Cha-U-Kao was a famous clown who performed at the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s. She was openly gay & a favourite model of Toulouse-Lautrec. Cha-U-Kao was a stage name & a style of dance similar to the cancan. It derives from “chahut", meaning "noise" and "chaos”.
Thread
Thread
Not much is known about her life. We don’t even know what her real name was. She was a gymnast before she became a clown. Maurice Guilbert photographed her during this time in her life. She was one of many openly gay women that Toulouse-Lautrec painted.
Although Lautrec was appreciated in his lifetime, his paintings of sexual intimacy between women were not. One anonymous critic in the paper Le Journal called this painting “The kiss of the devil” (“Le Baiser du diable”).
He was also friends with Oscar Wilde, drawing him several times and painting the writer in 1895 the night before his trial for gross indecency. He always stood by his friend.
Many of the women he painted in bed together were sex workers, living and working in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec lived in brothels for months at a time, renting a room to himself. He once wrote that “The professional model is always like a stuffed owl. These girls are alive.”
Lautrec once wrote to a friend about the women he had seen having sex. “Just imagine...When you see the way they love... eh? The technique of tenderness."
As a teenager, Lautrec broke both his legs and they never healed or grew properly. He had a full sized torso but stood at little over 5 ft tall. Diminutive, he may have been but by all accounts he had a very large penis. He called himself the little coffee pot with the big spout”
He was known in the brothels as “the prick on paws.”
He loved women & often obsessed about particular parts of their bodies. For 20 nights he reserved a seat in a Paris theatre just to watch Marcelle Lender dance. ‘I simply come to see Lender’s back,’ he said. ‘Take a good look at it. You’ve never seen anything so magnificent.’
He loved to smell a woman’s armpits, calling them his “tobacco shop.”
His most famous works today depict the dancehalls of Paris, like the Moulin Rogue, the women who worked there and their patrons.
Sadly for Lautrec, his wild ways caught up with him and he died aged only 36 from complications related to alcohol and syphilis.
His paintings offer a unique & valuable glimpse into an otherwise hidden world. Were it not for him, it is doubtful we would know about early gay pioneers like Cha-U-Kao. His works sell for millions of pounds today.
If you would like to read more about Lautrec and his paintings of lesbian sex, this is a wonderful article scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewconten…
If you were after a really in-depth study, this thesis by Anna Dobbins will do the trick scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewconten…
