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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 broughtsuch 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.… Theminers, some coming in from a day in the drifts, some coming 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