Whore Stories (5 page)

Are we implying that Gannon actually serviced members of the White House staff? Well, why the hell not? It would be suspect if you found out that a reporter visited the White House more than 200 times in two years, eluding even the Secret Service, who often lost track of him (they have dozens of records of him exiting without entering and vice-versa), so there is speculation that, in addition to his job playing journalist, his little side biz may also have enjoyed some success in the
Whore House
White House.

“People criticize me for being a Christian and having some of these questionable things in my past,” says Gannon/Guckert. Look, “Bulldog,” we don’t criticize you for being a Christian and having some of these questionable things in your past. We criticize you for being an asshole and having some of these questionable things in your past.

LIU RUSHI

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Painter, poet, politico

CLAIM TO FAME:
Ming dynasty must-have for the discriminating john

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
China

Liu Rushi (1618–1664) was patient, and to a degree, lucky. During the Ming dynasty China was a place where, despite being a hooker, you could rise through the ranks in the art world without buttinsky gallery owners talking about how featuring a solo show by a local whore might compromise the integrity of their establishment. Sort of. You were also a slave, and you had to sit still while someone wrapped your rotting, infected feet up so tightly that the bones cracked, rendering you virtually immobile: Foot binding was/is one of the more sinister and nauseating fashion trends perpetrated against women since the advent of behaving like a dick.

But Liu Rushi was also a gifted poet, not just some prostitute with a flair for iambic pentameter, a peculiar rhythm, indeed, to anyone accustomed to the beat of traditional Chinese poetry. In fact, Liu Rushi became the most famous prostitute China has ever known and one of its more revered poets and artists to boot. She possessed great beauty and a talent with the quill and scroll, and the girl knew how to party. This is the kind of crossover appeal people like Gore Vidal, Ke$ha, and Dog the Bounty Hunter would kill for. But Liu was different.

Not much is known of her early life, though it’s sometimes hypothesized that a scholarly family educated her before selling her into slavery. After countless business “transactions,” Liu finally found herself with enough money to buy her freedom, and having a prodigious talent for art, poetry, and sex, she took on the role of courtesan to members of the
Jishe
, a kind of literary group. The
Jishe
was full of talented men, the Chinese intelligentsia, but Liu Rushi shamed those sorry bitches. She became a de facto member of the
Jishe
herself, then moved on to higher art and higher artists.

Enamored of the poet Qian Qianyi’s verse, Liu went to his place dressed as a man. Qian was a married man, so you can understand the courtesan’s need for discretion. It never looks good when your country’s most famous prostitute comes knocking at the door looking foxy and holding in her hot little hand a bag of the most erotic poetry anyone’s seen in years.

Qian Qianyi was so moved by the poetry of this “man,” that he thought, “What the hell? Nobody’s perfect,” and brought Liu on as sort of a second “wife”
before
she even revealed herself to be a woman. Mrs. Qianyi must have been
steamed
. It couldn’t have helped the family dynamics that Qian was fifty-nine and Liu a fecund twenty-four.

Liu continued with her art and her poetry, and she became extraordinarily skilled at calligraphy, as well. She also delved into politics, becoming an expert on military matters. When the Manchus took control in 1645, Liu advised her now-husband Qian, a Ming minister of the court, to kill himself by jumping in the river as a form of protest. In response her husband offered the compelling arguments that the water was too cold and he couldn’t swim, so Liu went back to scheming how best to restore glory to the Ming dynasty. She refused to accompany her husband to the new Qing court in Beijing, and spent the rest of her life dedicated to the Ming loyalist movement and creating timeless poetry and prose.

Unfortunately, the rest of her life ended with Liu Rushi taking her own advice, but being a strong swimmer, she opted to hang herself for the “cause,” one of the more loathsome political strategies ever and a significant loss for art no matter the meter of your verse.

SALLY SALISBURY

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Eighteenth-century streetwalker

CLAIM TO FAME:
B-list celebrity; tabloid darling

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
London

There wasn’t a whole lot of opportunity for upward mobility in London during the early eighteenth century, especially for women. One did what one could to make ends meet, including occasionally schtupping prominent politicians and statesmen. A young woman growing up in “The Square Mile,” as London City was once called, had it particularly hard. Apprenticed to a seamstress, Sally Salisbury (born Sarah Pridden around 1690) fell out of favor with her employer and turned to selling raunchy brochures on the streets of London. These proved quite the draw about town. One assumes the real appeal of the pamphlets lay not in the articles, but in the illicit sexual arrangement implied by paying way too much for a crumpled piece of paper.

Sally managed to parlay her pamphlet business into a chance to consort with some of the biggest names in England, including the Duke of Richmond and, purportedly, a young King George II. She soon made a small fortune as a courtesan/prostitute and was living the relatively lavish lifestyle of a B-list celebrity, until a funny thing happened on the way to the opera.

John Finch, the brother of Lord Finch and son of the Countess of Winchelsea promised to bestow upon Sally some excellent opera tickets in exchange for a romp at the Three Tuns Tavern on Chandos Street in Covent Garden. Sally agreed, though wary that once you start accepting vouchers and coupons for sex, you’ve compromised your operation. Unfortunately, Sally was later humiliated by Finch, who decided the classy thing to do would be to give the tickets to Sally’s sister. Well, hell hath no fury like a whore cheated out of her opera tickets, and in the ensuing melee, Sally Salisbury pulled a knife, used it, and was charged with murder.

A letter from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to the Countess of Mar describes the event with a flourish:

In a jealous pique [Salisbury] stabbed him to the heart with a knife. He fell down dead immediately, but a surgeon being called for, and the knife drawn out of his body, he opened his eyes, and his first words were to beg her to be friends with him, and kissed her.

That’s right, he kissed her. Sally was tried for murder and acquitted, but ultimately convicted of assault, fined 100 pounds, and sentenced to a year in prison. Sadly for Sally, and legions of randy London swells, shortly after arriving to serve out her sentence, she fell victim to a “brain fever brought on by debauch,” which sounds like a badass way to go out, but was probably just syphilis.

MARKUS BESTIN

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
U.S. Marine

CLAIM TO FAME:
First legal male prostitute to work in a brothel

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Nevada; online

Markus Bestin is a strapping former marine who once commanded $300 an hour at the Shady Lady Ranch brothel, thus laying claim to the title of first legally working male prostitute in America. Born in Alabama in 1984, Markus (his real name is Patrick) was keenly aware of the prejudice and bigotry embedded in the darkest reaches of the Southern psyche. And, like the civil rights warriors who came before him, Markus felt a need to pop the clutch and push through a penile paradigm shift. His quest was to make the world show some respect for the rent boys.

When Markus opened for business he did make one thing clear: “My sphincter is not for sale.” He also made the lame announcement that he would prefer to be called a “surrogate lover” rather than a “prostitute.” Markus faced daunting resistance, but he persevered. When asked on ABC’s
Nightline
about the significance of his groundbreaking new job, Markus responded:

Basically this is the first time in the economy of the United States that a male has actually stood up and said, “I want to do this for a living.” And be protected under law to do it. It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman … or what Gandhi did when he had a sit-down protest against the British Embassy. And I’m doing the same.

Rosa Parks? Gandhi? Really? Those comparisons are about as monstrously inaccurate as an analogy can get. Markus Bestin was many things to many people—but his paltry, self-serving efforts required nowhere near the courage, and they had nowhere near the significance of Rosa Parks’s or Gandhi’s, although presumably he’s better in the sack.

However, the maverick man-ho is showing a measure of perseverance. While his tenancy at the Shady Lady was short lived, he’s now found a home on the Internet—where else? You can find him listed under “Bahamute,” or Model #1679 on
www.xxxfilmjobs.com
, which is a kind of
myspace.com
for desperate porn stars and would-be trailblazing civil rights advocates who think their mistranslated tattoos are life-affirming Chinese maxims but are usually just Szechuan lunch menu specials.

MINEKO IWASAKI

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Plaintiff; memoirist

CLAIM TO FAME:
Basis for the main character in critically acclaimed novel,
Memoirs of a Geisha

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Kyoto

Every year in Japan, a select few women go through the
misedashi
(literally, “open for business”), which is a kind of debutante ball for whores. But in Japan, they’re not called whores. They’re called
geisha
. Geisha, mind you, are not common prosties—think of them as Eastern courtesans, sexual samurais, really. Geisha have been a source of Japanese entertainment for centuries. These alabaster-faced beauties have their origin in the
saburuko
, or “serving girls,” who emerged around the seventh century. They were typically wandering girls displaced by war and strife. The popularity of these young women grew until members of the nobility were offering them a home in exchange for performing sexual and sometimes intellectual favors. Some geisha even went on to serve emperors as concubines, occupying important positions of wealth, power, and reverse-cowgirl. And it was on February 15, 1965, that Ms. Iwasaki and dozens of other girls emerged from their “training” to step into the curious world of glorified prostitution.

While you may think of former secretary of state and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger as a devious troll and architect of countless atrocities in Southeast Asia and Latin America, you may be surprised to learn that in his prime, the man was a libidinous lothario. In fact, in a 1972 poll of
Playboy
bunnies, the rascally rabbits selected Kissinger as the man with whom they’d most like to go out on a date.

The sixties ushered in a period of great strides in both civil and women’s rights in Japan and the rest of the world. Incurable STDs were virtually nonexistent, birth control pills hit the market, and folks the world over went around fornicating with fierce abandon. It was a good time for Mineko. Shortly after her debut, Iwasaki was earning over $500,000 a year. Her likeness was featured on posters, shopping bags, and billboards. If there had been a rookie-of-the-year award, Mineko Iwasaki would have been the uncontested winner. But again, we’re not dealing here with simple copulation. A geisha must have intense training in the arts, including conversation, poetry, dance, music, and
blowjob—all sacred pillars of their traditional and storied business plan.

“Hey, you occidental shit-for-brains—we’re not prostitutes—what’s with the blowjob gag?” an angry geisha or nitpicking historian might ask, and then hiss, “All you did was read
Memoirs of a Geisha
and make presumptions.” First of all, that’s a lie.
Memoirs of a Geisha
has almost 450 pages in hardcover—way more than I’m willing to tackle, and in addition, I don’t even know what “presumptions” means. But Ms. Iwasaki did sue the author of
Memoirs of a Geisha
, Arthur Golden, who outed her as his primary “source,” the one who was willing to break the geisha’s code of silence and imply that geisha commonly exchange sex for money. The scandal prompted Iwasaki’s retirement from geisha-ing at age twenty-nine to begin her second career as memoirist and plaintiff in lawsuits against Golden. The issue of whether or not geisha actually exchange sex for money is something best dealt with on a case-by-case basis, but come the hell
on
. It’s tough to earn half a million dollars a year reciting haiku in whiteface—sexy kimono notwithstanding.

In her own memoir, the meandering
I, Geisha
, we learn that Iwasaki faced degradation on a scale previously unthinkable: She was obliged to dance and entertain former president Gerald Ford and his henchman, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. She describes a lurid affair: