The Oldest Profession Gets a New Museum

By John Cloud/Butte

I loved being a whore, and that offends people." Norma Jean Almodovar, 49, head of the International Sex Workers Foundation for Art, Culture and Education, has made a career from such bluster. But being an activist for prostitutes is less lucrative than her previous job--impersonating a bawdy Julia Child for her johns. (That was one specialty.)

It's also more controversial here in Butte, Mont., where Almodovar has been trying to rustle up the funds to fully restore the Dumas, a former brothel that opened in 1890. After seeing Almodovar on a talk show in 1998, Butte businessman Rudy Giecek, 57, who had acquired the dilapidated Dumas from its last madam, contacted her. Using little more than sweat equity, they have turned the 43-room Victorian building into a museum exploring the history of prostitution. One day Almodovar would also like to turn the Dumas into her foundation's "headquarters" (a fancy term for her tiny collective, run on a shoestring with loans from a New York City john). It may be the only place in the world written up in both Penthouse and Civilization, the Library of Congress magazine. When Giecek first explored the dank basement rooms, which the madams hadn't used since the '40s, he found lipsticks, a 10-minute timer, chamber pots, an ancient jar of Vaseline. In one room, the bed frame had worn through the flooring.

If not for Almodovar and all her red hair and radical talk, the locals might have overlooked the Dumas's reincarnation. They have survived far worse, particularly the collapse of mining. More than 100,000 people once lived in this city (current pop. 35,000), and it acquired two nicknames: "the Richest Hill on Earth" (the relentless digging of Butte's copper turned it into the nation's largest Superfund site) and "the Perch of the Devil." It was where miners could rise from the underground to, as local booster Donal Moylan puts it, "fight, f___ and drink."

In all mining towns, the scarcity of women helped bordellos flourish, but "Butte boasted of having the prettiest women of any red-light district, and it was true," Charlie Chaplin noted in his autobiography. Cops looked the other way. "It kept the miners occupied," says Ellen Baumler of the Montana Historical Society. "The women paid money that went right into city coffers"--until 1982, when a new, reform-minded sheriff closed the Dumas, the last of its kind. The mines closed a year later, and Butte was changed forever.

Or was it? When Almodovar came here from L.A., she entered a fight over the town's soul. On one side are residents of the flats, the suburban realm of McDonald's and Staples. Susan Kaluza, 41, lives there with her husband, three children, and bunnies that run freely on her immaculate green lawn. "I didn't want Butte to be identified with the sex workers of the U.S.," says Kaluza, spokeswoman for the Concerned Citizens. "What if our children see the Dumas and say, 'O.K., this seems like a good career'?"

On the other side is the uptown district where the brothels were. It draws assorted Old West romantics and libertarians. Curt Buttons, 54, is one of the folk who keep the saloons open until 2 a.m. A former Dumas client who estimates he has had sex with 50 prostitutes, Buttons, a retired railroad worker, has given more than $1,500 to restore the Dumas. "I hate the town Butte is becoming," he says. "You can't have a great time."

Almodovar's foundation is struggling. Last weekend's Biker Rally, a motorcycle fund raiser for the Dumas, drew small crowds. Almodovar and Giecek are bitterly arguing over money. They could lose the Dumas. Worse, the world's prostitutes found themselves too busy to come to Butte to help out, which broke Almodovar's heart as well as her bank account. This summer, in fact, only one sex worker showed up, a 23-year-old who has stripped at the Palace of Pleasure in Portland, Ore. She admits to feeling awed by the Dumas. "The mind reels--you imagine the women hanging on the banisters and the player piano going." So is she glorifying prostitution? "No way. I know for sure this was a rugged business. Douching with Lysol, years of raging alcohol abuse. You see that here too." Many in Butte, however, would rather consign such depressing images to history.