Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women

by Alexa Albert

  As soon as I entered Mustang #2, the women greeted me enthusiastically, eager to hear about the other house. I appreciated their warmth and attentiveness after my frosty treatment at #1. The new turn-outs wanted to know how beautiful the women at #1 were. Those who had been fired from #1 and were doing their time on probation at #2 wanted to know whether their friends (and enemies) were still working there.

  Their reception made me realize what a welcome diversion I’d been for them. Instead of disturbing the normal flow of their business, I was the source of much amusement. I was teased relentlessly for my squareness and frequently made the butt of their jokes. One evening, a couple of women sent a client over to proposition me after telling him I was cheap—real cheap. “She’ll only charge you twenty,” I overheard one woman say. At that time, the house minimum for any sexual activity was $60 (later raised to $100). The women doubled over on their bar stools in hysterics. Confused by the women’s laughter, the mousy-looking man who now stood before me faltered. I had to explain I didn’t work at Mustang.

  That wasn’t the first time I had been approached by a customer. With my conservative attire and the notebook and pen I carried with me religiously, I tried to stay visibly distinguishable from the working girls. I didn’t always succeed. One night a Mexican man who had been guzzling Budweisers with his buddies for over two hours came over and perched himself on the bar stool next to mine. “I know you like me,” he said, his breath reeking of alcohol. “I want to make love to you. My friend have money. Much money.”

  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.

  *Albert AE, Warner DL, Hatcher RA, Trussell J, Bennett C. Condom use among female commercial sex workers in Nevada’s legal brothels. American Journal of Public Health 1995; 85: 1514–1520.

  Albert AE, Warner DL, Hatcher RA. Facilitating condom use with clients during commercial sex in Nevada’s legal brothels. American Journal of Public Health 1998; 88: 643–646.

  2 .. AN INSTITUTION

  You 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.

  For three months, I watched adolescents supply a staggering demand of adult men seeking out teens for impulsive, reckless sexual recreation—in their cars, in subway and bus stations, in seedy hotels, in alleys, and sometimes right on the street. Except for centers like Streetwork, the only affirmation these kids received came from the men who sought to abuse their bodies. This demand seemed never-ending, despite the well-publicized risks of unprotected sex.

  Most of the adolescents had fled troubled homes, neglect, or outright abuse, and they had few resources. Most came to the streets with developmental handicaps and minimal education. The imminent hazards of street prostitution—HIV infection, drug addiction, incarceration, rape, and murder—only isolated these teens further. By the end of my summer, I came to regard the downward spiral of prostitution as inevitable and inexorable.

  My experience at Streetwork thus informed many of my initial assumptions about Nevada’s brothel prostitution. I couldn’t believe a state in America would actually choose to legalize this atrocity. Were Nevadans amoral? What sort of cruel, detached people condoned a profession that brought such pain on its practitioners? While I had considered the possibility that legalization might eliminate some of the perils of street prostitution and that Nevadans were actually brave pragmatists, I was skeptical.

  I learned quickly that nothing I knew accounted for Nevada’s singularity in deciding to license prostitution. Brothel prostitution has been tolerated in the state for over a century; houses of prostitution have operated unobtrusively since the gold- and silver-rush days of the Comstock Lode, between 1859 and 1880. But unlike California, Arizona, and Colorado, which also tolerated brothel prostitution during the mining days, only Nevada would go on doing so. In the northeastern town of Elko, one licensed brothel now known as Mona’s has been operating since 1902.

  Like a boastful parent, almost every longtime Nevada resident I met regaled me with brothel folklore. As far as I could make out from their tales, prostitutes first arrived in Nevada on the heels of the gold and silver prospectors, to fulfill what was then considered an important social need. At a time when men far outnumbered women on the frontier, prostitutes were welcome new additions. Every gold-rush town had a red-light district, and prostitution became a flourishing industry in mining towns such as Goldfield and Tonopah. At one point, over 50 brothels operated in Virginia City.

  Some locals quoted their forefathers to prove the civic-mindedness behind their state’s permissive stance on prostitution. I heard James Scrugham, a Nevada governor in the 1920s, quoted more than once: “The camps were not for wives. They just couldn’t put up with the roughness.… The miners, some coming in from a day in the drifts, some c
oming from months of prospecting, hands callused, boots worn, having smelled only sagebrush and sweat … why, the poor bastards knew the one place they could get a welcome, a smile, a bed with springs, clean sheets, the smell of perfume, was the crib [a string of small shacks where prostitutes would work].”

  Several of Nevada’s frontier prostitutes have become legends, particularly over the last century. Like Julia Bulette, a well-known prostitute at the time who worked in some of the Comstock’s best brothels before she was brutally murdered in 1867 by a customer. It is said that Virginia City’s Fire Engine Company No. 1 elected her to be an honorary member, “in return for numerous favors and munificent gifts bestowed by her upon the company.”* After her untimely and tragic death, the Territorial Enterprise wrote, “Few of her class had more friends.” Fire Engine Company No. 1 marched in her funeral procession through the streets of Virginia City. The public execution by hanging (the first for the city) of her alleged killer drew more than four thousand spectators, including Mark Twain, who was touring the country. But according to Nevada State Archivist Guy Rocha, it is twentieth-century writers of Nevada’s history who are responsible for creating Bulette’s bigger-than-life legend with their romanticized and glamorized writings of her life. Even the Virginia and Truckee railroad line contributed to her mythical status when they named a club car after her in 1947, eighty years after her death, as a publicity gimmick.

  As soon as “respectable” women and their families traveled west to join their men, however, lawmakers realized they would need to regulate prostitution if they were to keep it tolerable to their evolving populace. Legislators passed the first law to control prostitution in 1881; it vested county commissions with the power to “license, tax, regulate, prohibit, or suppress all houses of ill-fame.” Continuous pressure from community groups led the state legislature to prohibit brothels both on main business thoroughfares and within four hundred yards of schools, and later churches, for the presumed protection of public morality. (Refusing to cede their brothel, legend has it that the people of the old mining town of Searchlight in the 1920s complied with the law by moving the school.)