Fugitives and Refugees by Chuck Palahniuk

Author:Chuck Palahniuk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307420756
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Getting Off: How to Knock Off a Piece in Portland

“THE JIG’S UP—people are having sex in Portland,” says Teresa Dulce. An advocate for Portland’s sex workers and the publisher of the internationally famous magazine Danzine, Teresa says, “Instead of fighting the inevitable, let’s try to prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease.”

Teresa sits in the Bread and Ink Café on SE Hawthorne Boulevard, eating a salad of asparagus. Her eyes are either brown or green, depending on her mood. Since her car broke down outside of town in 1994, she’s been here, writing, editing, and performing as a way to improve working conditions in the sex industry.

With her pale, heart-shaped face, her thick, dark hair tied back, she could be a ballet dancer wearing a longsleeved, tight black top. With her full Italian lips, Teresa says, “The sky has not fallen when there’s been trade before. There are plenty of guys who just want to knock off a piece and are grateful for sex. If there were as many of us getting raped and killed as people say, there wouldn’t be a woman left standing on the street.”

Ordering a glass of white wine, she adds, “Sex work does exist. It’s going to exist with or without our permission. I’d just like to make it as safe and informed as possible.”

According to history, Teresa’s right. Sex work has always existed here in Stumptown. In 1912, Portland’s Vice Commission investigated the city’s 547 hotels, apartment buildings, and rooming houses and found 431 of them to be “Wholly Immoral.” Another eighteen of them were iffy. The investigation consisted of sending undercover female agents to each business to look around and interview the managers. The resulting vice report reads like a soft-porn romance novel: scenes of naked young women wandering the halls in fluttering silk kimonos. Described as “voluptuous blondes,” they strut around in “lace night-gowns, embroidered Japanese slippers and diamonds.” Their workplace—called a bawdy house or parlor house— always seems to be paneled in “Circassian walnut and mirrors” and crammed with Battenberg lace, Victrolas, and cut-glass vases and chandeliers. The famous 1912 report refers to these women by their first names: Mazie, Katherine, Ethel, Edith . . . and says they each served twenty-five to thirty different men every night.

These were famous houses like the Louvre at SW Fifth Avenue and Stark Street. Or the Paris House on the south side of NW Davis Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues, a brothel that boasted “a girl from every nation on Earth.” Or the Mansion of Sin run by Madam Lida Fanshaw at SW Broadway and Morrison Street, now the site of the Abercrombie & Fitch clothing store.

Richard Engeman, Public Historian for the Oregon Historical Society, says few of those brothels were documented, but the proof is hidden in official records like the census. “When you find forty women living at the same address, and they’re all seamstresses, it’s a brothel.” He adds, “Sure, they’re popping off a lot of buttons, but that doesn’t make them seamstresses.

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