Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  At Sheri’s Ranch, sex workers can leave the premises for only four hours on one designated day a week to run errands and do their banking in Pahrump. Lee insisted that such restrictions are mandated by Nye County regulations. However, Brents says she has never seen anything in the Nye County code that stipulates that women can leave the brothel only once a week for a few hours. “I think it’s [the owners’] interpretation of what the county says they’ll tolerate,” Brents said in an interview. “I don’t think it’s written in the code.”

  Some of the brothels in northern Nevada, outside Reno, do allow sex workers to leave after their daily shifts. And they do not require the twenty-four-hour on-call shifts that Sheri’s Ranch does, Brents says. But all the sex workers must also sign a contract stipulating that they cannot ply their trade outside the brothel walls.3

  Anna says she doesn’t mind the restrictions — in fact, she chose to work at Sheri’s Ranch because it was a “lockdown” facility and she felt safer knowing that customers couldn’t get in (without permission) and workers couldn’t slip out. However, she acknowledges, “Sometimes I feel stir-crazy, so [on her designated day out], I put on my jeans and T-shirt and go to Walmart.”

  Many sex workers, however, chafe at the brothels’ restrictions and at having to share so much of their hard-earned wages with management. “You don’t have the ability to be independent and call your own shots,” Reed says.

  She and others note that the women working at Nevada’s brothels have few legal rights. They are hired as contractors, not employees, which means the brothels don’t have to pay for their health care or any other benefits.4 That also makes it easier for management to fire women who cause trouble or don’t earn their keep. Many sex workers are adamantly opposed to laws that might legalize prostitution per Nevada’s brothel model. Sociologists who study the industry agree that Nevada’s institutionalized brothel model wouldn’t work in urban areas, mainly because many sex workers value their independence and the flexibility it gives them.

  “Just exporting the brothel model to other cities and then cracking down on escorts, that won’t work,” Brents says. “You’d still have the illegal prostitution you had before. In the most successful [government-legislated] models [for prostitution], like New South Wales in Australia and New Zealand, they allow both independent escorts and brothels.”

  The irony is that Nevada’s approach to prostitution was not always so paternalistic. The state’s history of tolerating, indeed welcoming, ladies of the night stretches back into the mid-nineteenth century, before Nevada had even achieved statehood. As the stories of Molly b’Dam and Veronica Baldwin in Chapter 2 illustrate, many women worked as prostitutes and brothel owners in the booming mining towns of the Old West — not only in Nevada but also in other western states such as Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana.5 There were many more men than women in the sparsely populated West, and women who sold sex and ran saloons earned a certain status, even respectability, among the mostly male residents.

  Indeed, at least part of the reason that Nevada carved itself out of the Utah territory in 1861 was the Mormon Church’s attempt to impose moral constraints on the mining towns, according to Brents and her coauthors in The State of Sex.6 Even when the feds cracked down on prostitution throughout the country on the eve of World War I, local officials in Nevada resisted the purge. While the storied red-light districts in Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Denver were shuttered, a number of brothels located on the outskirts of mining towns and small supply towns such as Las Vegas and Reno remained open.

  In 1919, Prohibition succeeded in closing saloons throughout the state, but the brothels remained open. In fact, Brents and her coauthors argue that while Prohibition squeezed out the women who worked independently as prostitutes and saloon-keepers, it actually helped to cement the power of Nevada’s brothels, which plied customers with bootleg alcohol as well as pretty women. After Prohibition ended, it was Nevada’s brothels, along with the rise of gambling and the nation’s fascination with the bygone days of the “Wild West,” that played a key role in creating that state’s tourism industry.7

  During the 1920s and 1930s, prostitution continued to flourish openly in Nevada’s urban and rural areas. But with World War II looming, Congress passed the May Act in 1941, prohibiting prostitution within a reasonable distance of military and naval bases.8 The Nevada state attorney general closed Reno’s red-light district, an area of town known as the Reno Stockade, and the state’s small rural brothels went underground, serving civilians and soldiers stationed in Nevada on the sly. After the war, the politically connected men who owned the casinos in Las Vegas and Reno decided that prostitution would impede their efforts to market their cities as glamorous destinations for gambling and leisure. By 1947, gaming had surpassed mining as the state’s number one industry, and as Brent and her coauthors note, “The casino industry sacrificed open prostitution to make gaming look legitimate.”9 The last openly operated brothel in Las Vegas closed its doors in the mid-1950s, and the only brothels that stayed open were hidden in rural areas, at least a half-hour’s drive from Las Vegas or Reno.

  In 1971, Nevada’s casino interests lobbied the state legislature to ban all brothels, but their efforts backfired. Rural legislators fought the ban — after all, county coffers benefited mightily from brothel licensing fees — and in 1971, a compromise bill was passed, which allowed brothels only in counties with a population of fewer than 200,000 people. In 1980, Nevada’s supreme court ruled that counties with fewer than 400,000 residents could regulate and license brothels.10

  By the 1990s, Nevada’s larger brothels were on their way to becoming corporate-run businesses, increasingly operated by businessmen who came from outside the sex industry.11 The rules governing Nevada’s brothels were (and still are) mostly implemented by city and county officials. These locally elected officials have the power to inspect brothels in their jurisdiction whenever they choose, and they hold absolute sway over decisions about who can get a brothel license and whether it can be revoked. Consequently, it is difficult for outsiders who don’t have political connections in the state to operate brothels. At one point, Julie Moya, the Manhattan madam, considered moving to Nevada and opening up a legitimate brothel. But she says she was told she would never get a license there — she didn’t have the right political connections.

  Like Chuck Lee, Dennis Hof, who owns the Moonlite Bunny Ranch and another brothel near Reno, and Joe Richards, who used to own the Chicken Ranch, many of the businessmen who own brothels not only have an in with the powerful county commissioners who govern the brothels in their rural fiefdoms but also have become respected members of those communities. They donate equipment to firefighters, money to charities, even uniforms for Little League teams in their respective locales.12

  The same, however, does not hold true for the sex workers themselves. Like Anna, the vast majority of these women don’t live in the communities in which they work — many come from out of state — and their involvement in the community outside the brothel gates is restricted. Some counties even require brothel workers to leave the county when they are not working.13

  Nevertheless, conditions at most of the brothels today are better than they used to be. In 1991, a nineteen-year-old single mother who now goes by the professional name of Joi Love went to work at the Old Bridge Ranch outside Reno, Nevada. Joi had enlisted in the Air Force right out of high school, met a handsome airman, and gave birth to a girl two years later, in April 1991. A few months later, she was dancing on the side at a Sacramento strip club when she overheard some of the other girls talking about how much money they made at Old Bridge. Her mother agreed to watch the baby, and Joi drove to Old Bridge, a brothel twenty minutes outside Reno. She returned home a few weeks later with $5,000 in cash.

  This wasn’t the first time Joi had sold sex. In one sense, she says, she has been doing it all her life. A beautiful woman, slender, with full breasts and smooth ebony skin (she’s biracial), Joi
says she has always used sex to get what she wanted. “When I was a teenager and I wanted to go to a party on the other side of town, I’d sleep with someone who was going to the party,” she says. After she joined the Air Force, at the age of seventeen, Joi was stationed near Seattle and remembers going with a friend to a bachelor’s party. The two women stripped and had sex with several men at the party — for pay. “I slept with my sergeant to get out of a work detail,” she says. “Getting paid for sex is no different.”

  Joi didn’t like the restrictions at Old Bridge; she and the other sex workers were not even allowed to leave the premises during their nine- to ten-day shifts. The health professionals who checked them regularly for venereal disease came to the ranch, as did vendors hawking wares the women might be interested in, such as cosmetics, hair products, and lingerie. But she did appreciate the tight security and the fact that everyone was “on their best behavior.”

  “There is so much security at the brothels, you can’t get away with anything,” she says. “You’re locked in there along with the girls, and if you act the ass, you’re in big trouble. The bouncers, the bartenders, the chefs, the manager, and all of the girls — everyone is on the girl’s side. So [the customer] can’t step on somebody’s toes.”

  Joi remembers one occasion while she was working at Old Bridge Ranch. A twenty-four-year-old geek from Sacramento had hit the jackpot while playing blackjack at one of the Reno casinos, and he came to Old Bridge to party. He hung out at the bar for a while, and Joi went up and started talking to him, so he chose her and two other girls and paid $1,000 for each girl to leave the brothel and come back with him to his Reno hotel to party. (Outcalls are allowed by law in Storey County, where Old Bridge is located, but not at Sheri’s Ranch or the Chicken Ranch because of different regulations in Nye County, where these two brothels are located.)

  For Joi, the evening did not end well. She and the other girls accompanied their newly flush client back to his lavish suite at the hotel and started drinking and dancing to music. But then, she says, one of the other girls wanted to have sex with her, even though the customer wasn’t pressing for it. “He wasn’t even going there and she was putting it into his head,” she says. “It felt like a pressure tactic and I didn’t like it.” An argument ensued, and Joi was sent back to Old Bridge.

  The brothel’s management, she says, was furious at her for causing a ruckus. “They can be pretty nasty. It’s kind of like a mob mentality. Once one person is angry at you, they have everyone treating you really bad,” she says. “One minute you’re being squired around in a limousine, the next moment you can’t even get a cab to leave the place.” Joi left Old Bridge a few days later and never went back.

  Four years later, married and the mother of two daughters, Joi was living in Petersburg, Virginia. But money was once again tight. Her husband had been kicked out of the Navy for lending an underage sailor his ID so the young man could buy liquor. Her mother, who had brought her two younger children to live with Joi and her family, was ringing up burgers at a nearby McDonald’s. Joi could have done the same but she wanted more — for herself and her family. So she made a deal with her husband — she would go back to Nevada and work in a brothel, if he would take care of the children. This time, she chose the Chicken Ranch, whose famous name was transplanted from Texas to Nevada in 1973, two years after brothels were legalized there. At the time, Joi says, the Chicken Ranch was considered a more upscale brothel than many of the others, including Old Bridge. “The whole environment was more like a resort and spa,” she recalls.

  Today, the Chicken Ranch seems like a down-at-the-heels remnant of its former glory, particularly when compared with the much grander Sheri’s Ranch, a stone’s throw down the road. The brightly painted façade of the Chicken Ranch resembles the Disneyland version of a Texas ranch, but slightly before noon one sweltering July day, there are no cars or trucks parked outside and the supposedly locked gate stands ajar, propped open by a stone. Inside, the empty Longhorn bar is much smaller than the bar at Sheri’s Ranch, and the entire space feels forlorn, as if time has passed it by. Judy, the current madam at the Chicken Ranch (she asked to be identified by her first name only), gives me a quick tour of the premises. We start in the lounge where the lineup takes place and then walk down a hallway with a low ceiling to a small lounge with a TV set. Sequined stiletto sandals line the wall, waiting for their owners to step into them and become some man’s fantasy.

  “That’s the cat room where the ladies hang out,” Judy says. “They have access twenty-four hours a day to the kitchen and cat room.” She shows me the dining area and country-style kitchen, a spacious, well-lit space lined with windows. “They have their meals cooked for them,” Judy explains. “Lunch is at noon, dinner at 5 p.m.”

  On the morning of my visit, I see only one sex worker up and about, rummaging through the refrigerator, who appears to be in her midtwenties and is beautiful, blonde, and busty. She regards me with friendly curiosity and says, “Hi.” Judy, however, has made it clear that I am not to talk to specific workers without prior permission, so we move on. She shows me a room with a hot tub and a pole for strip dancing, “where customers can party.”

  “Our clients come from Germany, Alaska, Canada, all over the United States,” she says. The sex workers also hail from all over: Florida, New York, Hawaii, California, Panama, Tennessee. At both the Chicken Ranch and Sheri’s Ranch, the women range in experience from seasoned escorts, porn stars (who are a big draw because of their films), and erotic dancers to young women, like Anna, who have never worked in the trade before.

  While working at the Chicken Ranch in the ’90s, Joi says she “dated” an NBA basketball player (now playing with the San Antonio Spurs). Joi also partied (sex workers call the process of selling sex “partying”) with a number of well-known musicians and rap stars, judges, defense attorneys, and a smattering of Fortune 500 CEOs. Many of Joi’s customers were older men. They had been married a long time, and their wives weren’t into sex any more, she says. Or the men were bored with the sex they were having and craved variety. Many of her clients requested sexual intimacies that they were afraid to request from their wives. “They might say, ‘I want you to put a finger in my butt,’ ” Joi says. “Some wives don’t want to hear that.” Or they’d tell her secrets they wouldn’t tell their wives, such as the fact that they like to wear high heels in private or that a son from a previous marriage was hooked on heroin. “The wives don’t want to know, so they tell me,” Joi says. “A good prostitute is paid to keep secrets.”

  Joi says she never saw any women who were being coerced into prostitution when she worked in Nevada. “If the girls were there, they wanted to be there,” she says. Working in the brothels, after all, “was a safer, more lucrative environment” than working the Las Vegas Strip, she says.

  At the Chicken Ranch, some of the women didn’t get along — there was jealousy and fighting over petty things such as who was favored by management. But many of the women got along just fine. Joi remembers one woman who called herself Dallas because that’s where she was from: Dallas, Texas. She was about sixty, the oldest worker there, “a big-breasted blonde who was just a good person, funny, entertaining, pretty,” Joi recalls. “She was good at what she did.” Dallas taught the twenty-three-year-old novice a lot about how to live. “She always said, ‘Kick ass and take names,’ ” Joi recalls. “Meaning utilize what you have, don’t worry about your age, or what anyone else thinks. If you’re happy with you, you’ll be successful. To this day, I still live by what she taught me.”

  Dallas’s wisdom helped Joi deal with the daily stress of the lineup. When the bell rang to announce the arrival of a customer, all the women on shift at the time — between ten and twenty — would stand in a lineup for the customer’s inspection. The women could introduce themselves — their names and a quick “Hi” — but they weren’t allowed to say or do much else. The customer would pick a lady solely on the basis of looks and what he was in th
e mood for that day. Customers who were too nervous or couldn’t make up their minds could go to the bar and have a drink. At that point, the women could go up and engage them in conversation. Joi was good at conversation, so she usually did better at the bar than in the lineup. Sometimes the women worked the bar in pairs; Joi would go up and talk to the customer, see what he wanted, did he like black or white girls, and then if the answer was a white girl, she would send in her friend. “We were just trying to get him to spend his money,” she says.

  Once the man made his choice, the two might take a tour of the facilities — to see the hot tub, the dungeon, and other specialty attractions the brothel offered. Then they would go to the woman’s room, where they negotiated the sexual activities desired and the rate. Once there was agreement on the rate, the customer paid up — cash or credit, please — and the girls took the money or card to the front desk. The brothel managers made a practice of listening in on the negotiations, according to Joi, so they knew exactly what was agreed to, and while managers insisted they then turned off the intercom, Joi says she wouldn’t put it past them to continue listening in.

  “[The managers] seem all friendly — we’re here for you and all that — but as soon as you do something wrong, drinking on duty or drugs, they’re mean,” she says. “ ‘You got to go, you fucking whore, you’re not clean.’ ”

  Joi says drug use was rampant at Old Bridge while she was working there. “There was a heavy biker influence in Reno,” she says. “They had the Hell’s Angels; they ran a lot of drugs and women through there.”

  Joi says she herself didn’t use drugs while working in Nevada. “That’s just not my thing,” she says. The only child of a black preacher’s son and a white woman of French ancestry, Joi grew up in Sacramento watching her parents get drunk and smoke crack, and she vowed to do things differently. “My dad used to beat on my mom,” she says. “They were always fighting and he was an abusive guy.” She says her father never laid a finger on her — he took it all out on her mother. “She left him when I was five, but then they got back together for my sake,” she says.