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| Good news: This article features some cool Phil Cambridge artwork. Bad news: The headline is misspelled. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "Lesbian-Involved Prostitution," aka "Lesbian-Involved Prostition." Originally published in Lesbo Lassies (Calga Publishing), vol. 3, no. 2, April/May 1971.
Excerpt: "Any number of local beer bars cater to the lesbian trade, and who is to say how many of the butch or the passive types are not in the professional trade? One looks much the same as any of the others. But it is a sure bet that many financial arrangements are met and the affairs are arranged with more than love interests at hand."
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| Ed's 1967 book on the subject. |
Reflections: In the years following World War II, many Americans migrated out to the suburbs, believing that these areas would provide the perfect environment for their families—away from the filth and crime of the major cities but still close enough to civilization to enjoy all the modern conveniences. That was the plan, anyway. What they wound up with was a place that, according to many artists and writers, combined the worst aspects of both the country and the city. In art and literature, suburbia tends to be depicted as a place of stultifying boredom, cookie-cutter conformity, and empty materialism. For fun sometime, try Googling the phrase "quotes about suburbia." See how many positive ones you get.
Pornographers, meanwhile, looked at suburbia and saw an opportunity. All those people, many still in their 20s and 30s, with nothing of interest to do but watch television—why, they probably get up to some kinky stuff out there, just to pass the time. So we get movies like Herschell Gordon Lewis' Suburban Roulette (1968) and Steve Apostolof's Suburbia Confidential (1966). Under the pen name Emil Moreau, Ed Wood himself wrote a book called Suburbia Confidential in 1967, swiping the title directly from Steve's (similar but unrelated) movie.
And then there's "Lesbian-Involved Prostitution," an article in which Ed Wood tries to convince us that the American suburbs are being overrun by housewives-turned-lesbian-hookers. From his opening paragraph, he says he has the data to back up this outrageous claim:
If we are to believe recent surveys dealing with suburbia and the suburban areas, then we must necessarily believe many of the bored housewives have taken up prostitution, whether for extra money or for purposes other than financial. . . . And it is that many lean more to the lesbian practices of prostitution than to more conventional intercourse with the milkman or other tradesmen. For one reason it is much safer. There is no chance of getting caught "knocked up," and little chance for catching or carrying venereal diseases.
I guess, then, that you can't turn a ho into a housewife, but you can do just the opposite. That sounds like more fun anyway.
According to this article, when Americans left the cities for the suburbs in the 1940s and 1950s, they took the long-established practice of lesbian prostitution with them. Not that these women are exclusively homosexual, mind you. They'll take on all comers, men included, especially if there's money involved. But these women prefer encounters with their own gender. In "Lesbian-Involved Prostitution," Ed repeats his theory that women are driven to sapphism after being traumatized, abused, or simply disappointed by men.
Ed Wood also offers us a snapshot of the prostitution industry in general. With the widespread closing of brothels and bordellos after the war, hookers needed to find new ways of plying their trade. The result was what Ed refers to as "the Call Girl system" in which clients would call a service and arrange a "date" with a young lady in some agreed-upon location, probably a motel room or apartment. This new business model was quite convenient, as Eddie explains:
It's really nothing very new, having been around as long as the telephone, but never before on such a grand scale as the present-day services. Companionship, for whatever purpose, is as close as the nearest telephone . . . all it takes is the knowledge of certain telephone numbers.
The strangest aspect of "Lesbian-Involved Prostitution" is when Eddie starts discussing stereotypes that we readers might have about these women.
One of the largest misconceptions of the lesbian prostitute has been that she necessarily is big of bone and rugged of features, more the truck driver type than the girl next door. She is pictured wearing a tweed suit with belted down trousers and the fedora hat cocked saucily over one eye along with the flat male shoes. She is to be gruff in manner and roll off the pornographic words like a drunken stevedore. . .
Uh, gee, Eddie, I think that might a stereotype that exists only in your mind and nowhere else in the world. I promise you, I was not thinking of tweed suits or saucily-cocked fedoras. And certainly, stevedores were far from my mind. The furthest, in fact.
Next: "The Strange Fascination of Lesbianism" (1972)