Whore Stories Read Free Page B

with a bouquet common to courtesans. They exiled the Comte for being an idiot and Madame de Pompadour deflected the blow, as she always did. In fact, she went on to become one of the world’s most recognized names in the fine arts of seduction, solipsism, and sex work.
THE SPANISH BARBARA
PRO FILE
DAY JOB: Fantasy fit rent-boy
CLAIM TO FAME: Proudly enduring a humiliating execution under the Borgias
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Fifteenth-century Rome
Nobody knows from when or where the Spanish Barbara hailed. One can assume that “Spain” would be a safe guess, but in Borgia Rome, things were ass backward. With a regime that bore more resemblance to a donkey show than a papacy, the Borgias spent many afternoons having enemies of the church burned at the stake all over town, in between sundry orgies and flesh buffets. Luckily for us, a social climbing Alsatian named Johann Burchard was a first-rate chronicler of the era, and provides whorestorians with a trove of haunting anecdotes that illustrate the unspeakable cruelty committed by the papacy. In 1498, Burchard records a harrowing tale of one pioneering transvestite prostitute who stood excruciatingly nude before the draconian Borgia despots.
The whore in question was indeed “The Spanish Barbara,” and his hellish fate is one Abraham Lincoln might have attributed to something he never called, “the shittier angels of our nature.” The following is from Burchard’s Liber Notarum , his exhaustive diary recounting the Borgias’s daily debaucheries:
An honest prostitute, named Cursetta, had been thrown into prison because she had a Moor as a friend who went around in women’s clothing under the name of the Spanish Barbara. . . . As a punishment for this outrage, [they] were led around together through the city … the Moor in a woman’s dress . . . in order that everybody might see his private parts and recognize the fraud he had perpetrated.
Can you imagine the daring, the unbridled nerve it would take to be a black tranny prostitute in Borgia Rome? Neither can I. And I also can’t believe that the Spanish Barbara’s client list wasn’t already aware of the “fraud” he had perpetrated. You can just see it:
“Hey, Vito! Do you remember Barbara, that smoking hot Spanish prostitute? Yeah, the one with the penis. Well, you’re never going to believe this—I saw him/her burned at the stake today and guess what? She’s actually a black African man . What do you mean ‘how didn’t I know?’”
In another tremendous entry to his Liber Notarum , Burchard describes an orgy that’s referred to affectionately as “The Dance of the Chestnuts,” and reveals the scope of indulgences (of all variety) going down on a typical Sunday night at the Borgia’s apostolic palace: “Chestnuts [were] strewn about, which the prostitutes, naked and on their hands and knees, had to pick up as they crawled in and out amongst the lampstands. Finally, prizes were offered—silken doublets, pairs of shoes, hats and other garments—for those men who were most successful with the prostitutes.”
Damn. Some popes have all the fun.
It’s awfully curious how one can become inured to violence and torture. Take Guantanamo Bay, Torquemada, and Houston Astros baseball. People come to expect the lowest common denominator, and Burchard was no different. His depiction of the following horrors committed against the Spanish Barbara and his fellows is almost clinical:
The Moor was put in prison, and finally led . . . together with two other brigands with a Sbirre [a Roman policeman] riding before them on an ass carrying on the point of a stick two testicles, which had been cut out from a Jew because he had had intercourse with a Christian woman. . . . The Moor was placed on a pile of wood, and was killed on the pole of the gallows. . . . Then the pile was lighted, but on account of a downpour of rain it did not burn well and only his legs were charred.
Are you fucking kidding me? Somewhere, there