The world of sex work and sex workers in the 19th century west was certainly no stranger to clients who thought outside the sexual box. In 1871 Nevada, a female sex worker at a more upscale brothel got into some trouble after starting a fight with a (male) customer over politics. This is of interest to us because her means of assault was a whip, and her local nickname was the "German Muscle Woman."

So brothels and individual sex workers definitely had experience with sexual acts beyond the missionary position.

(n.b. This is from Wilbur Shepperson's "Restless Strangers," citing a newspaper account; and no, there is no further information so please don't ask.)

In terms of specifically lesbian sex and/or intimacy, it's pretty difficult to see in the sources. This was still the age of acceptable romantic friendships between women--if, that is, there were enough women in a town to have any kind of female community. (I kid, but, you see official ratios like 2500 men to 150 women in some mining towns. And please note that this does not mean 149 women were sex workers--none other than /u/itsallfolklore has shown that at least in some places, it was quite rare!). When legal and other sources get up in a huff about women having sex with women, it is generally between two sex workers. With other women, basically all I read about is rampant adultery between women and men.

Please don't get the idea of 19th century brothels as some sort of femme paradise populated by tinkling pianos and Companions from Firefly. In the same "upscale" brothel where the German immigrant got into a fight with a client, another sex worker attempted suicide later that year...twice. The frequency of drug use, alcoholism, and suicide are far better indicators of most of these women's lives.

Now, there is a wrinkle here. Women seen hanging out with sex workers, or sometimes even in the area of a town well known for having brothels, could pretty much count on at least some men starting to call them "you damned whore." An accusation that, Marion Goldman notes, in 1863 caused one woman to kill the man who flung it at her--and was exonerated on the grounds that her act was justified. Being labeled a whore or harlot was a condemnation that stuck.

There was also a distinctly racist component. Sue Fawn Chung points out that essentially all Chinese women, most of them immigrants, in Virginia City, Nevada were treated like (disrespected as) sex workers.

So it's very possible that male fears of lesbian sex between sex workers, and the occasional report therefore, did not always involve two actual sex workers, but there doesn't seem to be much way to tell.

I bring up this idea of "potentially, people who weren't sex workers being tagged as such" because it very much applies to our understanding of male sex work in the late 19th and early 20th century.

----CW for child/teenage sexual abuse----

The best information here is from the early 20C, when young men (generally considered 16-21, more or less) "delinquents" involved in either sex work became somewhat of a moral panic in western cities. Naturally, this means younger white boys/men either being corrupted by or complicit in "gross indecency" with men of color.

In fact, to the extent we can trust court testimonies, we have a decently developed picture of an underground gay male community because of this moral panic. Why? Because the police really liked recruiting teenagers as undercover agents of a sort. And these boys knew how to testify in court.

That's also the problem--what if their statements reflect an invented ideal, and each person uses that ideal, rather than their actual experience, to authenticate their testimony? There's some evidence for this, in fact: in a lot of cases, the prosecution and witness speaks of "prostitution" when the actual testimony is...fuzzy.

Still, the overall picture is of a shadow world where sex work and "stranger intimacy" are possibilities, and easily blend into each other. And while court cases concentrate on older men of color seducing young white men and teenagers, racism and the recent identification of statutory rape against girls as a crime seem to be much more at fault for isolating those cases from much broader involvement. So when I say "men" here, please understand that as a simplification of a scale that extended from two consenting adults to statutory rape against boys.

Women sex workers generally lived in brothels or their own homes. For men, however, the street was the place to go. Nayan Shah (using primarily legal records) describes a highly developed body language vocabulary, where

Glances, gestures, and movements conveyed interest and attention, curiousity and fascination, disinterest or disgust. Eye movements, hand gestures, and comportment while standing or walking provided a code shared by the men.

This could be simple--catching someone's eye and making gestures to come over (especially if the person gesturing was standing in a doorway or along the side of the road). Or it could be more complex.

Shah gives an example that's perfect here, because it definitely crosses into "is it sex work/it was sex work, right?" territory. One man walked near another and, reportedly, rattled some coins in his pocket. The second understood this as enough of a signal that he turned and started walking away...but kept glancing back over his shoulder in a manner that evidently communicated he wanted the first man to follow him, rather than hoping he wasn't.

Other cases that were labeled "prostitution" in court might involve one man with relatively good living conditions letting another stay with him and then being caught having sex (looking through keyholes was a favorite police pastime). Maybe even just offering a meal. Again--it's difficult to judge these interactions.

And maybe it was for the people involved, too.