Sex Work

The original Playboy Bunnies were required to be able to identify 143 brands of liquor and how to make 20 different cocktails as part of their job.

Nestled in the clutter of Manhattan's late-night television fare is the ultimate in safe sex for the cable-ready: Voyeurvision, the nation's only live call-in tele-fantasy show. Four nights a week, Lynn Muscarella, the show's campy, vampy hostess, slithers over the sheets while encouraging her phone fans to flesh out their sexiest fantasies. Most, not surprisingly, involve her - which delights the Brooklyn-bred Muscarella. She jokes, teases, pouts, writhes - even blushes. "I'm your video game," she coos to a caller. "Tell me what you want."

Trimming Bettie Page's pubic hair

I recently, again, watched Natalie Wood’s Gypsy (1962). While the film is stunning — as rich & saturated in period color as it is fashion and sex appeal, I’m always...

From Lousiana State University Yearbook 1975, page 25.

What may have begun as the vengeful opportunistic act of a lover scorned (deflowered and left to prostitution) is quickly shown to be more complicated, exposing more than unfinished business but unrequited feelings between the two.

On horseback; 1930s

Newly discharged from the Marines after World War II, Scotty Bowers arrived in Hollywood in 1946. Young, charismatic, and strikingly handsome, he quickly caught the eye of many of the town’s stars and starlets. He began sleeping with some himself, and connecting others with his coterie of young, attractive, and sexually free-spirited friends. His own lovers included Edith Piaf, Spencer Tracy, Vivien Leigh, Cary Grant, and the abdicated King of England Edward VIII, and he arranged tricks or otherwise crossed paths with Tennessee Williams, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, Katharine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Errol Flynn, Gloria Swanson, Noël Coward, Mae West, James Dean, Rock Hudson and J. Edgar Hoover, to name but a few.

Full Service is not only a fascinating chronicle of Hollywood’s sexual underground, but also exposes the hypocrisy of the major studios, who used actors to propagate a myth of a conformist, sexually innocent America knowing full well that their stars’ personal lives differed dramatically from this family-friendly mold. As revelation-filled as Hollywood Babylon, Full Service provides a lost chapter in the history of the sexual revolution and is a testament to a man who provided sex, support, and affection to countless people.

Of course I had to post this in sex work!