When the Ladies of the Night Unite

In an age of mixed morality, the memories of a whore seem quaintly innocuous.

They become, by nature of our cultural collapse, no more outrageous than those National Geographic documentaries of lions coupling on the Masai Mara.

We are in an eternal rutting season in America since the Bill and Monica Show legitimized sexual dalliance and since Kenneth Starr turned their groping and puffing into a national bestseller.

Encouraged by the notoriety, the nation’s wily new merchants of salacity have filled cyberspace with enough pornography to stop an old man’s heart. And while I have no firsthand knowledge of the subject, I am told that even phone sex is making a comeback.

Which leads me, however circuitously, to Norma Jean Almodovar, the cop-turned-hooker who is attempting to become to erotica what Karl Marx was to communism. She’s calling upon the sex workers of the world to arise. So to speak.

You remember Norma Jean. She quit the LAPD in 1982 to pursue a more lucrative career as a prostitute and wrote a book about it. She still calls herself a whore in symbolic unity with women on the street but won’t say whether she is still active.

I doubt that she has the time. Her International Sex Worker Foundation for Art, Culture and Education keeps her running. Just opening a museum for whores sounds like a lot of work.

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Norma Jean has gone big-time. This became clear the other day when I met with her and her publicist, Max Green, in a Panorama City apartment that has become a kind of temple to whoredom.

In an effort to humanize the plight of sex workers since the days of Mary Magdalene, her organization has placed a $5,000 down payment on a building in Butte, Mont., that is believed to be the nation’s oldest brothel. They want to turn it into a sex museum.

Both art and artifacts of the world’s most vilified profession will be on display, including work created by today’s hookers and trinkets left behind by yesterday’s darlings. A kind of whore’s journey through time.

For $100 you can adopt a brick in the 108-year-old building, and for a $3,500 donation they’ll put up a plaque with your name on it where the ladies once turned tricks. Not exactly a star on the Walk of Fame but close.

“We want to challenge the perception people have of us,” Norma Jean said, curled up shoeless on a couch but, I hasten to add, otherwise fully clothed. “We’re not from another planet. We have husbands and kids. We have lives.”

The term sex workers, she explained, is intended to embrace not just prostitutes but also those who work the phones, take pictures and even merchandise aphrodisiacs on the Internet.

“It’s sort of like everyone who covers the news is a journalist,” she added, “but you break it down into reporters, photographers and you.”

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Much of the memorabilia that will fill the old whorehouse in Butte was found in the building: the bones of a canary owned by one of the girls, a World War II food ration book someone traded for sex, a black silk stocking, whips, spats, lingerie and even wind chimes for the truly perverted.

Norma Jean brought them out one by one with the loving care of an archeologist at a dinosaur dig, accompanying the display with a running commentary intended to place harlotry in the context of history.

Upstairs in an office cluttered beyond clutter she displayed her own work, doll-sized clay sculptures that will be part of a planned traveling exhibit titled, “Commercial Sex: The Way We Work.”

Among the pieces are the depiction of comedian Eddie Murphy in a red convertible picking up a prostitute, and a housewife at home ironing clothes and raising kids while working at phone sex.

The purpose of it all, Norma Jean says, is to educate the world. “You can scream all you want to get the message out, but if no one listens it goes nowhere. So we’re using art and a museum to get attention.”

I’ve never been certain whether Norma Jean’s reinvention of herself as the Queen of Whores is altruism or self-promotion, but for whatever reason she’s putting a lot of energy into uniting the sex workers of the world.

It gives one pause to wonder what might happen if they formed their own labor organization. It could be more powerful than the Teamsters and noisier than the Writers Guild and send the cost of sex skyrocketing. Makes a man think.

Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com