Brothel (4 page)

He suddenly became unsteady on his seat and grabbed hold of the bar to regain his balance. The next thing I knew, he subtly slid his arm behind me and groped my right breast. My mouth dropped. I looked around, but no one had seen him grab me; the women were in the middle of a lineup, Irene was
filling in as floor maid, and the bartender was serving another customer. This man obviously felt entitled to cop a feel because he was in a brothel. Would he ever have tried that move in a squares’ bar? What was a prostitute in his eyes?

After I informed him I wasn’t a working girl, he started apologizing profusely. He felt ashamed at having taken me for a prostitute. He obviously judged prostitutes as intrinsically different from other women. I know I pitied the prostitutes for the men they ended up servicing. I stood in judgment of the johns, certain I would never freely choose to be intimately involved with a man who paid a stranger for sex. But, as angered as I was by the stereotyping of prostitutes, I had to admit that maybe the tricks, like the working girls, deserved to be better understood.

The cool reception I got at the main house changed soon after I met Baby. A slender, five-foot-eleven strawberry-blonde in her early forties who frequently wore her hair up in a French twist, Baby had worked on and off at Mustang Ranch since 1979. In addition to being one of Mustang’s most seasoned prostitutes, she was also one of its most successful and well respected. Although she was a night girl and slept during the days, we seemed to cross paths constantly. We usually kept our greetings brief, but I detected a desire in her to linger and converse.

Then one day, Baby invited me to join her and another working girl at one of the kitchen tables. I did. As I sat down, Baby turned to me. How had my stay gone thus far? Was I learning a lot? Were the girls being nice? Since she had been
the first to bother to ask, I decided to take the plunge and to speak frankly. I told her that the women at #2 had warmed up to me quicker, perhaps because that was where I was staying and spending most of my time.

“You should sit in our parlor here, too,” Baby said firmly, unaware of Shelley’s intimidation tactics. I detected a competitive edge in her voice. I already knew the women at #1 were used to being preferred over those at #2. Did she want me, the visiting outsider, to favor #1 as well? Baby hadn’t seemed surprised to hear that her colleagues at #1 had been standoffish. She promised to see what she could do.

Over the next couple of days, two things happened. First, I decided to take Baby’s advice and to venture over to #1 more frequently and with more courage. (I tried to ignore Shelley’s glares.) Secondly, women at #1 became more gracious. A few let slip that Baby had spoken highly of me. Baby was their litmus paper; if she thought she could trust me, so could they. In the end, Baby greatly eased my entry into the community. And she not only smoothed the way for me with the others, but ultimately became my friend.

In the course of my three-week study, I managed to collect a great deal of information.
^*
Brothel prostitutes were complying
with Nevada’s mandatory condom law and using an average of six condoms per day with their customers. Not surprisingly, these women were expert condom users, and the rubbers rarely broke or slipped off. It seemed practice did make perfect. They explained their techniques to prevent condoms from breaking: they always insisted on putting the condom on the client themselves, and they frequently stopped sex to visually check the integrity of the condom. It wasn’t uncommon for women to double up on condoms. Finally, when sex lasted a long time, women stopped to change condoms.

Although the AIDS epidemic was already a decade old, customers were still trying to persuade women not to use condoms. Some tried the classic excuses—that rubbers decreased sensation and prevented them from having an orgasm. Others came up with more original lines: “I’ve only been with my wife of thirty years”; “I’m a doctor.” Some men told the women, “You get tested so I know you’re clean.” Did these customers think that women were insisting on condoms for the
men’s
protection? It wasn’t uncommon for men to offer women extra money or even try to slip the condom off during sex. Nevertheless, the women usually managed to transform the condom into an acceptable and even erotic part of sex—a skill that could be useful for other women, sex workers and non–sex workers alike.

A few of the women turned the tables on me. Did I use condoms with my fiancé? I started to say “No, we’re monogamous,” but caught myself and mumbled “No, but I probably ought to.” According to these prostitutes, most of their customers were married, and I’m sure the men’s wives hoped and believed, like me, that their significant others were faithful.
Despite their caution on the job, even the Mustang women rationalized not using condoms with their husbands and boyfriends, who they assumed were monogamous. At first I couldn’t believe these women hadn’t grown more cynical about marriage and monogamy, given the amount of infidelity they witnessed. Their hopefulness in spite of what they knew about human nature made my heart ache. These women were just like the rest of us.

All of which made me think: it was prostitutes and other sex workers whom we in mainstream America accused of contributing to the spread of HIV. Society blamed prostitutes’ recklessness on ignorance, poverty, and disregard for personal responsibility, but I knew plenty of people who were more educated and more affluent and failed to properly protect themselves sexually. Despite widespread condom promotion by the mainstream media, my own friends neglected to use rubbers regularly with new partners. My future brother-in-law said he and his friends, all ten years my junior, worried more about pregnancy than disease. By contrast, Nevada’s licensed prostitutes seemed remarkably conscientious. I wondered who really should be casting the first stone.

Relishing the opportunity to turn the magnifying glass on me, the prostitutes of Mustang Ranch wanted most to know if I could ever turn a trick. Because of my apparent interest in prostitution, they assumed that deep down I wanted to try. (I would discover that most people assumed the same thing.) Not wanting to offend anyone, I kept to myself how repulsive I
found the idea. I tried to dodge the question by saying I didn’t think I would make a very good prostitute.

But that was exactly where I—like all squares—was wrong, the working girls said. All women sold sex for one reason or another. The housewife who slept with her husband to maintain her household, the secretary who dated her boss for job security, the girlfriend who had sex with her boyfriend for status or another piece of jewelry (maybe an engagement ring). Prostitutes just did it more honestly. “My motto is, ‘A bitch with a pussy should never be broke,’ ” one terse Mustang prostitute said. “If you’re going to put out, why not get paid for it? There’s too many women giving their bodies away for free and getting nothing but heartache and pain.”

It was an argument I would hear used over and over again to defend brothel prostitution. Although I struggled with the notion that all sexual relationships could be reduced to commerce, the women’s larger point wasn’t wasted on me. Prostitutes weren’t social deviants, they were trying to say. They were no different from other women.

All the working girls had stories about feeling disrespected and misunderstood. Baby once confessed to another American vacationer on a tour of Japan that she was a brothel prostitute; he ignored her for the rest of the trip. Her friend Barbie overheard a ticket agent in the Reno airport complain to her colleague about the brothels and how “those damn prostitutes” were a constant threat to her marriage.

Even I encountered the contempt Mustang prostitutes described when I went home four weeks later and tried to describe
my experience to family and friends. People cared less about how decent and helpful the women were than about how much money they made, what types of sexual activities they sold, and what horrible circumstances forced them to resort to selling their bodies in the first place. Andy simply wanted reassurance I hadn’t kissed anybody, and my younger cousin needed to know I hadn’t become a prostitute. Perhaps my sister-in-law exemplified the general view best when she mistook my acknowledgment of the women as great condom experts and public health resources for approval of their work. “I just don’t see how you can support prostitution,” she said.

To be honest, I still wasn’t sure how I felt about legalized prostitution. At the time, my head was spinning. I had long believed that prostitution represented “badness” on multiple levels. Practically, it disturbed me because of the dangers to the women who practiced it. Politically, I thought prostitution degraded all women. But Nevada’s legal brothels were far less repugnant than I had expected. They appeared to be clean, legitimate workplaces, and the women were not shackled hostages but self-aware professionals there of their own free will.

Still, I knew so little. How had Nevada come to legalize brothel prostitution in the first place? How did one become a licensed prostitute? What drove individuals to abandon mainstream society to work in such isolation, in houses of prostitution? How did the women feel about the work they did and about each other? Who were their customers? Did their relationships with these men ever become more than professional?
How did other locals feel about the legal brothels and their prostitutes? How long did women do this work; was there ever an end?

I knew I needed to learn more about Nevada’s brothel industry. These women’s lives had moved me deeply, and the Mustang Ranch was an astonishingly rich environment for examining some of America’s most loaded social issues.

Two years passed before I could return to Mustang Ranch, during the summer between my first and second years of medical school. I was delighted to discover that Baby and many of the other women I had met were still working there. Baby greeted me effusively, and we embraced like long-lost friends. She told me she’d suspected I would return. Then she confessed why she had first taken an interest in me: “Everyone seems to have a problem with what I do. They think we are bad people. That’s why I enjoy talking to you. I want to make it known that we are okay people, too.”

That conversation, and that trip, convinced me of the need to write this book. To do that, I made repeated trips out to Mustang Ranch and Nevada’s other brothels over the next four years, spending a total of nearly seven months there. It is not my intent to redeem these women—they don’t need my help—but to awaken readers to their humanity and bring this issue out of the realm of caricature and into that of serious debate. That would be more than enough.

2 .. AN INSTITUTION

Y
ou could say that I have something of a history with prostitution. That history began in earnest in 1988, when I was a twenty-year-old psychology major. I read an article in
Psychology Today
asserting that juvenile prostitutes were at risk of becoming part of the AIDS epidemic. The article estimated that there were 1.2 million runaway and homeless teens nationwide, some 20,000 to 40,000 in New York City alone, and that between 125,000 and 200,000 each year turned to prostitution to survive on the streets. Selling sex—principally condomless sex—to strangers and abusing illicit drugs significantly increased these kids’ risk of HIV infection.

The article mentioned Streetwork, a drop-in center in New York City’s Times Square run by a former prostitute whose
underfunded agency furnished social services to the runaway, throwaway, and otherwise homeless adolescents who worked the streets of Hell’s Kitchen to get by. A refuge from the dangers of the street, the center offered counseling, meals, clothing, showers, and laundry facilities to help the teens regain some of their dignity and self-esteem. Inspired, I managed to get a job there that summer as an outreach worker.