Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women

by Alexa Albert

  *There has only been one reported case of assault against a prostitute in a Nevada brothel in the last twenty-one years. In contrast, one 1998 study of San Francisco prostitutes found that 82 percent had been physically assaulted since entering prostitution (55 percent by their customers), and 68 percent had been raped (46 percent by their customers).

  7 .. LEGALIZED, NOT LEGITIMIZED

  One summer night, George Flint and his wife, Bette, invited me to their home to celebrate their granddaughter Lisa’s fifteenth birthday. I had come to feel close to the Flints, who seemed to appreciate my sincere, nonjudgmental curiosity. George was thrilled to have someone as interested in the brothels as he, and Bette was glad that her husband had someone willing to listen. I had been flattered to be included in this family event, at which I would finally get to meet Bette’s daughter, Marlene. I had already become acquainted with Lisa, Marlene’s daughter, and I was eager to meet as many of the family as I could.

  The night started off badly. Marlene was clearly in a foul mood, and George told me later that she was furious at him for bringing Lisa along when he picked me up at Mustang Ranch. Lisa had seen Mustang Ranch only once before, as a small child, when George had pointed it out from the highway. Marlene had always tried to shield her child from the brothels and downplayed the fact that Lisa’s grandfather ran the state’s brothel association. Now that Lisa was a teenager, and inevitably beginning to pull away from home, I imagined Marlene’s anxiety mounting. If anything, Marlene’s overzealousness could have the opposite effect, I feared; many a rebellious teenager finds a parent’s worst fears tempting if not irresistible.

  Conversation during dinner was light, dominated by George’s gossip about the “business” at Mustang Ranch. Throughout the evening, I sensed Marlene’s eyes creeping over my face. There was something accusatory about her gaze that made me increasingly uneasy. I knew that Marlene had never in her life consented to visit a brothel with her stepfather, and I imagined that she thought I had been tainted by my involvement. By her standards, maybe I had.

  I was interested to know more about her attitude, so after dinner I asked her and her brother, Dean, to share some of their thoughts about the brothels, as family members of an industry bigwig and as local citizens. Dean and Marlene had very different opinions, and as we got into it, Marlene grew visibly more uncomfortable. She rolled her eyes almost continuously as Dean, now forty years old, described the thrill and excitement he had felt as a young man growing up in the only state in the Union with the “guts” to legalize prostitution.

  Marlene interrupted and asked, with a touch of hostility, why I was so interested in the topic. I explained that in the process of conducting a public health study, I had discovered that essentially no research, either sociological or health related, had been done in Nevada brothels, and the time seemed ripe. Again, Marlene rolled her eyes and said nothing, but her body language shouted “Liar.” I tried to explain that my earlier studies had focused on condom use. “That’s enough, stop!” Marlene yelped. “My daughter’s in this house.”

  Without missing a beat, Dean volunteered that as a teenager he had patronized the brothels. “You didn’t have to worry about going to a party in junior high or high school and having that pressure of trying to have sex with someone,” he said.

  That was over the top for Marlene. “I think there’s a time and a place for some things,” she shrieked, jumping up. “My daughter’s here, and Dean, I know you would never be talking about these things in front of your children.”

  Actually, Lisa was nowhere to be seen. She was watching television with her grandfather in another room behind a closed door, completely out of earshot. It was Marlene herself who brought the conversation to Lisa when she got up and stomped into the television room to announce her raw feelings about me to George.

  She declared that she was offended by my insensitivity to the situation—my lack of discretion in discussing this topic under the same roof as Lisa—and that my interest in these women and my support and tolerance for them were inconceivable. Not to mention that I was actually socializing and cohabiting with them!

  The night ended dismally, with George angry at Marlene, Marlene angry at Dean, Dean angry at Marlene, and me angry at human nature. George reassured me that Marlene’s attack on me was merely a camouflaged attack on him and the brothel industry that paid him to represent and defend it. All I could think about was George telling me on the first day we met that he’d once offered to arrange a visit to one of the brothels for Marlene’s high school boyfriend “if the boy needed some.”

  Still, I felt sorry for George. He had been dealing with his family’s strict judgment his entire life. His parents, both of whom were ordained ministers in a fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christian church, had ruled their household with iron fists. George’s sneak visit to his high school prom was quashed when his father showed up and pulled his humiliated son off the dance floor, leaving his date standing there alone. George’s parents were now in their late eighties, and they knew nothing about his brothel job.

  I was relieved to get back to Mustang Ranch that night. It felt safe and warm, and the place where I belonged, where I didn’t feel judged. I was wrung out by my encounter with Marlene. I suspected that Marlene felt overwhelmed and extremely frustrated by the lack of sympathy and understanding in the room that night. But she had shaken me up, demoralized me. I could only imagine how she would have made me feel if I were a Mustang prostitute.

  Until that night, I had almost managed to forget how controversial prostitution was in mainstream America. Legalized prostitution had started making sense to me, particularly in terms of the safety it provided women. Because there were legalized brothels in most of Nevada, I assumed the majority of Nevadans had come to tolerate and even accept them. Without having to do much digging at all, though, I quickly came to see that Marlene was but one voice in a chorus of local opposition. Legality was no assurance of legitimacy.

  After my evening with Marlene, I decided to look into the Nevada opposition. Immediately, I discovered John Reese. He was the brothel industry’s most notorious foe, and his name appeared regularly in the Reno Gazette-Journal. A fifty-four-year-old Reno construction worker, he had been furiously crusading for over a decade to rid Nevada of its legalized brothels. He refused to meet me, but he did agree to a telephone interview.

  He began the conversation by offering that he hadn’t always been a crusader. In fact, when he was younger, he used to patronize Joe Conforte’s pre-Mustang brothels. After becoming a born-again Christian in his mid-thirties, however, he became obsessed with repenting for his former sins and getting brothel prostitution outlawed. Over his ten years of activism, Reese estimated, he had spent over $35,000 of his own money to fund his various campaigns, from petition drives (all of which ultimately fell short) to lobbying legislators under the auspices of his organization, Nevadans Against Prostitution (membership unknown). (George Flint calculates that Reese has spent over $150,000.) Reese attributed his unblemished string of failures to the fact that politicians and the public “see us as a pest and a nuisance, a bunch of religious people trying to shut down the brothels.” In fact, say Reese’s critics, he is his own worst enemy. They say it has been his “false claims of Christian love” and capricious methods of attack that have deterred potential allies, like religious and women’s groups, from aligning with him.

  There’s some truth to this. Reese has changed tactics the way some people change hairstyles. Once he attacked legalized prostitution solely on religious and moral grounds. Then he tried to frighten the public with allegations about concealed health hazards in the brothels. He leased two billboards on opposite sides of Interstate 80 near the exit to Mustang Ranch and put up ads reading, WARNING: BROTHELS ARE NOT AIDS SAFE. When George and the Nevada Brothel Association threatened to sue Reese and the 3M National Advertising Company, which leased the billboards for $1,500 a month, for libel, the advertising company painted over the billboards. Reese s
hould have known full well that his allegations were false. Since March 1986, when the state’s Bureau of Disease Control and Intervention Services began requiring brothel prostitutes to undergo monthly HIV tests, over 53,000 such tests have been conducted, and no licensed prostitute has ever tested positive.* (Twenty-six brothel applicants have tested HIV-positive, have been denied work cards, and are barred for life from employment as legal prostitutes.)

  When Reese’s fear tactics failed, he tried a different approach. In 1994, he stepped down as president of Nevadans Against Prostitution, and announced he was seeking a license to open Nevada’s first gay brothel. Reese seemed to have undergone a radical conversion, publicly claiming that “the brothels are a good place for gays to go to have safe sex.” Declaring that Nevada could become “the gay prostitution capital of the nation,” Reese pledged that the state would soon have two gay brothels and “as many as ten or more within the next five years.”

  Playing to local homophobia was shrewd. Even George admitted that with this tactic Reese had finally succeeded in getting under the skin of the brothel industry. State statutes criminalizing gay and lesbian sex had been repealed in 1993, and there were no county codes to prohibit gay brothels. As George pointed out, the brothel industry couldn’t outright oppose a gay brothel without appearing to be discriminatory, but Reese’s proposal could very well prompt the legislature to ban brothels entirely. Only after the Nye County commissioners turned down Reese’s application because it was incomplete did Reese withdraw his proposal, admitting he was only trying to bring attention to his antiprostitution agenda.

  In 1999, Reese pulled off his most outlandish stunt yet. He staged his own abduction, leaving his car running near Mustang Ranch with a door window broken out and bloodstains, presumably his, inside, suggesting foul play. Police spent the next ten days on a wild-goose chase, searching for Reese with deputies, dogs, and a helicopter. Three days after his disappearance, a security camera at a Sacramento bank recorded him withdrawing money from his account. After the fact, of course, he admitted that his vanishing had been staged to draw attention to his battle. This time, the public was far less amused; the Washoe county sheriff’s office billed him the $8,761 spent to finance the search.

  Remarkably, he hadn’t alienated everyone, and he had the support of even a few Nevada politicians, including State Senator William O’Donnell, a Republican from Las Vegas. In fact, during our phone call, Reese credited O’Donnell with being “sort of a father to the antibrothel movement.” Privately, O’Donnell allegedly had encouraged Reese to stick to AIDS fear tactics because “morals didn’t seem to work in Nevada.” (Reese’s organization ultimately returned the favor and gave O’Donnell a $2,000 campaign contribution.)

  Eager to meet a politician who publicly opposed the brothels, I called O’Donnell’s office in Las Vegas and to my surprise got him on the phone. I explained that I was a medical student who had done some public health research at Mustang Ranch and now was exploring the larger social ramifications of legalized prostitution, and that a number of politicians had recommended I contact him. Wanting to conceal my bias for as long as possible, I didn’t mention that I had been living at Mustang Ranch off and on. To my surprise, instead of giving me the brush-off, he said he would be pleased to talk to me.

  The day of our meeting, I arrived early at the Las Vegas real estate agency that O’Donnell ran in his spare time. Nevada legislators had lots of spare time, because the state legislature was in session only six months every year (in 1999 this was reduced to four months). Spare time hadn’t made O’Donnell prompt, however. He kept me waiting in the reception area for over half an hour while he finished some business. When his secretary finally escorted me back to his office, O’Donnell didn’t look up to greet me but continued poring over his papers. After a few minutes, he began tidying up the documents and stood to shake my hand. “That article was about some sleazeball who has been ripping off young, poor women with realty scams,” he said, explaining his tardiness.

  Sitting as a state senator for twelve years—he represented Las Vegas District 5-South and West Vegas—had obviously made the forty-seven-year-old media-savvy. He wouldn’t let me record our interview, reasoning, “I don’t know what you are going to use that tape for.” I put the recorder away. Ten minutes into the interview he stopped himself mid-sentence and asked, “Sure you’re not taping this?” His suspiciousness reminded me of John Reese’s reluctance to meet me in person. How strange, I thought, that brothel opponents were more apprehensive about speaking to a stranger than members of the brothel industry had been.

  Our interview was initially unremarkable. O’Donnell recalled that he first laid eyes on a brothel in 1973, when he drove past the four brothels outside Carson City, the state capital. In 1985 as a freshman assemblyman, he got his first taste of the legislature’s tacit support of the brothels when assemblywoman Barbara Zimmer, a Republican from Las Vegas, introduced a bill to outlaw prostitution, and he watched as her bill “went nowhere.” Troubled by this, O’Donnell said he tried as a state senator in 1987 to pass another bill banning brothels statewide. But O’Donnell quickly realized that, like Zimmer, he couldn’t get enough votes. “The standard reaction I got was that the brothels were a local option. The rural politicians and liberals asked, ‘What are you doing legislating in my district?’ Since I couldn’t get any support, I dropped the whole thing. I’m disgusted with the whole situation.”

  O’Donnell has threatened in three different legislative sessions to introduce legislation to close the brothels, he told me frankly, but he has concluded that all attempts to legislate will be futile until “we change people’s attitudes,” meaning their morality. Calling Nevada “an unchurch state,” O’Donnell informed me that more than 70 percent of the state’s population lacked affiliation to a church or organized religion. O’Donnell also said he was offended by the culture’s sexism. “It bothers me that we’re making money off the backs of women. Condoning prostitution is the most demeaning and degrading thing the state can do to women. What we do as a state is essentially put a U.S.-grade stamp on the butt of every prostitute. Instead, we should be turning them around by helping them get back into society.”

  I perked up at this. What did he have in mind? What did he propose doing to help these women? “Nothing,” he said. “There are already so many community programs out there. Anyone with half a brain could get services.” When I pointed out that such services were usually only short-term, he replied, “If you give them long-term help, they’ll be imprisoned for life.”

  O’Donnell believed that legalized prostitution encourged men and women to transgress the social mores that kept us civilized, that kept us Christian. “I’ve been married twenty-three years,” he said. “We’ve had knock-down, drag-out fights. If you have other releases or escapes, like brothels, you don’t need to be pulled back to the marriage, and divorce is just a matter of time. Brothels make marriages weaker. The government shouldn’t make it easier for men to step out on their wives and encourage divorce.”

  But brothels only existed, I said, in response to the preexisting demand; some men intended to buy sex, whether it was legal or not. O’Donnell’s eyes lit up. “Oh, economics. I got my bachelor’s in economics,” he said patronizingly. “Supply and demand. What is the point of equilibrium? When supply equals demand. Prostitution upsets this equilibrium. I don’t have to get into a relationship with a woman because any day of the week I can get some sex from a prostitute.”

  We had been talking for nearly two hours. We were both on the edge of our seats; the room pulsed with energy, pent up as well as released, and with a palpable intellectual tension. A bead of perspiration formed on his receding hairline and saliva had gathered in the corners of his mouth. Suddenly, O’Donnell steered the conversation off prostitution. “I bet you’re proabortion,” he said. “Well, I’m pro-life and proud of it. As a senator, I’m more interested in representing the defenseless, the unprepared, and the vulnerable of this wor
ld. People like me are trying to pull the world to what’s righteous and produces life, not death or mental destruction.

  “You’re a medical student. You understand physics. Here’s the light spectrum.” He was panting now. “You have blue, ultraviolet, red, etc. Blue is heaven, and red is hell. Human beings are somewhere on the line between. As they move towards the blue, they are more divine, more devout, like St. Francis, whose whole life was dedicated to being more divine than animal. People who enjoy being more animal than divine are more towards red, or hell. Should government encourage man to be more animal or more divine?”

  I was now late for another interview. O’Donnell stood to follow me out, determined to have the last word in his final campaign to offer me salvation. “Your intellect will keep you from knowing the truth,” he yelled from the curbside as I got in my rental car. As I pulled out, through the glass I saw O’Donnell mouth the words, “The truth is, it’s Wrong.”

  Other brothel critics packaged their condemnation in more pragmatic terms. There was the magnate Steve Wynn, owner of the Golden Nugget, Treasure Island, Mirage, and Bellagio casinos and arguably the most influential businessman in Nevada, who asserted that legalized prostitution tarnished the state’s image and deterred new enterprise.* “We have outgrown legalized prostitution,” wrote Wynn in a letter he sent to all Nevada state senators and assembly members in 1988. “The existence of brothels in Nevada is just one more item that out-of-state media people use to denigrate the quality of life in Nevada.… It is not good for Nevada’s image to have wide-open legalized ‘cat houses’ and the sooner we put that image behind us, the better we will be.” At risk, he threatened, were tourism and gaming revenues; the latter produced monthly taxable revenues of $632 million in 1997.