Word: brothel
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...this show makes clear, the high point of Lautrec's art is not the cabaret scenes, bursting with character and morose, raucous appetite, so much as the late brothel pictures, which fluctuate with such marvelous ambiguity between desire and repulsion, between the sentimental and the caricatural, while preserving (for the most part) a strict and innately aristocratic ( distance. One side of Lautrec was a goatish, little skeptic who regarded sex as a semiexcretory function -- "To make love," he once said, "it doesn't matter what you're with -- anything will do." The other side was extremely tender, and it comes...
Except to amuse his friends, Lautrec rarely drew couples actually copulating; the character of his brothel scenes is that of inaction, waiting, even boredom, and in this they were perfectly true to the social world they addressed, since most of the life of a girl in a maison close was taken up with sitting around. The tedium of the big-city seraglio becomes monumental, almost Egyptian, with In the Salon at the Rue des Moulins, circa...
...story is simple, but not simplistic. Sweetback (Van Peebles, the director) works as a performer in a brother. He makes his living displaying his sexual prowess for a racially mixed audience. The police "borrow" him from the brothel owner to serve as a generic black suspect...
...whore you must be a dyke." Though any hint of homosexual activity means close scrutiny, gay military personnel say a good deal of wayward heterosexual activity is tolerated, even tacitly approved, by the military hierarchy. At the end of the gulf war, a Nevada brothel called the Mustang Ranch offered free passes to returning soldiers. "For some reason," says Wilson, "going to a whorehouse in their dress blues is not a problem...
...even for the Wild West. A psychologist in Nevada's state prison system wanted to build a theme park that would represent an 1880s mining camp. As Bill Mace Knapp envisioned it, the place would be old-timey, with a general store, saloon, gold mine and . . . oh, yes, a brothel...