Selling Sex, Drink and Gender

A Storyville Story

Abstract

From 1897 to 1917, there existed a legally sanctioned (though not technically legal) Red Light district in the city of New Orleans. Dubbed Storyville in dubious honor of the city alderman, Sidney Story, who allowed for its creation, the red light district spanned several blocks comprising both single-room bagnios and elaborate “high-end” brothels. Storyville’s pseudo-legal status allowed for multiple, regularly published guidebooks to the district—advertising everything from brothels and individual sex workers to restaurants, liquor and cures for venereal diseases. The scholarship on Storyville is sparse and often fails to recognize the complex gender dynamics playing out between the high end Madams, who held considerable economic sway as the “faces” and partial owners of their own establishments, and their male backers who controlled the service and entertainment complex that surrounded Storyville. In this paper, I examine advertising in Storyville’s guidebooks—archived in Pamela Anderson’s Guidebooks to Sin—to illustrate how Storyville constructed placating narratives of masculinity, especially around the districts entries, to put customers at ease while maintaining the brothels themselves as a heightened space of feminine exoticism. There is a particular focus throughout the paper on the advertisement of alcohol and how different beverages, drunk in different spaces, took on gendered connotations.