Diversity - A Beautiful Bisexual Octoroon Scams Progressive Washington With Charm And A Bit Of Color

Back in the Nineteenth Century, New Orleans was truly a diverse city, proud of its interracial culture, its mix of Caribbean, Creole, black, and Anglo residents. In this heady brew one wasn't just of mixed race but a quadroon or octoroon - one-quarter or one-eighth black - and this classification had its own set of rules, perks, and prohibitions.

Octoroon consorts were considered among the most desirable for white men. They were beautiful, Caucasian-featured but with copper, light mahogany, or burnished oak skin that gave only a hint of their parentage.  The client could have it both ways - crossing the color line without censure, and enjoying the delights of a foreign -looking princess. 

Octoroons could step out in New Orleans society, never in the highest echelons of course, but nevertheless in good company.  Adela Beaumont was considered an international beauty, compared to Nefertiti, Cleopatra, and a Phoenician princess; and she was often featured in magazines for both blacks and whites. 

Although Adela enjoyed a privileged and storied reputation, she could never aspire to any class above her own.  Racial tolerance even in welcoming New Orleans had its limits.  This never concerned Adela who was visited by wealthy men from the Americas to Europe. 

Emmanuel de Miramon-Fairmont was a French aristocrat, a man of eclectic but fine tastes in wine and women who had heard of the legendary Adela Beaumont and her alleged French royal  heritage.  It had been rumored that in the days before the Haitian revolution, the Third Duc de Guiche, a Bourbon second in line for the French throne, had relationships with a number of Haitian women of whom was Adela's great-great grandmother.

Emmanuel booked his travel to New Orleans by steamer from Le Havre, and spent long days awaiting his arrival at the Port of New Orleans.  He was not disappointed, invited Adela to be his concubine, and promised her all the treasures of Europe. She agreed and thanks to her beauty, charm, and savoir-faire became the toast of Paris. 

 

This is all preamble, for the story is about Lutece Millington, also an octoroon, who lived in rural North Carolina but who, thanks to her beauty, natural sophistication, and enviable charm had other desires. She came into her own in the era of 'diversity', that peculiar American political ethos which recognized the colored, the ethnically diverse, and the sexually fluid and gave them social priority.  As in all cultures and subcultures, beauty has always given added luster to already desirable ensembles, and Lutece felt that it was the right time to leave Booneville and head north. 

The progressive canon being what it was - featuring diversity in all its forms and including them along fluid spectra of race, gender, and ethnicity - Lutece's sexual orientation was a plus. From the age of twelve when she blossomed into a fully mature, desirous, and vitally sexual young woman, she realized that she was sought after by both men and women, neither of whom could resist her seductively mysterious origins.  Although many suspected her parentage to be that of most mixed race women - fieldhand, tenant farmer, and former slave - they willingly suspended disbelief and imagined her a Persian princess. 

Black men who characteristically want only the whitest women as sexual prizes were no different.  They followed Lutece like a pack of bloodhounds. Lutece wanted  no part of them.  Her white ancestry had diluted three-quarters of whatever 'Bama blackness she had in her, and she was not about to roll over for some homeboy. 

White men, however, were the most insistent.  The idea of actually living diversity, not just talking about and promoting it, was something else indeed; and what greater honor than to squire the likes of Lutece Millington and show the world their political commitment and virility. 

It was a matter of serendipity, pure luck with a little ambition added, that she met Mrs. Buxton Longworth, a woman who, despite her ties to the Roosevelt family and the wealth and social privilege that came with it, was a woman on the prowl; and when she saw Lutece sitting alone in the Russian Tea Room, she made her advances.  She must have this oriental beauty at any cost. 

The affair became the talk of Georgetown, for although Mrs. Longworth's bisexuality had been rumored, it had never been confirmed; but the besotted Buxton never hesitated to show off her love in the best social circles; and before long it was the stunning octoroon who became the center of Washington's attention. 

The Nation's Capital is like that - it fixes on something, anything, and makes it a cause celebre, a shibboleth, a temporary icon; and the beautiful, mixed race, bi-sexual Lutece was it.  She was fawned over, given public fora, adulated like no other. Progressives were delighted to know that someone like Lutece - young, nubile, beautiful, and sexually complaisant - was out there. Liberal lesbians were the toughest Bernal Heights bull dykes, blue-haired, nose-ringed, ugly Subaru-driving butches, and here came Lutece, a woman out of pasha's harem or the Arabian Nights.

Finally, they applauded, the real face of diversity.  For progressives it was like the Second Coming, a long-waited, spiritual epiphany.  This would show the country club Republicans across the aisle what diversity really meant. 

None of this was lost on Lutece, a savvy, politically attuned woman as well as a sexual siren; and so it wasn't long before she left the rather staid and dour Mrs. Longworth for more spicy fare. Men who otherwise might be put off by a gay woman - despite the caricature of men loving lesbian pornography, these well-heeled gentlemen wanted to avoid any semblance of gayness either way - forgot their hesitancy, and jumped whole hog into the competition for the delights of the beautiful octoroon. 

Lutece was no concubine, consort, or kept woman by any means.  She, like most women gifted with a special allure, used their charms to best advantage.  'Feminine wiles', that old-fashioned and now discredited misogynist term, never lost currency among the brightest women, and Lutece was a master. She easily had the swells of Washington wrapped around her little finger.

She was not adverse to lavish gifts, weekends on St. Bart's, and dinners at the best restaurants; but kept her eye out for her political future.  One of these men would surely be able to place her somewhere in the hierarchy; and so it was that a junior Congressman from a neighboring Southern state, as smitten with Lutece as any of his more senior colleagues, offered her a position in his office.

As smart as they come, Lutece took every advantage of the office, sleeping with the Congressman when necessary, but heading his initiatives on a number of progressive causes. She was indifferent to them, cared little for their supposedly utopian promise, and found them ponderously officious; but until something better came along, she was agreeable. 

With Lutece around, politicians could check off diversity boxes with pleasure and ease. This was no dutiful exercise of fidelity to the movement, but one of pride.  Here was a woman who embodied the very best of the New America, a beautiful, mixed race, mixed sexuality goddess. 

During this heady period of her political acceleration, Lutece discouraged the advances of women, most of whom were second fiddle, either married to someone who mattered or wannabees, in any case not worth the trouble.  Moreover, the whole bi-sexual thing was never a keeper in the first place.

She enjoyed the spotlight, for she was invited to speak at a variety of public forums.  She could be counted on to look great, to flaunt her racial and sexual mix, and to mouth the words of her ambitious handlers.  Before long, someone decided it might be time for this now well-known woman with an impeccable progressive pedigree to run for office; but by then Lutece had had enough of the Washington merry-go-round, had managed not only to turn a profit from her stay but to manage a multi-million dollar Wall Street portfolio. 

She was last seen in Santa Barbara at a party with the Windsors but that bourgeois royal scene was but a stop along the way to something more je ne sais quoi, or at least accommodating to her now highly refined, eclectic, 'diverse' tastes. 

'An American hero', said one observer of the Washington scene who was onto her political brilliance, a woman who could work a crowd, take progressives for all they were worth, and claim both sides of any aisle or street. 'I wonder where she is now?', he mused, but  he really didn't want to know.  Icons are not real, after all.