ye be judged, art lovers.

Febo was a wily young man-whore who served as Michelangelo’s model, mount, and muse for over a decade. “Up from the earth I rose with his wings, and death itself I could have found sweet,” Michelangelo writes of his “little blackmailer.” But Febo was a bit of a shit. After a spat, Michelangelo panicked and broke into verse in an attempt to win back his boy toy:

Naught comforts you, I see, unless I die;
Earth weeps, the heavens for me are moved to woe;
You feel of grief the less, the more grieve I.
O sun that warms the world where’er you go,
O Febo, light eterne for mortal eyes!
Why dark to me alone, elsewhere not so?

In response, Febo moved back in, “adopted” Michelangelo as his own father, and then proceeded to hook his daddy for money to buy all the new haute Medici styles and new-wave imports from Sicily. It makes you feel kind of bad for Michelangelo until you realize that he was one of the most famous artists and sculptors the world has ever known, so cry me a
Pieta
, Mike. In the end, Febo’s expensive habits and unspecified “betrayal” proved too much for Michelangelo, who ended the relationship by kicking Febo to the curb, then painting the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel with
The Last Judgment
. In a particularly ironic turn, a few equally boy-friendly (and typically intolerant) cardinals were outraged that Michelangelo included genitalia fit only for a “public-bath or tavern” in his masterful depictions of both the beautiful and the damned.

BAGOAS

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Slave

CLAIM TO FAME:
Alexander the Great’s backdoor man

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Persia, around the fourth century
B.C.

There’s nothing funny about a child being forced into slavery and prostitution, or being castrated, or having to endure getting raped repeatedly by a snot-slinging drunk Alexander the “Great.” In fact, it’s all extraordinarily nauseating. But despite enduring these horrors, Bagoas (the word
bagoas
means “eunuch” in Old Persian), the catamite slave of King Darius III of Persia and then Alexander, managed to make quite the impression on history.

“I took the oldest profession on Earth
and I did it better than anyone on Earth. Alexander the Great
conquered the world at 32. I conquered it at 22.”

—Heidi Fleiss

As told by Plutarch, Alexander fell for Bagoas (one wonders how Alexander’s wife, Roxane, took the news) upon watching a dance contest in the desert, in which the young boy was the hands-down winner, using that winning combination of
duende
and
pasodoble
. Alexander’s soldiers then dared Alexander to kiss the boy, which he did to great fanfare from the troops. Right in the middle of the desert the greatest army ever assembled was holding dance competitions and playing spin-the-scabbard games. If historical texts are to be believed, Bagoas and Alexander eventually grew to share a “mutual” love for one another—although you have to ask yourself, what choice did the poor kid have? Even Diogenes wrote Alexander to tell him what a degenerate he thought the young emperor was. All of Alexander’s officers went along with the addition of Bagoas to this desert disco, except for one man named Orsines, who, according to the historian Curtius in his
History of Alexander
, foolishly barked that he’d come “to honor the friends of Alexander, not his whores.” He went on to argue, “It was not the custom of the Persians to take males in marriage who had been turned into women for the sake of being fucked.”

Bagoas suffered much, but by this time he was done suffering fools. Upon hearing Orsines’s insults, the emasculated young man entreated with Alexander to hang Orsines from the highest tree, and Alexander took care of that somewhere on the way to conquering the known world. What’s more, Bagoas was appointed a member of the vaunted
trierarchs,
advisors who above all others had the ear (among other body parts), of Alexander in matters of politics, war, and civics. A political post seems small consolation for a life of castrated servitude, but one can hope Bagoas found happiness knowing he could always support himself by dirty dancing in the desert.

CAROL
“THE SCARLOT HARLOT”
LEIGH

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Poet; pioneer in women’s rights

CLAIM TO FAME:
Coined the term “sex worker”

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
San Francisco

Carol Leigh was born in New York City in 1954 to Trotskyite parents, whose subversive work in the garment business kept the family afloat. In her autobiographical collection
Unrepentant Whore
, Carol writes that from an early age, her parents taught her that “nonconformity was the loftiest state,” although her mother, also a pragmatist, advised, “Think for yourself and marry a doctor,” then promptly disowned her fifteen-year-old daughter for dating a
goyim
.

Leigh took the first part of her mother’s life coaching to heart, and seems to have thought to herself, “I think it’s time to start getting laid a lot.” It was 1967, and the sexual revolution was in full swing, offering Leigh the chance to realize her dreams of nonconformity and nudity. In another passage from
Unrepentant Whore
, she writes:

Prostitution came to me at the intersection of my needs and proclivities—my radical political bent, my feminism, my sexual curiosity, and a response to the stigma I already felt for engaging in premarital sex.

This doesn’t give us a particularly illuminating look into anything juicy, except the literary technique of stringing together overwrought pronouncements like John Cheever when they let him write while shit-faced. Indeed, Leigh studied under Cheever in Boston University’s graduate program in creative writing.

After a few false starts, like charging $5 for palm-jobs to creeps at a nude modeling studio and $25 for fellatio while “leaning on someone’s old Ford station wagon” outside of the Golden Banana Strip Club on amateur night, the Scarlot Harlot packed up her things and headed West. Perhaps she was heeding the legendary advice of Horace Greeley, or maybe she was just paying attention to less legendary advice from the local weatherman. “The blizzard of ’78 was the last straw,” she writes.

In September of 1978, the Scarlot Harlot burst onto the San Francisco massage parlor scene. Okay, fair; nobody has ever “burst” onto a massage parlor scene, but for this good little Jewish girl, the move was a sea change.

I took a job at a very seedy massage parlor. I figured they must be selling sex, because they certainly weren’t selling ambiance. I was immediately enamored of my friendly, beautiful co-workers, and my first trick was handsome and sweet. After work, I rushed home to look in the mirror. Now there’s a prostitute, I told myself. I hadn’t changed. I looked back across that line that had separated me from the old me, the good girl. The line had disappeared.

At the same time the Scarlot Harlot was hooking for all she was worth, she was also a fervent political activist. At a conference organized by Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media, she even coined the term “sex work,” and she was tireless in her efforts to promote various feminist causes. Today, Ms. Leigh, who still gives readings and “performances” as Scarlot Harlot, is a prominent spokeswoman for COYOTE, a sex workers’ rights organization; she also curates and directs the San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Video Festival, which sounds a lot like Cannes, but more nude.

JEFF GANNON

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
White House Press Corps reporter

CLAIM TO FAME:
“Spanorcing” himself from reality

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Washington, D.C.

It’s probably safe to assume that former White House press reporter Jeff Gannon had to maintain separate curriculum vitae. That is, of course, unless the following description/personal statement was the kind of thing the Dubya Bush White House was looking for from its press corps:

• Ex-USMC Jock: Available for hourly, overnight, weekend or longer travel—OUT ONLY!
  

• Personal Trainer: Safe-Sane-Strenuous-Satisfying workouts, Sports training, and competition, especially wrestling. . . .
  

• Big SPORTS Fan: Will go to the game with you, then take you home and. . . .
  

• AGGRESIVE, VERBAL, DOMINANT TOP
  

• I DON’T LEAVE MARKS. . . . ONLY IMPRESSIONS
  

That was Gannon as his alter ego, “Bulldog,” on
USMCPT.com
, one of the many gay escort sites featuring Gannon’s services when he was busy hammering home another, decidedly more conservative agenda, at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in the mid-aughts, or 2000s, or whatever the hell we decided to call that decade.

Why is it that so often the most vehement critics of homosexuals are other homosexuals pretending not to be homosexuals? It’s confusing to the public, rooted in self-loathing, and it makes you look like a perfect vermin. It also embarrasses the rest of us who are perfectly fine with you being all-gay, sometimes-gay, or just a little gay. And what’s really frustrating is when the hate-monger actually has a platform, like say a White House reporter.

Meet Jeff Gannon (real name James Guckert, which, he claims, is “too hard to pronounce”), hard-hitting gay male prostitute disguised as straight White House news reporter whose daily “questions” for the George W. Bush “administration” were so soft and odious they served as the journalistic equivalent of anal leakage. In 2006, Gannon, the White House shill, dropped this greaser to then-President Bush during a presidential press conference:

How are you going to work—you’ve said you are going to reach out to these people—how are you going to work with [Senate Democratic leaders] who seem to have spanorced themselves from reality?

That’s what we call quintessential softball journalism, folks. Luckily, Gannon does have
some
bona fides—otherwise we might have mistaken him for a White House plant. It turns out Gannon once worked as a journalist for Talon News, a website consisting of himself and Bobby Eberle, President of GOPUSA, a conservative action group. Now, Jeff Gannon knows all about two (or more) dudes in a room, but sorry—two dudes in a room does not a newsroom make. And still, day after day, Gannon was allowed into the White House to ask probing questions, and to spit out idiocies that may have included, “Would you like to have sex for $200/hr?”

Well, we’re sure that at least one such question was answered in the affirmative, as “The Bulldog,” offered more than reasonable rates for X-rated pics and sex services on numerous websites, including:
hotmilitarystud.com
,
militaryescorts.com
, and
militaryescortsm4m.com
. Just to be clear, neither Jeff Gannon, nor James Guckert, was ever in the military. In addition, records show that—even in a post 9/11 environment in which every booger that came and went from the White House was assuredly accounted for—Gannon was allowed free access with a fabricated name on his press credentials, often showing up even when there were
no
press conferences on the schedule.