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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

    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 whoseunderfunded agency furnished social services to the