CW: suicide
When Jason Kirin (he/him) was growing up in Pittsburgh, he knew his family was unconventional. His parents were disco dancers and it was common knowledge within the family that his grandmother was a prostitute who, in 1957, shot a cop. Not just any cop — the head of Pittsburgh’s vice squad.
In the same way that we all normalize our upbringing, Kirin doesn’t remember feeling like having a sex-working grandmother was particularly noteworthy. “It was not a stigmatized thing in our household,” he tells me over Zoom. “No one in my family had any great love of the police.” Indeed, Kirin grew up thinking of sex work as “another job that somebody could have.”
And yet, while his grandmother’s job and story were normalized, she died before Kirin was born. Until he started researching her story for his recent book, From the Furnace with Love: The Multigenerational Tapestry of Shirley Cavanagh (which was published on Dec. 17, 2023 — the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers), he didn’t understand the impact she had on his life; he hadn’t connected the dots between the two of them, by way of his mother. The process of telling her story revealed the complex way that both trauma and love were passed down through his family line.
The story of his grandmother, Shirley Cavanagh, is remarkable on its own. She was born in Pittsburgh during The Great Depression. In the book, Kirin describes her life as one “informed by scarcity, pollution, and trauma.” She spent her teenage years in and out of institutions, foster care, and abusive family situations.
Throughout her 20s she gave birth to four children (none of whom she maintained custody of due to myriad tragic circumstances), worked in a brothel, and had a tumultuous love affair with the police chief who was using her as an informant. She also accidentally shot him in a public setting, and had the city of Pittsburgh stand by her side and offer aid throughout the trial.
Why would a community stick up for a woman with a dubious past who shot a cop? The answer, as detailed in the book, is complicated, but put simply: the officer summoned Cavanagh to a bar, he was drunk and belligerent, and he pulled a gun on her. She batted it away, which resulted in him getting shot by his own weapon. At first he denied Cavanagh was even present at the shooting, but it was in public. People knew. (Also, he was married, which didn't look good.) The entire debacle really was his fault and, incredibly, the public could see that.
Kirin writes: “In a rare example of justice, a 28-year-old sex worker with a record of assault and battery of a police officer, keeping an assignation house, keeping a bawdy house, and prostitution, stood up against the Pittsburgh Police Bureau and won.”
Indeed, Shirley’s story is so remarkable that I have spent the last week trying to make sense of it (particularly as someone who has no roots in Pittsburgh, and only knows it as it is now). If this same story happened today, I can’t imagine Pittsburgh taking the side of a sex worker as she defended herself against the police.
Yet in 1957, Pittsburgh women wrote public statements saying they would discourage their husbands from joining the police force, random citizens sent her money and offered Shirley a place to stay when she was released from jail, and the ACLU offered to step in and help (this last one I can imagine; when I was an organizer with the Sex Worker Outreach Project Pittsburgh, the ACLU was our biggest ally).
It is not just that Shirley won her case and was granted freedom, though she was. It’s also that her case had a very real impact on the Pittsburgh Police Department. Kirnan writes, “[The judge’s] punishment, reprimands, and shuffling of the police officers involved ultimately resulted in the full disbandment of the police vice and narcotic squad.”
I can only guess that Shirley’s outcome is the result of some combination of her whiteness, the working-class solidarity of the time, and the fact that 2nd wave feminism (with its insistence that sex workers are co-conspirators in the subjugation of women) had yet to take hold.
In the 1990s, Shirley’s three remaining children (including Kirin’s mother), found each other and — in an attempt to understand where they came from — began to piece together their mom’s story. A story as complex as Shirley’s, though, requires some tenacity, a quality that Shirley’s three kids did not possess. “Each of them was afflicted with mental illnesses, drug use, alcoholism, and genetics,” Kirin writes. “Like Shirley, her children, too, lived in a society devoid of support for their needs as humans with chemical imbalances. The struggle caused them to shelve their entire project and part ways in 1999.”
By 2003, Kirin’s mom’s mental health struggles got the best of her and she committed suicide, something that Kirin interrupted several times when he was in high school. Her death, in part, pushed Kirin to pick the project back up. “My mom and I were very close, we spent many years on the road and lived alone together for, like, 5 years after my dad and sister moved out,” he tells me. “When she died from suicide, there was a real sense of loss. There was a mom-shaped hole ripped out of the inside of my body that I tried to fill.”
Kirin wanted to understand his mom’s life, what made her who she was, and so he dug into her past, starting with his grandmother. What he found is that her story is far more complex than he imagined. His grandmother was born in 1927. “It was the Great Depression, it was the polluted suburbs of Braddock,” he tells me. “And it just keeps going on and on. It’s like she never stood a fucking chance.” While she managed to stand up against the police and win, her life didn’t have a happy ending. She was estranged from her children, who in turn carried her trauma on. “I look at my mom,” Kirin explains. “She was a mentally ill, alcoholic woman in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in the ‘90s. She had borderline personality disorder, she also never stood a fucking chance.”
But putting both women in their context also opened up space for him to deepen his love for them. “The stories of women are way more complex than we are allowed to know,” he says. His struggles with forces outside of himself pushed him to recognize that these women were also playing the hand they were dealt. “We’re all fucking doing the best we can,” he comments.
“Writing the book became a therapy,” he says. A sort of exposure therapy that lessened the intensity of the pain the more he engaged. “Throughout the process, I understood the need to cry; every time it would come on while I was researching I would allow myself to just flush my feelings out of my system through tears,” he says. “And then the next time, it would be a little bit less. And then finally, I would be able to look at my mother’s suicide.”
By the time he was finished telling his grandmother’s story in the book, he came to understand who she was and how who she was made him who he is. It also made him recognize the strength his grandmother exhibited in a world that wasn’t built for her. “If anything, I’ve learned that sex work is a very subversive, very anarchistic, incredibly punk thing to do with your body,” he says. It was her mode of survival, the very survival that led to his life.
The book is a testament to that survival, a survival teeming with familial love and disdain for the systems that work to control women’s bodies and shut mothers down.
“There are so many times when people tell me that they can't wait to read that book,” Kirin says. “I'm like, “It’s great, it's a true crime novel about a destitute prostitute and … and I tricked you. It's a book about generational trauma.’”
He ends wise words for anyone, “Go call your mom, now.”
You can find Jessie on Twitter @sapiotextual & Instagram @curvaceous_sage. You can follow her new podcast on Twitter & Instagram @NotHustlingPod. You can also visit her website jessiesage.com.
