Modest adventures in Maine skin trade

Sex, apparently, is still a big deal to a lot of people.

Sex also is, I’m hoping, a pretty good word with which to start a column when you want to grab the reader’s attention. We’ll see.

Seems everywhere you look these days – TV, newspapers, magazines, movies, video games, cereal boxes, there’s sex. Not people actually having sex, thank heaven, but people talking, wondering and, increasingly, fretting, about it.

And it’s not just in Hollywood, Times Square or some of the more randy sections of Des Moines, either. Even here in modest little Maine, a state so demure it showers in the dark, the obsession with sex is second only to the obsession with fishing and it’s closing fast.

Take Portland. Please. Down in that usually free-wheeling Babylon on the Bay there’s been a lot of fretting lately about a growing prostitution trade. In response, Portland police mounted a sting operation, called Forbidden Pleasures, which involved setting up a bogus whorehouse offering ” sensual massage.” Twenty-six men, reportedly including some of prominence, who responded to newspaper ads and who tried to negotiate for services that went beyond mere lumbar relief were popped for solicitation.

You might assume that, at least among those paid to think deep thoughts for a living in such a socially conscious city, this episode would spur a vigorous discussion on the damage prostitution can do to a community’s social fabric or how, in the interest of gender equity, the ganders who try to buy sex should be every bit as culpable as the gooses who try to sell it.

Assume again. That city’s daily newspaper, after reporting the bust, editorialized in high dudgeon that Police Chief Mike Chitwood should be thoroughly ashamed of himself for this undertaking and must not follow through on his threat to make public the names of the 26 men who were duped by undercover policewomen posing as hookers. I’m having a hard time finding published dudgeon of any degree regarding women who’ve been duped by undercover policemen posing as johns.

Stratospheric dudgeon was the reaction from one of the weeklies that ran the ads that caused all the trouble. They wouldn’t have run the ad had they know it was for a bogus whorehouse, which, unless they’re the only ones on he planet who don’t know what ”sensual massage” really means, suggests they would gladly have run an ad for a real one. Chief Chitwood used them for a night of forbidden pleasure and didn’t even call them in the morning.

(This episode reminds me an awful lot of Austin, Texas, when I moved there in 1975. That capital city’s downtown was a bustling financial and government center by day, a deserted ghost town of darkened office buildings by night. Deserted, that is, but for the clusters of ladies, gents and who-knows-whats of the evening who congregated on every street corner offering, I naively assumed, directions to passing motorists. When the downtown began a revival, the legit entrepreneurs complained loudly about the social fabric, so Austin police began a vigorous campaign to roust the illegit and so many prominent men got their names in the newspaper you’d have thought the Chamber of Commerce had just held its annual banquets. The rousting worked, the hookers were forced off the street, and since this happily coincided with a soft commercial real-estate market, they took leases on the many vacant strip-mall storefronts and opened sensual massage parlors. Win-win.)

Bangor is no stranger to fretting about sexual issues; often with strange results. For several the years the Queen City, known for showering in the dark while fully clothed, was home to the only alcohol-free strip joint this side of Teheran. The joint, Diva’s, recently cut a deal in which it got a liquor license in exchange for complying with a city order to put bikinis on its dancers. The dancers, their right to prance around naked clearly violated, held a highly publicized event in which they poured drinks and pranced at the same time, an act of civil disobedience that must be exactly what lonely old Thoreau had in mind when he penned his famous essay on the subject. Citations were written, lawsuits filed and Bangor’s exotic dancers are working their way up the court system. Can’t wait for them to land in Clarence Thomas’ lap.

But the best fretting going is out of Old Orchard Beach, a seaside resort long famous for its summertime gatherings of large men wearing tiny bathing suits. Now, town officials are cracking down on merchants who sell those T-shirts imprinted with sexually explicit messages — like the ones where Practitioners of a Certain Occupation or Hobby Do It With an Apropos Double Entendre.

I share the OOB officials’ distaste for these shirts, but I fear they’re giving up something far more valuable. Under normal circumstances, you couldn’t force people, even under the most severe penalty of law, to wear signs around their necks identifying themselves as idiots. Here, they do it voluntarily and pay 18 bucks for the privilege. Plus, anything that encourages large men in tiny swimwear to cover up a bit should not be discouraged.

An interesting follow-up to Austin’s experience in the skin trade is that, by the time I moved away in 1986, the police had successfully rousted the many sensual massage parlors through a series of sting operations that nabbed both sellers and buyers. This time, through, the sellers didn’t have to move – they merely changed the names of their businesses to modeling studios and the buyers rushed to local art-supply shops, grabbing up every last tube of flesh-toned paint in central Texas. Maine has a lot of art-supply shops, so there’s something else to fret about.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.