Part One: Sex Work in the American West & the Start of a Labor Movement

Margaret talks with writer and podcast host Courtney Kocak about how legal sex work shaped American culture in the Old West.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff a
podcast that comes out every week, which makes it a
weekly podcast if you were to describe it with an adjective,
which I now have because it's a weekly podcast. The
person you're hearing who isn't me just now, is Courtney Cossack.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hi. Courtney, Hello, Hi, thanks for having me on this
cool podcast.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Yeah. I aspire to have it be a cool podcast.
The thing I'm certain about is that it's a weekly podcast.
Courtney is a host of Private Parts Unknown, which is
a sex podcast, and is a writer podcaster that's probably
included in being the host of a podcast, and is
a dog mom, and that is the most important descriptor

(00:45):
I think, so. Jeez.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Also, my friend, it's true.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
Sorry, I get really excited when people that I know
are on the podcast.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
So he has very good taste in podcast guests, and
at this point I'm sometimes just like, yeah, you should
pick my podcast guests are very good at it. It's
almost like you professionally create.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Produces shell yeah weird.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Yeah, okay, but do you tell the audience your dog's
name or do you keep that secret to keep parasocial
relationships at a minimum.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Oh no, Georgia is my dog's name, and I'm totally
out about it, so okay, I can talk about it. Okay,
George's thirteen and just the best dog ever.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
I am very excited about this, you know. It's it's funny.
I went to go visit some of my friends that
used to live with and now I have a dog,
and I didn't have a dog when I lived with them,
and they all had dogs, and they were like, now
you get it, and I'm like, you're right, I do
get it now. I didn't like hate dogs, but I like,
you know, the dogs over there. I'm over here. Sometimes

(01:50):
I'll pet it.

Speaker 4 (01:50):
You know, when it's yours. It's a little different. Yeah, well,
and now I like all dogs more.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
I used to like say that I wasn't a I
was like, look, I think about dog the way I
think about people. I'm not a people person, but I
hope that they all do well in life. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Were you a cat person?

Speaker 1 (02:07):
No? No, I was a just nothing. There wasn't like
a group of things that I inherently like, like I
respect them all, but I like it was like individual cats,
individual dogs, individual people. That was like my thing, you know,
And now I'm like all dogs are perfect angels.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
I send my partner an embarrassing amount of dog memes. Oh, ell,
just what we do?

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Excellent. Well, we're sadly not here to talk about dogs today. Oh,
We're here to finish doing the thing where I introduce everyone,
including Sophie. Hi, Sophie sub Sophie's our producer. You probably
caught onto that when I said our producer, Sophie and
our audio engineers Ian everyone including the listener, and I

(02:54):
was to say, Hi Ian Hi ian Hian. Our music
was produced for by unwoman. And Okay, so I read
history books all day for work, which is the best
job that I've ever imagined having. But there's a few
strands that are like woven deeper and buried deeper than

(03:15):
most other strands, things that are omnipresent that people avoid
talking about. One example of this that comes up all
the time is like queerness. Right, A lot of people
in history were we don't want to necessarily say like LGBTQ,
because like everyone had different conceptions of queerness, but there
was a lot of like ladies' scissoring and stuff at
various different points throughout history.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, the best part of history.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Yeah, I know, right, the history of scissors. That doesn't
mean anything else. It's about the seamstresses. Oh there's seamstresses
in this episode. And my suspicions about who's lesbians. There's
one thing that's even more buried still that is also
conceived of very differently at different times, and that's sex work.
It gets called the world's oldest per fession, but it's

(04:00):
also the thing that people are like the shyest to
talk about. So well, I'm happy to talk about it.
It's literally one of my favorite topics. So oh good.
If if you were too shy to talk about it,
this would be very short problem.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
Yeah, because that's the topic this time specifically, we can't.
I was like, I'm going to do an episode on sex. Well,
that was too broad of a topic. Sex work is
a even for me, too broad of a topic. But
I want to talk about some of the organizing done
by sex workers in the American West, and about sex

(04:37):
work in the American West in general, and by the
American West, I mean sort of ye oldie six year times, Yeah,
contrasted with ye oldie sword times.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
I did a brothel tour in Deadwood.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
Oh shit, that's cool.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
It was very fun.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yeah, oh no, now I can't remember which one of
the people I'm going to talk about worked in Deadwood.
I didn't write down the names of towns very much.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
Because maybe I'll remember when we get there.

Speaker 1 (05:05):
I hope. So I start most episodes with a quick
thousand year overview of the topic. Like the number of
times I've been like, here's the history of all of
Ireland is too many. But we're not going to do
that today because sex work, once again, like queerness, expresses
itself and is handled so differently and from different time,

(05:26):
place to place, time to time, culture to culture, even
like year to year. You could like go to a
different town and run into a different conception of sex work.
You could wait three years and the conception of sex
work where you live will change. And I want to
say up top, this will be my little spiel about
sex workers rights at the top, just so everyone knows
where I'm coming from about this. I fully support sex

(05:48):
workers and their struggle to be treated like people. Now
they're work respected as work, and the overwhelming majority of
sex workers believe that sex work should be decriminalized and destigmatized.
Rather than pushing for what some people some activists push
for which is the Nordic model in which sex workers
aren't arrested but clients are or and sex workers that
I'm communicate with about this are also not excited about

(06:10):
the legalization model of strict regulation. The general consensus seems
to be a decriminalization, which is the leave us the
fuck alone model. So that's the bias I'm going to
be coming from as I talk about this.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Can I interject one modern exciting thing?

Speaker 1 (06:28):
Please?

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Do do you know about the Stargarden strippers who unionized
in North Hollywood?

Speaker 1 (06:36):
I wait, no, tell me.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
More so North Hollywood like Greater La or actually La Proper,
there is the Stargarden Dive Bar and for like I
think it was eighteen months, they were throwing these like
epic pickets outside the club and they would have who's

(06:58):
the guy from Rage, It's the machine Tom Morello, Yeah yeah,
and like people like that would come and anyway, they
won the frickin' battle. They're the second after the Lusty
Ladies of San Francisco in the nineties. They're this second
like group of strippers to be unionized in the US.
And I've been covering them so very cool modern Uh yeah,

(07:21):
sex work thing.

Speaker 1 (07:23):
Yeah, Like one of the things that keeps coming up
is that like as I'm like reading about these like
early work towards organization and stuff, I'm like, oh shit,
there are so many modern sex working organizations and like
they're not as many unions, but there's people like working
to unionize and then yeah, there's people who've succeeded, and

(07:44):
it's just like it's like, it's really cool. I don't
want to be like how far folks have come, because
it's like it's this ebb and flow in some ways
actually poor a lot freer in the mid nineteenth century,
and but I don't know, it's cool that people are
fighting about and that people are able to talk about
it now, Like I don't know, I don't see as

(08:06):
much like people like afraid to even possibly discuss the
work that cannot be mentioned or whatever.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
And it really pushes like the feminist agenda in general.
I mean just like some of the sex positive things
that we kind of take for granted now are thanks
to sex workers. So anyway, yeah, yeah, totalious.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
Yeah, So it's hard to imagine the US having any
different attitude around sex work than it does today, where
some sex work like stripping and acting and porn is
not criminalized, but is heavily stigmatized. Well, full full service
sex work is criminalized and stigmatized, except like I want
to say, like ten counties in Nevada is like the
only place in the United States where full service sex

(08:52):
work is legal, and now I'm off script again. But
and then you even run into the problems of legalization
where actually the arrest per capita of sex workers and
Nevada is higher than anywhere else in the country because
legalization means like more policing as compared to the leave
as the fuck alone model. Okay, So the American West,
which was the rapid expansion of the settler colonial project

(09:15):
that displaced and stole the rest of the continent from
indigenous folks, it was a place with really different values
in social norms than what we've got now. Specifically, and importantly,
it was an outlaw place, and it was a place
where the Protestant moral values of the East Coast didn't
hold so much. Sway. One of the things that I
keep running across in history that I didn't really understand

(09:37):
about the especially the turn of the century in nineteenth
and twentieth century, is just how completely like the Protestant
values were trying to control all of society, you know,
but how that isn't necessarily like always the way it's
been legally, So you have all this like tension where
people are like, can we please outlaw like I mean,

(10:00):
we're going to talk a lot about the temperance movement, We're
going to talk a lot about the people who outlawed drinking,
like prohibition and all that shit. It's the same fucking
movement that criminalized sex work, and yet we haven't seen
a constitutional amendment decriminalizing sex work. And I'm very confused
about this. These moral values, everything that affects sex workers

(10:20):
affects everyone, especially women more broadly, Like women acting in
theater was as bad as prostitution in most parts of
the US. You know. Actually in some places women weren't
allowed to act in theater, but it was legal to
be a sex workers. So anyway, that's so funny.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
And some of them were like theaters, yes, where they
had sex work, right.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
Yeah, totally. And there was like there's like a kind
of weird blurry line between places that are like entertainment
places and places that are like more purely brothels with
obviously a lot of people participating in both kinds of
work kind of like now actually with like strip clubs
and things like that.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
You know.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
So so for the most part, you go out west,
the first people out west were men. Well, the first
people out west were indigenous people. The first settlers out
west were men. And where there are lots of men
and not many women, sex work flourishes there were literally
like in like eighteen fifty or so, like in a
average town in the West, there'd be two women for

(11:24):
every hundred men.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
Oh my god. Yeah, like and a lot of syphilis.

Speaker 1 (11:30):
Yeah, totally yeah, And people are always like, oh, we're good.
Ah god, people are always like, oh the sex workers
spread disease, Like where do you think they fucking got
it from? Like yeah, and then like see they didn't
like just like it didn't like spontaneously start happening. Okay.
But in the West, madams were often the wealthiest and

(11:52):
most influential people in a given boomtown, madam being the
word for the procuress, the the person running a sex
work institution a brothel, and it was usually women, former
or current sex workers who ran these brothels. The age
of pimps comes later, starting around the eighteen nineties, with
the rise of criminalization, thanks first wave feminists. There's a

(12:16):
lot of things you fought for that were valuable. There's
a lot of things that set us back. This doesn't
mean that madams were necessarily good to their workers, but many,
including a bunch that we talk about, were just frankly
really good to their workers. They saw themselves as people
taking care of people who are doing hard work that

(12:36):
is necessary due to capitalism, and a lot of people
like try to take care of people. Then with criminalization,
you got organized crime. It's in the name of criminalization.
If you don't want criminals, don't criminalized behavior. I swear
my intense bias will slowly start fading into the background,
but for now. Brothels were often the center of a

(12:58):
town's social life. At all these boomtowns and all these
people are like moving down to town, especially miners and
people just like going around different places. And sex workers
in the West had all kinds of names, which is
cool because I love when people thinks of all kinds
of names. Soiled Doves is the most.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
Like, that's my favorite. I love that one.

Speaker 4 (13:16):
I know, it's so dramatic. It does not roll off
the tongue. It like it's so anyway dirty, it's weird.
I know, painted cats.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
I like this one, High Boots, Ladies of the Night,
Skirt Captains just I feel like I like that one.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
I haven't heard that one.

Speaker 1 (13:38):
And Shady Ladies. Shady Ladies is one of the A
lot of the sex workers were single, a lot of
them were married, and we're gonna talk about some of
the cool sex workers. First you ever heard of Molly
be Damn no, this is like, it's Molly's story, the archtypical, amazing,

(14:03):
awesome sex worker person basically right. She was born Maggie Hall,
possibly a Margaret. I'm very concerned with the great Margarets
of history. One can hope that she was named Margaret.
She was born in Dublin, Ireland, in a Protestant father
and a Catholic mother. She was raised Catholic at the
age of twenty in the eighteen seventies. Like all these
men are like trying to marry her and shit, and

(14:25):
she's like, okay. To be clear, everything about the Wild
West is full of legend, right, and so it's full
of bullshit. It's full of stories that are told, and
so everything that I read about any of the people
I'm talking about until we get into some of the
more like nitty gritty stuff that's less about these like
legendary figures. This is like the best guess I have
from reading a bunch of different things. But anyway, So

(14:48):
she's this beautiful woman living in Dublin and everyone's trying
to marry her, and she's like, no, I'm not into it.
I'm going to America. That is the place where I'm
going to start my new life. And she goes to
New York City in search of opportunity. She has a
hard time finding work because she has a brogue and
it is not a good time to be irish in
New York City is the eighteen seventies. She winds up

(15:10):
a bartender for a while. I think she does all right,
but then a problem appears. Problem in the form of
a man. A lot of these women have problems in
the form of men. It's weird. It's never happened again
in history.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
Nope.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
A cute boy came into her job and talked to him.

Speaker 2 (15:29):
I know, I know, legend has it. He was cute.
He wrote that part.

Speaker 1 (15:35):
Yeah, absolutely, And so he shows up and he's like,
like third date, He's like, yo, let's get hitched.

Speaker 5 (15:46):
Oh we got a love bomber.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
Absolutely, this is a classic love bomber in all of
the wrong ways. I mean, there's no good way. Besides,
like it's nice. When can people give you flowers? Whole
bunch of there's like some way to get like love
bombed where you like keep your guard up and then
they're like you get like the flowers and then you
like tell them to fuck off. Anyway. So he's like,

(16:11):
what if we get a whirlwind court marriage instead of
what you want, which is a big, proper Catholic wedding.
And she's like, what happened to her not wanting to
get married? Yeah, I don't know. She met a cute boy.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Okay, there's a problem is legedly cute.

Speaker 1 (16:27):
Is the problem with boys is they're capable of being
very charming sometimes.

Speaker 5 (16:32):
Ugh, I know.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
Yeah. So she marries him and he sucks. The first
thing he does, he's like, you know that name, Maggie,
it's not modern enough. What about Molly? She changes her
fucking name to Molly. Corney's shaking her head. He also

(16:56):
he had these rich parents. He's never worked a day
in his life and he just lives off his rich pair.
It's allowance, and he doesn't want to tell them that
he got married because they'll like cut him off. But
eventually they figured out, so they cut him off. And
he's like, well, there's a problem. I I I don't
want to work because I'm rich, but I don't have

(17:16):
any money, So you're gonna have to start fucking dudes
for money? No, I know, I know.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
This is how she gets into the trade, and she's
not excited. Like later, she's doing this on her own.
He's out of the picture pretty quickly. We'll get to that.

Speaker 3 (17:31):
Just yeah, really, motherfucker was like, can you change your
first name?

Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah, it's bad enough to change.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
Where is this happening in New York? Is this just
like amongst all the people or are they off to
the side in their own sex work zone or do
you know?

Speaker 1 (17:49):
I'm not sure I believe actually at the start, because
like obviously there's different types of sex work that have
in different places, right, and like overall, the work that's
done in brothels tends to be better for the women
involved or for the workers involved of any given gender.
But a lot of this sex work that I read about.
This is the only one I wrote into the script.
There's a fair number of women who start working because

(18:11):
their husbands basically pimp them out, and they're usually working
out of the home. So I believe she's working out
of the home, okay, which means that she doesn't have
like the solidarity of being in a brothel, and she
doesn't have like certain kind of cultural protections. Right. So
she goes to confession because she's a good Catholic and
she's ashamed of her new job, and she's like, hey,

(18:32):
I've been doing this thing and I feel bad about it.
In the Catholic church just like, well, we're going to
fucking excommunicate you, because even though our entire religion is
supposedly based on forgiveness for everything, we're just going to
excommunicate you. And maybe one day a podcast host from
a Catholic background is going to lose her mind about
how consistent we are in our hypocrisy. But that's just

(18:53):
a risk we'll have to take. And she's like, I
don't know what a podcast is. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
I thought this was a secret yip of fuck.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Yeah, totally totally, like, I don't know it fucking it
pisses me off, so she gets excommunicated. She hates a
piece of shit husband, so she ditches him, which is great,
and then she starts her life. As she's traveling around
the American West, she gets the fuck out of New York.
New York has not done her any favors, right, She's

(19:21):
no longer supporting a dead beat with her work. I
don't know what happened to him. I hope he drank
himself to death.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
Soon.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
She's doing really well for actually maybe I hope what
happened is what happened to some of the other A
lot of these madams murder men who steal from them. Oh, anyway,
I have no evidence of Molly be damn doing it,
but who knows. So she starts doing pretty well for herself.
She's just going around town to town. Everyone's in love
with her, and she's like because she's just fucking charming, right,

(19:49):
and she's good at her job, which is like also entertainment,
and so she would do things like she'd show up
in a town and she'd like drag a washtub out
into the open and be like, hey, miners, sprinkle gold
dust into this until the bottom is lined with gold

(20:09):
dust and then I'll get naked and take a bath
in front of you, genius, and then like, if you
pay it enough, you could scrub her back.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
Ah, that's the best. That's not even sex work.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
I know, I know.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
And she's super fucking caring. She never loses her like
just like essential like I mean, she has a fierceness, right,
but she also has essential gentleness. And like one day
she's she's traveling from place to place. She's on a
horse and there's this like mother and child who are
part of the like caravan going to a new place,
and they don't have a horse, and there's a blizzard

(20:48):
and everyone else from the like caravan train is able
to get ahead, and the mother and the child don't,
so she falls back and she just like wraps them
all up in her coats and they just weather the
blizzard together.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
Oh I love you, Molly.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah. And and this is like again like anything I
could be saying could be apocryphal, but this story in particular,
when she shows up to the town she was on
her way to, it's Murray. I think it's Utah. Everyone
has heard of this already, Like the word gets out
that she stayed behind to help people, right, and she
just like everyone loves her. Everyone is like, you rule,

(21:27):
You've coming to do this thing, and then you took
care of these kids. And this also goes to show
that like again, she wasn't being ostracized in these places
as she was going to.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
You know.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
So she settles in Utah. She changes her name to
Molly be Damn, which is probably a like misreading of
I forgot to write down whatever her piece of her
husband's name is, but it's like but Daniel or I
don't know, whatever the fuck. She becomes a madam and
she continues to go to church. She's no longer fucking
with the Catholic church, but she's like tithing and trying

(21:58):
to be a good member of society and all this shit.
And then this like combo plague hits Murray, and I
think it's like smallpox and tuberculosis. It's just like people
are getting really fucking sick, and everyone in town is like, oh,
we got to stay away from those miners, they're sick,
and she's like, the fuck you will, We're going to
take care of them. And so she shames the town

(22:20):
into emptying the hotel and to turn it into a
sick word to start taking care of folks, and she
shames the town's doctor to actually start treating people. This
was the work that did her in. She died in
her early thirties of tuberculosis, which kills approximately eighty percent
of everyone that I talked about on this show. Oh

(22:44):
but she lived a crazy and full life in like
I want to say, like thirty four years or something
like that. And like one of her last wishes is
that her grave put her name as Maggie Hall so
she could get her fucking name back, and it was
actually her name is Hall, so she took back the
name that was stolen from her by some fucking man.

(23:06):
And uh, there's like a two day celebration in Murray
every year for molly Be Damn.

Speaker 2 (23:12):
I feel like that's a common thing with the nursing
Like I think that was part of that tour that
I heard in Deadwood was they did some stuff like that.
And sex workers are always amazing at brandings, so that
molly Be damn it might have been her own invention.

Speaker 1 (23:30):
Yeah, totally, And like you got excommunicated, like hell yeah,
Molly Be Damn, Like that's medalist.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
Fuck I just quit. Fuck that church.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
But you know what else is medalist? Fuck if Sophie,
are all of our podcast ads for anti fascist metal
bands this time?

Speaker 3 (23:55):
Yeah, and if somebody happens to get anything different that
that was, that's a mistake.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah, and possibly actually just a subversive like maybe Reagan
Gold is actually just the name of a metal band.

Speaker 5 (24:08):
Honestly, I fuck with it, I know.

Speaker 1 (24:14):
So here's some advertisers for metal bands exclusively, and we're
back next up. Okay, have you heard of Madam Mustache?

Speaker 2 (24:31):
Oh no, but I love it.

Speaker 1 (24:33):
Oh yeah, it's fucking cool. They're also cool. That's what
I do a podcast, all right. Madam Mustache was the
most famous woman gambler in the West. And there's like
a lot of things that I keep running across whenever
I do research in history, where like there's people who
are really famous at the time who are just completely
forgotten because the way that fame exists in a moment

(24:55):
and the way that fame lingers or just seem to
be like unrelated, you know. But Madam Mustache was up
there with like Billy the Kid and Calamity Jane and
all those fucking people right actually knew Calamity Jane supposedly,
but also I kind of think that maybe people just
are like and then they all hung out. It was

(25:16):
clearly Madam Mustache and Calamity Jane and Billy the Kid
and whoever other famous Western people who Margaret can't remember
right now, just hanging out, you know.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
Calamity Jane, I think did sex work for a little tile.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
Oh yeah, totally, yeah, Yeah, she was a camp follower
for the military. And Yeah, it's a whole fucking fascinating
thing about especially like people who are like kind of
trans masculine, or people who are like cross dressing as
men or like acting fairly butcher or whatever. Like. Still,
this is completely not in my script. This is just

(25:49):
like something that I'm really curious to learn more about
at a later point in my life.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah. I think it's super fascinating.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
Yeah, so Madam Mustache, she probably grows up in New Orleans,
but her whole thing is like, I am a French
woman and she talks with a French accent. She probably
is from a French creole family, so it's like an
affectation but not you know, And she makes a bunch
of money playing this new game called Vanti. On twenty

(26:18):
one the game that later becomes blackjack, right, and she
makes a bunch of money at it one because she's
really good at it. Two blackjack Actually like she's the
dealer and blackjack is a set up where the dealer
makes more money than the person playing it most of
the time. Right.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
Oh yeah, it's like a the house always wins.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Yeah, it's like the house always eventually comes ahead. Otherwise
you wouldn't have casinos. Right. I used to know this stuff.
But it's like you're able, Like if you play absolutely
perfectly without card counting, you can win like forty eight
percent of the time or something like that, and if
you card count which is legal, you can win like
fifty two percent of the time or something. Anyway, I

(27:08):
totally didn't have a different period of my life where
I was trying to figure out how to make money.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
It's legal, I swear to God.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
Yeah, but okay, but check it out.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
One day.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
I'm gonna do this fucking thing on card counting, even
though it's not actually like cool in the like political sense.
What's interesting because card counting is legal, but you get
all of the like adrenaline of crime and some of
the risk because there absolutely will beat you up if
they catch you, right, But it's not illegal, so they're
not supposed to beat you up, right, But like organized
crime kind of runs them and you can get like

(27:41):
blacklisted and all this stuff. But like, if you ever
want the thrill of crime without committing a crime, you'll
still Also one of the reasons that it's legal is that, like,
no one card counts perfectly. I mean some people do.
Overall people don't cardcount perfectly, and so like the house
usually still just comes ahead, right because people are like, hey,

(28:01):
I'm going to get one over on it. This is
completely not the point. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So she's doing
really well because she is like one of the people
who introduces this game to the United States. Oh, everyone
plays a game called Farrow that I didn't look into,
which I kind of wish I had before I started
reading this script. She's also an honest dealer, uh, and

(28:23):
so she's not a card sharp she's not cheating and
not just card counting. That's not technically cheating, but I'm
coming on.

Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:31):
Yeah. She also had one distinguishing characteristic visually. I'm wondering
if you can guess what it is.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
A mustachio.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
Yes, she had a mustache. She obviously took some pride
in her mustache. When she was like younger, it was
like a pencil thin little mustache, you know, and then
by the end of her life she's just like, I
got a fucking mustache, Like what do you fucking want it?
You know, people grow them, get over it, And she
made a big us out of being a proper French lady.
She was probably born in New Orleans. For a while,

(29:04):
supposedly she traveled around with Calamity Jane. I think that
there's a chance they were dating, but that's just like
my over active seems stress brain. Madame Mustache wasn't necessarily
doing sex work at the beginning, and it's actually possible
she didn't do sex work as possible she was just
a madam, but I wouldn't bet on it. But even

(29:26):
people who are part of sex work, like madams all
the time, are often like still people write biographies and
don't want to like say like this person did full
service sex work, like people just like don't want to
touch it. This is like not the first person on
the show who I've covered, I don't remember her name.
I covered a trans woman madam from California, who did
all this amazing stuff. And it just is like she

(29:50):
worked really hard as a domestic and then bought three
buildings and turned them into brothels, and you're like, the
fuck she did? She fucked people for money. It's fine,
Her job was facility the fucking for money anyway. Whatever.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
Yeah, she just randomly got this idea. She didn't know
anything about it totally.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
She didn't know the business at all. So Madam Mustache
is primarily a gambler at this point. She's opening up
casinos here and there with various business partners, and they're
like fancy establishments. They're often like the fanciest building in town.
They'll have gas chandeliers, cussing as discouraged. But other times

(30:29):
she just wandered from town to town, following the railroad
camps as they made their way out west, dealing for
the workers with the like novelty of this honest woman gambler. Right,
that's like two adjectives that don't usually go with gambler,
And most versions of the story say she almost never
dated or recreationally fucked dudes. Sometimes, when she got all

(30:51):
of a man's money at a table, she would make
him drink a glass of milk as a like weird
further embarrassment, Like I think it's like, awe, you little kid,
you little baby, do you need your glass of milk?
But there's like an account of this guy who was
like really excited to get a chance to try and

(31:12):
you know, play with meta mustache, and he loses like
two hundred bucks and then he like tries to get
up and the bouncers are like, you're not getting up
to you finish your milk.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
I love it. I'm hearing like Bill Burr in my head,
just the way that he Oh, do you want your milk?

Speaker 5 (31:29):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (31:29):
Yeah. And so she made a ton of money and
in eighteen sixties she used that fortune to open brothels,
which were fancy parlors, often the finest building in town,
with red lanterns hung out front. There's a couple different,
Like I wrote it into a different script, which I
don't even remember which script it was. I talked about
where the red light district may or may not come from.

(31:50):
There's a couple different, vaguely possibly apocryphal origins for that.
But out west at this point, a red lantern out
front was this is a brothel, and this is where
she's cool as shit is when she's a madam. She
creates a pension plan for her girls. She doesn't take
any of their money. She makes all of her money

(32:12):
from the gambling and the take of the bar. Right,
So the women are working, the workers are working for themselves, and.

Speaker 2 (32:21):
She she's honest.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yeah, she creates a pension plan and then forces them
to retire after twenty four months lest the work harden
their heart or as she put it, quote, no gold
nugget in the world is worth damage to the heart.
Workers had their pick of customers, not the other way around,
which actually I think was the norm in brothels out west,

(32:47):
but I'm not certain. But there's this kind of thing
where there's two women to every hundred men, where like
you kind of get to be picky.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah, if they don't have money, you're like, I'm gonna.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
Hop on the Yeah, but it intrigues me, yeah, totally,
or the one that least offends me, you know. And
they were all completely unashamed, much to the chagrin of
like the proper the people trying to like make the
place respectable. Right. Every now and then she would go
and rent like the fanciest carriage and then her and

(33:20):
her employees would parade around town on the like fanciest
carriage to show off and to advertise. But eventually she
fells on hard times. There's a couple of different versions
about what happened, and I think it's a combo move,
is my guess. The reformers came and they run her
out of work. Sex work goes underground and only crooks

(33:41):
are able to make money off of brothels at a
certain point. Right, That's one version of how she lost
her fortune. The other is a man, a cute boy,
A cute boy arrived, mother fucker Jack McKnight, which is
the name of a bad person. I'm sorry, if you're
listening and your name is Jack McKnight, you should go
by John overall. I am pro Jack as a better name.

(34:06):
But if your last name is mckknight, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
It's giving villain.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
Yeah. So she retired with him and spent all of
her money on this like ranch. Right, So he swindled
her and took all of her money, But she decided
to apply the scientific method to the hypothesis. And the

(34:35):
hypothesis is that a double barreled shotgun makes someone twice
as dead as a regular barrel shock, and she was
never charged for his murder.

Speaker 2 (34:45):
Oh amazing. But didn't we think she was maybe a lesbian? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (34:50):
I mean, you know, I think that that shit's fluid.
I am not certain. I am like there's versions where
she never fucked anyone. There's like kind of some like
weird maybe she was a lesbian, although then like other
people like say, Calamity Jane was a lesbian and other
people are like, no, absolutely not, since she wants married
man and had kids, and like, well, I have news
for you about identity labels and they are non legitates. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:17):
So I don't know. Maybe this is the only time
she fell in love or something. I'm not actually sure.
She also carried a derringer under her skirts, so the like,
I think a lot of it. I don't think this comes
from her. I think this is just like literally what
women would do is carry a loaded pistol in your stockings.
You know. At one point, there's a story of two
men trying to rob her, so she just kills one

(35:38):
of them and the other one runs away. So she's
down and out. She's lost all of her money. I
don't think she successfully got it back over from the
corpse of the or she lost it all to changing times.
I don't know. In Bodie, California, which is now a
ghost town, you can go visit. It's really pretty. Oh,
it's immediately the east of Yosemite. If you're driving through Yosemite,

(36:02):
there's Mono Lake and body she's living. There's a mining
town and she's like, she borrows three hundred dollars from
her friend and bets it all because she's trying to
reclaim her fortune. The game was crooked. She lost, and
at the age of forty five, she wandered off into

(36:25):
the night and drank probably wine laced with morphine on
pandas like to kill herself. Yeah, after losing all her
friend's money and seeing everything she'd built, you.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
Know, fall away, she needed her own pension.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
I know, a good point. Who's taking care of anyway,
Madam Mustache?

Speaker 2 (36:50):
I know.

Speaker 1 (36:52):
Well, now I'm sad.

Speaker 4 (36:53):
I'm sorry, no, no, I mean I just described the
suicide of our protagonists, so some of sadness is in order.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
But a newspaperman reported about her funeral at the time
quote she had the reputation of being honest in her
dealings and always paying her debts. Upon this, she prided herself,
and woe unto anyone who claims she did not play fair.
It is said that of the hundreds of funerals held
in the mining camp, that of Madame Mustache was the largest.

(37:22):
The gamblers of the place buried her with all honors,
and carriages were brought from Carson City, Nevada, a distance
of one hundred and twenty miles, especially to be used
in the funeral. Cortege cortege. I've never heard that word
before in my life, and I didn't bother looking it up.
I assume it means procession. I don't know what if
it mean something completely different.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
It's really it's like sad and kind of ironic that
she was so honest and then got you know, I know,
like the last game was someone.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
Cheating her, I know. And the fact that she always
paid her debts was probably why she was like, I
can't do that, like I can't pay it back, you know,
And she left a note, but I didn't. It wasn't
transcribed in any of the things that I saw. But
you know what probably doesn't include morphine o metal bands.

(38:21):
Morphine is a nineties all rock band and not a
metal band, so we don't advertise morphine. We only advertise See.
The problem is, I like, I'm in a black metal
band and I still can't, off the top of my
head name enough black metal bands that aren't like secretly
nazis that I'm like, I can't safely just pretend to
be advertising a specific band A wend In. This this

(38:45):
show is brought to you via Wendin. I once did
a split with a band called a Wendin and they're
real good. They write songs about labor organizing. Actually, if
you want twenty minute black metal songs about the first
strikes in the United States, listen to Sam's later blighting
candles by wend that's my plug. They're great. Here's some

(39:08):
other ads for metal bands.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
I'm trying to think of the band Minnesota metal band
Mega Death. Okay, one of the guys from Megadeth was
from my hometown. Oh I started a coffee shop, all right.

Speaker 1 (39:28):
It's also brought to you by Megadeth, and was I
one of the ones that Beavis and butt Head where
the shirts of I know is ac DC. Megadeth band
is Bronze by a CDC and Megadeth.

Speaker 5 (39:41):
Was it good coffee?

Speaker 2 (39:43):
I don't drink coffee. Wait, really, my boyfriend No, I
drink his diet mountain dewshit. I like chemicals.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
And we're back. So now we're gonna talk about Klondike Kate,
who actually might not have been a sex worker but
was in the saloon dancing world and is interesting. So
I'm going to talk about her. The line between entertainer
and sex worker has always been blurry. May it forever
be so? Because fuck rigid categorization, and I don't know,

(40:21):
the more we can refuse to let sex workers be
isolated by society, the better without doing stolen valor. Because
also it's like cool to anyway whatever, it's like more
than I.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
Want to know.

Speaker 2 (40:33):
It's dicey because I have a I have an OnlyFans,
and I feel the same way. I'm like, in some
ways trying to normalize it. But I'm not trying to
claim this thing that's like not mine, you know, maybe
or whatever. You know, it's complicated.

Speaker 1 (40:46):
No, that makes that makes absolute sense. Yeah, Like you know,
in some ways, folks who are in like non criminalized
aspects of sex work have like an easier time and
it's like less stigmatized, right, but then like, yeah, sex
workers have a lot to say, you know, and so

(41:06):
I don't know. Yeah, well, saloon dancers. Saloon dancers are
the entertainment in saloons they danced. The name is fairly literal,
unlike their other name, parrots, which is not as literal. No,
I assume it's like a painted bird thing or something,

(41:29):
you know. I don't know, Okay, the can Can came
to the US. I didn't write enough of the history
of can Can, but kind of interesting it like started
in France and then came to the US and like
was not cool in France anymore, and then eventually I
think maybe went full circle. I don't know. Can Can
was all over the fucking West, and you know, like

(41:50):
people high kicking and shit, and it was like a
naughty style of dancing, right because you could like see
their knickers or whatever old timey word they used for underwear.
So dancers would go around work at different saloons. There's
a lot of different ways this would work, and like
town to town, decade to decade, culture to culture within
those towns, it would all be different. But Cancan dancers

(42:12):
might pull in fifty dollars a night instead of like
forty years later when a domestic gets six dollars a week.
You know, fifty dollars a night was like fucking money.
They might make that money from coins thrown on stage
and a cut of the take at the bar. They
took care of their own affairs. Many were functionally as
far as I could tell, many were functionally worker cooperatives,

(42:34):
like collectives of equals. These like gangs that would go
around town to town and perform right, and they're coolest shit.
They kicked the shit out of manufucked with them. They
kept pistols and daggers, and they're like boots in between
their breasts. I'm sure some of them did sex work.
I'm sure some of them did not. And the most
famous of these saloon dancers was a woman named Klondike

(42:56):
Kate who was born in eighteen seventy three in Kansas.
Gw up as a tomboy, and she was the terror
of the town and or of various towns. This is
like someone who like, there's a million versions of her upbringing.
One of them is as she like halfway grew up
in Chile and nothing else mentions leaving the country besides
maybe Canada like at all, I don't fucking know, but

(43:17):
she's a tomboy. And she got sent to boarding school.
So she escaped. So her parents were like, all right,
we're sending you a boarding school, and they sent her
to boarding school again. So she escaped, so she got
sent to boarding school. Eventually she just got expelled. They
were like, we can't fucking deal with you. You are
too fucking much. Because she's cool as shit. She tried

(43:40):
to get to Alaska. She heard about the you know,
gold Russian shit, and she was like, I'm getting to Alaska,
but Canada wouldn't let an unaccompanied woman into the country.
This is an example of the kind of shit where
anti sex work and anti lude women whatever laws affect
all women. Right, she can't get into the country because

(44:03):
unaccompanied women can't come in because they might do sex work.
What Yeah, and this is just happening all over, Like
I'm going to talk a little bit about happening in
like the nineteen tens in the US and stuff too,
Like crossing state lines became very hard for unaccompanied women
because of anti trafficking laws. It when you make laws,

(44:26):
you usually end up catching the people that you ostensibly
don't want to catch so she's turned away in Canada
and she's like, well, I got an idea, and she
dresses up as a boy and then she crosses into Canada.
She started working as a dancer when she gets to Alaska,
and her signature move was the flame dance, which was
slowly unraveling two hundred feet of cherry red fabric. And

(44:48):
then she felt for the same trap that every other
woman that we've talked about so far has fallen for.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
Cute boy.

Speaker 5 (44:56):
Oh no, no, no boy, I know, oh I know.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
She fell for a man named Alexander Pontegas who was
a Greek American guy. And stop me if you've heard
this one before, but dating a stripper and being like, hey, babe,
like I just need some money, so like I got
my my theater management career is just gonna get off
the ground, you know, Like, don't you care about my career? Babe?

Speaker 5 (45:25):
I really hated you reading that quote. I just want
you to know, yeah, no, thanks.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
That's brought to you by the number of my friends
who had acoustic guitar boyfriends who didn't work and didn't
take care of the house while their stripper girlfriends were
at work anyway, He's like, but I don't want to
live in Alaska. Don't you want to come to Washington? Like,
don't you want to move to Seattle? Like he's probably

(45:53):
good at fucking, Like he probably is something going for him.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
But I don't know.

Speaker 1 (45:57):
I mean, some of these people, all they have is
emotional men population. They don't even Anyway, she moves to
Washington to be with him, so he immediately ditched her
for a violinist, like, married this violinist in secret, and
then four days later wrote her a letter that was like, sorry, babe,
just got hitched. Ugh, this doesn't ruin her, It just

(46:19):
sets her back for a while.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
It sets her free.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, being robbed is what set her back.
Him marrying a violinist is like bullets whizzing past her
head and falling into it. The guy even has a
fucking Wikipedia page. He is like, he is like a
theater producer of some I didn't bother even reading it
because I don't like him. Why she like Nazis, I
don't know, and I don't care to quote the author

(46:43):
Professor Calamity about Klondike Kate quote, she always traveled with
the Cancan crew and quickly earned a reputation as someone
not to be messed with. One evening in Dawson City,
one of her crew was harassed by the foreman at
a local mine. After the show, Hate heard about the attack,
so she gathered up the girls and marched into the

(47:04):
mining camp, still in their costumes, to meet out justice
to the foreman. Miners gathered around and started cat calling
the colorfully dressed girls. The girls proceeded to high kick
the miners, who fled in shame.

Speaker 2 (47:19):
I love that that was one of their weapons. Yeah, yeah,
literally kicking the shit out of epault. That's so good.

Speaker 1 (47:28):
So yeah, she did well for herself despite the youthful
setback of dating a fuck boy. She lived on a
ranch for a while, She got married a couple of times.
She she lives a long life actually on like the
last two folks we were talking about, And she raises
money for local charities all the time, like the volunteer
firefighter departments, like totally dependent on her. And then when

(47:50):
the great depression hits, she basically starts spending all of
her time cooking soup for local hobos. Right, and she
just like shows up at the hobo camps with like
pod after pot of soup and like, well, I'm gonna
take care of you, which is just cool as shit.
See current heroes food not bombs in Houston who are
getting ticketed for feeding the homeless constantly. It is possible

(48:11):
that she grew into being a bootlegger and or a
madam and no, because no one's quite sure how she
got the money that she had and do you.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Know if she did sex work?

Speaker 1 (48:22):
Nope, we knew she was a traveling cancn dancer, stripper who,
like everyone was like maybe as a madam, I don't
know because people don't like talking about that shit, and
and amy, it's completely possible she had nothing to do
with it at all, right, but I doubt she. I mean,

(48:42):
clearly she was like part of that world, so I
thought she was like anti that shit.

Speaker 2 (48:46):
You know.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
She died peacefully in her sleep, old and happy, And
the main part of her legacy from my nineties kids
point of view is that Scrooge McDuck has a secret
love named Goldie and it's based on Klondike Kate. Or
she's this like badass, like backwoods lady who you know,
can like take care of her own and all this shit.

(49:09):
But now we're gonna talk about the city debait. We're
finbally gonna go to the big city. We're going to
leave these tiny little labor camps and go to the
place that was also just a tiny little labor camp
for a long time, San Francisco. You ever heard of
San Francisco a city?

Speaker 2 (49:23):
I've heard, I've heard about it.

Speaker 1 (49:25):
Yeah, it's just it's like a it's I think it's
a suburb of Oakland. So many people are going to.

Speaker 5 (49:32):
Be so bad at you for saying that, but like,
let's be honest.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
San Francisco, Yeah, it's going through an amazing renaissance right now.

Speaker 1 (49:43):
Yeah, because the prices are actually becoming affordable again. A
lot of people are leaving, or a lot other crazy
rich people are left. So San Francisco sex workers are
not just on the outskirts of societies, they're on the
frontier of societ There's this pattern. Sex workers show up,
they make a place livable, then folks decide they're no

(50:05):
longer useful and do a moral crisis to drive them away.
It happened in the American West, and it happens on
every corner of the Internet. Famously Tumblr band pornography after
building a platform on the back of sex work, and
only fans try to get rid of pornographys.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
Yeah, they were like, we're just gonna do like PG stuff.
Now it's like, okay, how are you going to make money?

Speaker 1 (50:26):
Yeah, And like so much of the Internet is built
on sex work, like culturally, and all this shit, and
now half of the like payment processors hate you. If
you're trying to do even legal types of sex work.
You can do other illegal shit with your money on
the Internet, no one cares. But like if it involves
like touching someone's penis, like, sorry, only God can touch people.

(50:50):
I'm not going to sow the This is a story
about the American West, not the Internet. Towns are boom towns.
There's sex work and gambling and such is openly. Madams
are powerful respect to members of the community. Then families
move in and the whole place is supposed to become respectable.
Respectable apparently means telling people what they can and can't
do with their bodies, criminalizing and harassing folks, especially women,

(51:13):
especially unmarried women. And again, like there's like all this
shit that didn't even make it into my script about
like older like like twelfth century, thirteenth century type shit,
where like the church made no distinction between selling sex
and having sex outside of marriage, like really yeah, for
a lot of like moral law or some word for

(51:34):
church law shit was like you know, oh, anyone is
basically a whore if you're sleeping with people that you're
not currently married to or whatever. So all of this happens,
this moral crisis pattern, etcetera, is happens to the red
light district of San Francisco, which was called the Barbary Coast, which.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
Is like late eighteen hundreds. Did you say you're sorry?

Speaker 1 (51:58):
Yeah, So this is going to be like we're going
to be like eighteen forty nine. Eighteen fifty is kind
of when San Francisco, Like I literally kind of only
remember this date because of the sports team, the forty
nine ers, Sophie, I know a sports team. I liked
football when I was a kid because I was too
afraid to take ballet, so I took football. Who were anyway?

Speaker 5 (52:18):
Get it?

Speaker 1 (52:19):
Thanks? So it's named the Barbary Coast because everyone in
history is racist. It's named after what Europeans called the
Northern Coast of Africa for centuries which in turn was
named after the Berbers, which is the exonym the name
from outsiders that Europeans called all of the indigenous inhabitants
of that region before the Arab migrations to the area.

(52:42):
To be fair, this nickname for San Francisco was less
like wow, this is Africa, and more the Barbary Coast
was like known for like pirates and thieves and shit right,
and actually enslave traders who are like robbing everyone, and
a lot of robbing people and occasionally enslaving people did
have in the Red Light District in San Francisco, And
we'll talk about both got the Barbary Coast. It's a

(53:05):
little too wild for some people's comfort. It's nine blocks
of clubs and bars and brothels. And it started during
the gold Rush of eighteen forty nine, which basically means
it started when San Francisco started. It is as old
as San Francisco. There were only a few hundred people
living in tents and shit in San Francisco in eighteen
forty seven, then some in eighteen forty eight, some other

(53:25):
folks settled there, including a bunch of Mexican American war
vets who included a lot of New York City gang members,
and they settled there in eighteen forty eight. And one
of the very first things to happen in San Francisco.
This is like, actually, like makes me kind of like
a thing about history with San Francisco. Actually, there's a
lot of cool history in San Francisco. One of the
very first things that happens in this city the little

(53:48):
sleepy suburb of Oakland. Oakland was even smaller. I'm making
this shit up, Okay, Saone takes what I'm saying literally
a bunch of nativist fucks. Nativists being like people who
hate immigrants, like white settlers who hate immigrants. They form
a racist gang called the Hounds. And this gang is
politically associated with one of the major political parties of

(54:11):
the United States, the one that is most often forgot about.
I wish it would stay forgotten, but to keep having
to bring it up on this show, The No Nothings.
You ever heard of the No Nothings? The No Nothing
There was this anti Catholic, anti immigrant, anti drinking party
of Protestants called the No Nothings that I think nothing.

Speaker 5 (54:33):
Yeah, sorry, it was in my head, I know.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
Time.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
Yeah, I'm like you're the Bummer Party, got it?

Speaker 5 (54:42):
Yeah, bad timers.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
So the armed political wing of their group is a
gang called the Hounds, and they're mostly vets of the
Mexican American War, as in people fighting in the Mexicans
to steal Mexico from one day all cover the Mexican
American War and I'll know more about it.

Speaker 2 (54:59):
So, but how are they nativists because they just became
like they were just immigrants, right, which just took over
this place.

Speaker 1 (55:10):
Yeah, yeah, but you don't understand. I think that North
America belongs to the Protestant white man.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
Oh manifest destiny of.

Speaker 1 (55:18):
Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's yeah, you're right, because they're
not even like we were in San Francisco first, right,
they literally, I mean they weren't right, like it was just.

Speaker 2 (55:28):
A matter of life in Mexico.

Speaker 1 (55:29):
Yeah yeah, yeah, no, they suck their racist gang. But
here's the cool part of this story. The other very
first thing that happens in San Francisco is that two
hundred and thirty people took up arms and ran the
racist out of town. Hey yeah, and so they kind
of just roastly drove them out of town, but they
sort of arrested a bunch and tried to like take

(55:51):
them in and be like these people are criminal, bad
people or whatever. But the Hounds have all these political connections,
so they're overall not serving jail time, which is a
thing that has never repeated itself related to an insurrection
and anyway, so the armed citizens hatred of this racist

(56:13):
bullshit kept the Hounds from ever being a political force again.
A bunch of them moved out to mining camps and
they were like, Oh, we're going to show up here,
and then the miners were like, the thing about having
moved somewhere completely lawless is that some people are only
alive because it's illegal to kill them, and here nothing's illegal.
So they died. The Hounds who moved to the mining

(56:34):
camps died. I know, not that the miners weren't also
themselves often racist. We're going to talk about anti Chinese
bigotry and all this other stuff, but like, good on you.
Early San Francisco, and for decades in San Francisco and
the Red Light District in particular, it remained a fairly

(56:55):
wild place, and lines around sex work were sort of blurry.
There was a u nique style of dance hall, the
Barbary Coast Dance Hall where the waitresses were it were
scantily clad and they got paid to dance with patrons
in exchange for a commission on the drinks the men bought.
This paid pretty well. You can make twenty dollars a week,

(57:15):
which is compared to the six dollars a week if
you have a respectable job, right, which is not enough
to feed a family on. It just isn't. And my guess,
because I'm sure someone's written a book about this and
I haven't found it yet, because there's only so much
time in this world, I think that this is the
direct lineage of American strip clubs more than the history

(57:37):
of like people like burlesque and vaudeville and or not
necessary Vaudville. That might get into it, but like people
taking their clothes off for money is not the important
part of stripping, right. The important part of stripping is
getting paid to dance with men and then taking their money,
and then also getting like, you know.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
And the drinks. I was a hostess at a strip
club and that was like one of the biggest things
is like selling those fucking drinks that nobody.

Speaker 1 (57:58):
Wants because they're watered out exactly totally. So this feels
like that lineage, right, and this is my conjecture. Also,
sometimes the waitresses working this place would drug their customers
to rob them, and that's fine too. In nineteen oh eight,
a gay brothel opened up in the Red Light district

(58:19):
called the Dash, which hired gay men and what at
the time were called female impersonators. I love that my
gender has a different name, like every twenty years. Like
I don't know what it would be called twenty years
from now whatever. As long as I could still wear
dresses and be named Margaret, I don't give a shit.
And this supposedly horrid district full of murder and death, Okay,

(58:41):
there was some murder, there was some death, there was
some robbery, and we'll talk anyway whatever. It is also
the first place to bring jazz to the West Coast.
It exported dance crazes all around the country. This was
like an important cultural hub for the city and therefore
for the West Coast and therefore for the country. And
that's where we're going to leave it today. This is

(59:02):
not my best cliffhanger, but I swear it's going to
get really good next week. Next week, well that too.
But on Wednesday this week, because we are going to
talk about sex workers organizing against the temperance activists and
against criminalization. We're also because nothing can ever be simple,
We're going to talk about some really cool temperance activists
who rescued enslaved women.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
Okay, plot twist.

Speaker 1 (59:24):
Yeah, and if you want to hear that plot twist,
you're gonna have to wait. Well, not you. Actually you
only get to wait like five minutes because we record
immediately after we stop hitting record on this one. But
everyone else has to wait till Wednesday. But what they
don't have to wait for is to learn more about
you and where people can find you.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
Well, y'all can listen to Private Parts Unknown. I love
to talk about sex work on that show. And yeah,
I have two other podcasts, but it's whatever. I'm addicted
to making podcasts.

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
Yeah, me too.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
It's a problem.

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
I've had people be like, but how does your voice
hold on if you just record podcasts all the time?
And I'm like, I don't know.

Speaker 5 (01:00:13):
You don't talk outside of this, Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
Right, I live alone in the wood. That's the answer. Cool. Well,
people should listen to Private Parts Unknown, and people should
hear us on Wednesday, and people should subscribe to Cooler
Zone Media so that they can listen to all the
cool Zone Media shows without advertisements, which is currently for
Apple but not Android because we hate open sources. Android

(01:00:40):
even open source I don't know, because it is complicated
to make different types of things happen, and we are
working to make it available for Android. But if you subscribe,
then you don't have to listen to ads. You only
have to listen to ad transitions and what better things
a plug?

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
Then?

Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
I have a black metal band. It's called Femine Noschool.
It's a black metal band. We haven't put out an
album in like three years, but I swear we're working
on one. So all of our existing album so far
are puns from Lords of the Ring, The Age of
Men and Is Over, and No Dawn for Men. Sophie,

(01:01:18):
What do you got? What do you want? What are
you trying to plug?

Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
I want to plug one of our podcasts. It's called
It Could Happen Here, and I want to plug that.
We have a couple of different series coming up on
that show in the next month or so, one led
by Garrison and one led by James that should be
pretty interesting and people should check those out.

Speaker 5 (01:01:39):
Wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 (01:01:43):
What if someone's never heard of a podcast before, what
could could you explain to them out of never mind?

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
Oh no, I'm like both Corney and I have had
that conversation with many people I know, but have you
had to have it on a podcast?

Speaker 1 (01:01:55):
Wherever you found this is where you can find that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:57):
How did you get this far? And we'll explain it.

Speaker 3 (01:02:01):
I've had this conversation with somebody I was recording with
that didn't understand what a podcast was, but they were
on a podcast episode.

Speaker 1 (01:02:09):
Oh many times.

Speaker 3 (01:02:12):
Many times they're like, oh so yeah, I'm like, yes,
it's like on demand radio.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
You're welcome, see y'all Wednesday.

Speaker 5 (01:02:25):
Bye.

Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.