Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

Recently, a colleague returned to Boston from a trip to San Francisco. He said he had a good time and then did a long riff on how different the culture of San Francisco was from Boston's. This is a common observation and an important one. Boston was founded by English religious dissenters who promptly set up a semi-theocracy. (Massachusetts, in 1832, was the last state to disestablish religion). San Francisco was set up as a military/trading town by the Spanish. Russians and many others were settled in the area long before the Americans rushed in. And rush they did after gold was discovered in the late 1840s.

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Thomas Jefferson once commented that it would take the US 1,000 years to endcap the American continent with the admission of California as a state. Jefferson, one of the smithies who forged the nation's invention, is author of one of my favorite phrases: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." a rhetorician's equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. In fact, California was admitted as a state just 23 years after Jefferson died. History speeded up in the 19th century.

As my friend and I were chatting away, I made reference to the Bay Area's colorful history of peg houses. He had never heard of them. Nor did two other friends. I'd assumed peg houses were a standard component of common gay lore. I guess I was wrong.

The California Gold Rush (as was later the Alaskan) was almost exclusively a male phenomenon. It's been estimated that at the height of the early gold rush, men outnumbered women in the Bay Area by 100 to one. I suspect working girls, despite the employment conditions, did rather well. In some of the mining camps, it seems quite likely that the population was all-male.

Enter the peg house. A peg house was an establishment that employed boys and young men to be available to other men for sexual services. The peg house got its name for featuring a long board with various upright pegs of increasingly larger sizes. The customer presumably knew his own cock size and would indicate to the host (or occasionally, hostess) which peg represented his endowment; he would select a boy, and the boy would then sit on the peg to make sure he was a suitable partner to get fucked. The customer would want to make sure the boy could take him but not too loose in the bum to diminish the experience.

It seems likely that the pegs were important to facilitate anal sex. I doubt, but don't know, that the peg rack was used to test oral capacities, though it's a consideration, particularly for the well-endowed, to be sure that a sex worker is capable of giving satisfaction. But going down on a peg which just recently tested some other male's ass seems unhygienic, at the least -- more frat-house prank than professional prostitution.

Many peg houses were located near the mining camps, where all the men (and the gold nuggets!) were. Some, too, were in San Francisco, and they were probably on the fancier side.

Who manufactured the peg boards? Were they whipped up in a shed? Was there a commercial manufacturer who provided the peg houses with their specialty tools?

Algebra, guitars and...

I hope the pegs were well-crafted and suitably sanded. Pity the young man who sat on a peg and got a splinter stuck in his rectum! Ouch!

I suspect in the early years of the Gold Rush, the Bay Area had the highest incidence of male homosexual contacts per capita in US history. Thus was that culture formed, and still present today, as noted by my friend after his trip to San Francisco.

One account I read has the peg board being an invention by ancient Arabic cultures. This sounds right to me. On the other hand, coming up with a device to measure male asshole size is not something you might win a Nobel Prize for inventing; it seems, to refer to Jefferson's phrasing, self-evident. Though I doubt many Arabs were in the throngs that were panning for those gold nuggets, perhaps some of the early Spanish settlers, after their own experience with Arabic culture, brought the peg boards with them as they colonized California. It's a tantalizing idea.

What were the boys in the peg houses paid? What was the cut for the House? Was there a fixed price? Or were prices negotiable? I have never been a buyer or seller of sexual services, so I am unfamiliar with the art of the deal. But in that crazy Wild West culture of the Gold Rush years, market forces worked their way and male whorehouses filled an important niche by providing employment to young men, encouraged the transfer of wealth and provided satisfaction.

Who knows? Some of the patrons may have taken up with some of the lads they met in the House and made it something more than just a sexual arrangement. It can happen.

Alas, Boston cannot count a history of multiple male peg-houses in its distinguished past. When you think old Boston, one tends to thinks of stockades, not young men sizing out their asses on plump pegs. As the old cigarette ad from the '60s noted (when there were still butt ads on the toob), "Oh, the disadvantages!"

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com