The vision of sexually and spiritually empowered women - as contained within the archetype and myth of the sacred whore - inspires today's Women's Spirituality Movement and contributes to a postmodern theory of women's sexuality. It is a vision which also informs contemporary sex workers who experience themselves as heirs to ancient religious practices which honor sex work as holy rite and spiritual service.

Lee's work is grounded in the history and archeaomythology of the "temple prostitutes" of the ancient Near East, and unfolds into an ethnography of the currently emerging renaissance of sacred harlotry. Lee examines the image, legend, historicity, mythological aspects, and contemporary implications of the sacred whore with a feminist critical perspective. She argues that the sacred whore is a priestess who provides an embodied conduit to the divine, and is a model through which contemporary women are reclaiming sexual power, authority, and agency.

Master's Thesis, December 1997

Lee Gilmore's interest in sacred prostitution was sparked by her study of ancient Sumer and the goddess Inanna. She discovered that friends and acquaintances who worked in the sex industry were identifying with these legends and researched their experiences and perspectives. She continues her research on this topic as a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Lee is an Associate Producer for GraceCom at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and a member of the Media Relations team of the annual Burning Man Project in Nevada. She has given several papers at professional academic conferences, including the American Anthropological Association. A central chapter of her thesis was published in the journal Anthropology of Consciousness (December 1998, Vol. 9, No. 4).