Brothels Still Cozy With the New Nevada

PAHRUMP, Nev. —  Anywhere else, a ballot initiative to shut down houses of ill repute would be a sure bet, like a straight flush at the poker table.

And such a proposition might one day even find support in Nevada, which is filling up fast with newcomers from the other 49 states, where prostitution is illegal. Arguably, what with that and family-friendly casinos, the Wild West is losing its frontier edge.

But not here. Not yet.

In Nye County, home to both brothels and sprawling neighborhoods of new residents, a petition drive to put a brothel ban on the November ballot is drawing yawns from old-timers and immigrants alike.

“They’re an adult thing, and Nevada is an adult state,” said Marti Linder, who moved to Pahrump from Texas last year. “Now, what I really object to are children in casinos.”

The sheriff says anyone who questions the benefits of brothels need only look at the legions of disease-infested prostitutes working the streets of Las Vegas, where brothels are illegal.

The chairman of the Pahrump Town Board talks about how brothel customers and employees spend money in town.

And the local Nye County commissioner speaks of the state’s “longtime love affair with brothels” and the license fees they generate.

None of this, however, is stopping Chris Nagel and his supporters from pushing an initiative to repeal the county’s brothel ordinance. The group hopes to turn in 957 signatures by July 28 to win a spot on the fall ballot.

“I just want . . . to give the people of Nye County the opportunity to chose whether they still want brothels,” said Nagel, 39, who refuses to disclose any other information about himself. The petition drive, he said, is running its course mostly through local churches and among “soccer moms.”

Observers of Nevada culture and politics say the measure probably won’t strike a chord with most local voters.

But the effort may foreshadow growing discontent with brothels, said Kate Hausbeck, a University of Nevada sociology professor in Las Vegas who has spent years studying the state’s sex industry. The threat to brothels, she speculated, will come from Nevada’s newcomers.

“I’d be surprised if this [petition drive] causes anything more than a minor fuss in Nye County,” she said. “But the future of brothels is fairly tenuous. They’re at the juncture of the Old West and the New West. Their anachronistic character makes them vulnerable to the pressures of modernization.”

Old-time Nevadans, she said, embrace brothels as a hallowed state institution, so integrated into rural communities that brothel owners help fund youth sports, sponsor Fourth of July parades and sit on the boards of chambers of commerce.

“There’s still a lot of support for them--as long as they remain quiet, out of sight, and are run the old-fashioned way, with no neon, no big advertising and none of their prostitutes walking the local streets,” Hausbeck said.

But southern Nevada--the fastest growing metropolitan region in the nation--is being swamped with new residents from out of state who “don’t understand the roles brothels play and the value they provide,” Hausbeck said.

If these “non-Nevadan suburbanites” join forces with religious and moral conservatives, she said, they may “dilute the old Nevada spirit, especially in the larger urban centers.”

Indeed, Las Vegas Sun columnist Susan Snyder worried recently that this process is already well advanced, and that banning brothels would make a more boring Nevada. “Pahrump’s subdivisions are spreading like a rash, and so is the move to homogenize southern Nevada,” she wrote. “Before you know it, we’ll be Wisconsin with palm trees.”

Brothels are illegal in every state but Nevada, and even here the two largest counties--Las Vegas’ Clark County and Reno’s Washoe County--ban them. Leaders of the casino industry, among others, didn’t want their business tainted by legal prostitution.

But brothels, which date back to old mining and railroad construction camps, are legal elsewhere in the state. Ten of Nevada’s 17 rural counties have adopted the ordinances required to regulate them and collect license fees.

Situated 60 miles northwest of Las Vegas--as close as brothels come to Sin City--Pahrump, population 37,000, is a center for Nye County’s brothel trade. Not allowed in town, the businesses targeted by Nagel’s petition are discreetly tucked away outside the town limits--a bare mile from the California line.

So far, no effort to ban brothels in rural Nevada has succeeded. Last year, a Mormon member of the Ely City Council made such an effort and, for various political reasons, a bare majority of the City Council voted with him. But the mayor vetoed the ban, to the cheers of brothel supporters.

The notorious Mustang Ranch in Storey County, east of Reno and Sparks, was closed by federal agents last summer after its former madam and its two operating companies were convicted of racketeering and fraud.

For their part, brothel owners won’t talk about the Pahrump petition drive. The reason, others say, is a belief within the brothel industry that the less they are discussed in the media, the better. No news is good news.

In fact, what sparked Nagel’s petition drive was one brothel owner’s posting of thinly veiled promotions of his business on two billboards on the outskirts of town.

One promotes the Brothel Art Museum (“The only museum of its kind in the world!”). The only art at the museum is old Hollywood movie posters--but there is a brothel next door.

Nagel said some parents have a difficult time explaining the billboards to their children, so he wants them taken down--and the brothels with them.

“When society views something as legal, that means it is condoned, and our children can view it as acceptable,” Nagel said. “Brothels are not acceptable. We hear that brothels are part of our history. Fine. That’s what we want them to be--history. I don’t want my kids or granddaughter or my family seeing this garbage.”

But for now, most Nevadans embrace brothels as a symbol of their freewheeling attitudes, said Michael Bowers, a UNLV political scientist.

“It’s part of the Wild West mentality, a kind of libertarian notion that exists in the rural counties that ‘As long as I’m not hurting anybody else, I should be able to do what I want,’ ” Bowers said.

For that reason, he said, there have been no wholesale movements in Nevada to ban brothels. Besides, he said, the rural counties have become wedded to the income the brothels generate, both in license fees and property taxes.

The seven brothels in Nye County, for instance, together pay about $170,000 a year in license fees toward the county’s general budget of about $40 million.

“In the rural counties, up to 97% of the land is owned or controlled by the federal government,” Bowers said. “So since they can’t tax that land, brothels are a matter of economic necessity, like casinos.”

Said Ed Bishop, chairman of the Pahrump Town Board: “It’s not so much that people are proud of brothels as it is [that] they don’t oppose them. They bring revenue into the community--and if we didn’t have them, we’d have a problem with call girls and streetwalkers.

“Getting rid of brothels wouldn’t get rid of prostitution,” he said. “It’s not called the world’s oldest profession for nothing.”