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."
In hot weather street bands used to march through the city, leading men back to the bars near the river, thus "drumming up business." Along their routes working women would lean from windows, advertising what was available.
In the vaudeville theaters the actresses and singers would roam the curtained boxes between their acts onstage. Called "box rustlers," they sold beer and sex.
Portland police officer Lola Greene Baldwin, the first policewoman in the nation, attacked Portlands venerable department stores, including Meier & Frank, Lippman-Wolfe's, and Olds & King's, on the accusation that easy credit forced many young girls into debt and trading sex for money. She fought to keep young women from being displayed in parades during the Rose Festival and had the touring comedienne Sophie Tucker arrested for public indecency.
In 1912 an estimated three thousand local women worked as prostitutes, so many that Portland mayor Allan
Rushlight campaigned to turn all of Ross Island into a penal colony solely for sex workers.
The moral crusade of 1912 was the city's biggest until the crusade of 1948, and the crusade of 1999, and the crusade of... well, you get the point.
It's a business cycle Teresa Duke's seen since she started dancing at age twenty-three. Pragmatic, frank, and funny, she describes the Portland sex industry in slightly more realistic terms than the vice report.
Free speech is so protected under the Oregon State Constitution that we have the largest number of adult businesses in the nation. And, thanks to our free-speech rights, pretty much any type of no-contact nude performance is legal. According to Teresa, Portland (aka "Porn-land") has at least fifty nude dance clubs and twenty lingerie studios and shops with fantasy booths. This means a workforce of as many as fifteen hundred women and men make money performing naked. This means you'll see a much wider range of body types, ages, and races than in any other city.
Nudity and alcohol don't go together in any other state, she says. In most states full nudity is limited to juice bars. But because we mix alcohol and nudity, we can't have legal lap dancing. In Oregon it's table dancing, where the performer can be naked and close up in your face, on a table or stage, but not touching you—and you not touching him or her.
In a local lingerie studio you pay to sit on a couch in a room while a performer models. The performer and you may talk out a fantasy during the session. And you may exercise the option of masturbating. You're paying for time, plus extra for anything above and beyond the performer's normal show. In a "fantasy booth" you pay to watch the performer through a window. You pay by the minute, extra for specific services you want to watch. Teresa's example, a double-anal penetration with dildos, would cost you extra.
According to Teresa, adult films are shot every day in Portland. Telephone sex services thrive. Local live web-cams transmit on the Internet. The city's fetish specialists run the gamut from the dungeon dominatrix to the Dairy Queens, lactating women who collect and sell their breast milk. Sex workers range from the "career" women, who stay blond and thin in spinning classes and augment their breasts, to the "survival" or "trade" workers, who work a "track" on the street, trading sex for money or shelter or food or drugs.
Teresa says—irony aside—the best place to find street action is in any of the city's "prostitution-free zones." These include Burnside Street, between the McDonald's at the west end of the track, and Sandy Boulevard at the east end. Also check out Killingsworth Street, Interstate Avenue, and Sandy Boulevard—especially through the Hollywood District.
For escort service, she says, check out the free magazines offered in most nude dance bars. The standard tip to a dancer is a dollar bill but don't be afraid to pay more.
In order to dance nude in a bar, the performers must pay the bar a "stage fee." The dancer also pays an "agency fee" to a booking agency that finds her venues and schedules her appearances. Between the two types of fees, a performer can go home with little or no profit. A situation that Teresa says drives many performers to arrange private dances in hotels or homes after work or between shows.
Started by Teresa in 1995, the magazine Danzine collects this professional wisdom that sex workers won't find anywhere else. It teaches workers before they have to learn—and maybe die—from their mistakes. Danzine is here to tell you—no, you can't tax deduct your tampons, even if you cut the string and wear them while performing. And yes, always wipe down the brass pole before riding it with your newly shaved coochie. One drop of even dried menstrual blood is enough to transmit hepatitis C or possibly HIV
Danzine and Teresa also run the "Bad Date Hotline," where sex workers post the details of their shitty "dates" and describe the customers for others to look out for. Bad dates range from the bald driver of the silver Porsche who's HIV positive and demands unprotected vaginal sex to the Honda driver who wears a tie and zaps women with his stun gun.
And the magazine's damn funny. In one feature called "You Know You've Been Stripping Too Long When..." Item Number Seven says you're banned from the playground after you teach the local kids how to work the pole. Item Number Ten says you go to the drugstore and automatically pick up your change with your teeth.
Danzine is published twice a year. To buy back issues, write to Danzine, P.O. Box 40207, Portland, OR 97240-0207. Or look for it in small-press bookstores and Tower Records and Magazines in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Also check out the website, www.danzine.org.
At 628 E Burnside Street, Teresa runs Miss Mona's Rack, a store that sells secondhand shoes, clothes, and jewelry, plus razors, condoms, and tampons. It also offers a staggering variety of lubricants, with all profits going to support community job training and risk-reduction programs that teach HIV and other STD prevention.
To date, Teresa says the city continues to increase the size of the prostitution-free zones, in order to arrest more sex workers for trespassing—a worse crime than prostitution. And the city recently tried to impose a raft of licensing regulations on everyone in the sex industry. According to Teresa, the city's effort is first to make money but ultimately to eliminate sex workers. Another irony, since the city also supports growing the local hotel industry and attracting large conventions while denying that conventioneers create and support much of the local sex industry.