The Gay Blackmail Confession

Scandal!

The Cleveland Street Scandal, in which a male brothel was found to have been operating on Cleveland Street in London (hence the name) was the one of the precursors to the Oscar Wilde trial. The scandal in 1889 allegedly involved aristocrats who had had sex with male prostitutes, much of this was hushed up. Things were much more explicit (though tame by our standards) when in 1895, Oscar Wilde was tried on a charges of having sex with other men.

As Wikipedia points out,[1] Charles Hammond, the brothel keeper, managed to flee the country. Wikipedia doesn’t say where, but on January 8, 1891, two years after the scandal, the Los Angeles Herald reported that Hammond was arrested in Seattle. He had been accompanied by one of the young men, Herbert John Ames, who had been working at the house from June of 1888 until its closure in 1889. To make it clear, he was about sixteen when he started turning tricks.[2]

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Girls’ Trip to Evil Haunts Blamed on Novels

Remember children, the policeman is your friend
Especially when your trip to New York lands you in a brothel

Those damn novels, leading young women astray for generations. Now, of course, when people are looking for something to blame, they never think of novels. But in 1889, novels were still on the suspect list, though it had become limited to “trashy novels.” Got that? There are good novels, then there are trashy novels. And if you read the trashy kind, there’s no telling what could happen to you.

The Evening World did manage to quietly give their readers the addresses of two New York brothels, though the implication of the article was that the police had closed these “establishments.” When I was last in New York, I took the Tenement Museum tour (tours only because it’s a preserved tenement house, that was boarded up for decades and used as a storehouse, so its interiors were largely preserved), the tour guide said nothing about tenements being used as houses of prostitution,[1] but that is the implication of this article. Yes, that “trashy novels” will land you in a brothel.

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A Shakedown in San Francisco

Highbinders? They come in crowds?

I learned a bit of old slang today. The word is “highbinder,” and according to Wiktionary, originally referred to a specific gang in New York City of the early nineteenth century, but later came to refer to Chinese criminal gangs.[1] It’s in this second meaning that I encountered it. However, another work, The Crooked Ladder, suggests that “highbinders” were the paid assassins of Tong gangs in New York and San Francisco.[2] A little further research showed that the word was once a familiar term that has fallen into disuse.

It’s not clear to me exactly when this story actually happened, as I have found reports with dates from November 5th through the 7th, 1888. Maybe as early as the 4th. Certainly those papers who are giving it a later date are wrong. The story deals with a shakedown within the Chinese community of San Francisco, but other than that it happened in Chinatown, no specific address is given, though a map of Chinatown from the 1880s locates the bordellos with Chinese prostitutes at the northern end, while those with white prostitutes were at the southern end. One article specifies that the inhabitants were “a number of Chinese women,” so it is more likely that the building was in the northern part of Chinatown.

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Oregon Okay with Licensed Brothel

You broke the law, but you seem
to have paid in advance.

As with an earlier post, I don’t want to speculate to wildly over the identity of the brothel keeper in an article from the East Oregonian of Pendleton, Oregon of August 21, 1913. She’s described as “Belle Olcott,” but the only Olcott I can find living in Pendelton in 1913, is Ida Beale Olcott, the wife of a farmer. She and her husband later moved to San Diego California. But perhaps I would be maligning her in suggesting that she is the subject of our tale.

On the other hand, the article does note that Belle Olcotte (who may or may not be Ida Beale Olcott) previously ran the “Stock Exchange,” which (given the location) was either a saloon or a place where livestock were traded. Either of those might actually be the occupation of the wife of a farmer. The article suggests that she had another occupation, “conducting a bawdy house.”

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Mrs. Delf's Unsuccessful Profession

Naughty Margaret Delf

I hope that whoever wrote the police court column in the Saint Paul Daily Globe in 1884 went on to bigger and better things. There’s some real style here, so I hope the anonymous journalist gave us some work at book length. It’s really amusing writing, which makes me think I should be dipping into the Saint Paul Daily Globe’s police column more frequently.

I’ve decided do things a little differently, and I’ve scattered a few footnotes into the text. The second item in the column was the one that lead me there, but this one was too good to resist.

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Would an Orderly Brothel Been Okay?

Let's have some order here!

Just a short news item from the July 25, 1856 New Orleans Daily Crescent.

Catherine Webber was fined $15 for keeping a disorderly brothel; two of her boarders were fined $5 each, and four others sent to the Work-house.

I did a quick bit of searching and wasn't able to find anything about Ms. Webber. Typically I like to fill out the historical record a bit more, but then there was that term, "disorderly brothel." Disorderly houses were places of prostitution, drug use, or such. By definition, a brothel is already "disorderly."

There was a Catherine Webber living in New Orleans in 1850, the wife of one J. G. Webber. The couple was from Germany and lived with their children and two women (presumably Mrs. Webber's sisters). The 1860 census doesn't show a Webber family living in New Orleans.

Could J.G. Webber, the 29-year-old German merchant of the 1850 census been dead by 1856 and his wife become a brothel-keeper in order to raise funds? Who were the "boarders"? Since they were fined, they clearly weren't so much boarders as prostitutes.

Then there were the four sent to the work house. I really wan to know how the judge made the distinction. Perhaps the other four weren't the actual prostitutes, but those who were helping run the establishment.

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Parents, Don't Send Your Children to Brothels

Don't do it. It's bad parenting.

Wait a minute, was this sort of thing legal beforehand? On July 24, 1878 the Clearfield Republican of Clearfield, Pennsylvania wrote about a change in the laws, effective at some point in 1878 (since the article describes it as "the law of 1878"). I wonder if there were people who looked at the law and thought, "there goes the government, telling parents what they can and can't do with their children."

Is the whole point of the article that under the law in 1877 parents actually could do these things? I used the word "brothels" in the title, because it actually shows up in the article. Were women being sent into prostitution by their families?

A NEW DEPARTURE  — Under the law of 1878, people who unnecessarily beat or ill use their children, hire them to acrobats and gymnasts, or beggars, keep them in brothels or at indecent or dangerous occupation, are not only liable to punishment, but may have them taken from their custody and put under charge or guardians appointed by the court.

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