Over the past year, Heidi Fleiss has been consistent in two things: predicting that she will enter the legal brothel business in Nevada and not entering it. Earlier, it was her relationship with Dennis Hof, owner of the Bunny Ranch near Reno, that was going to supply entrée. Now it is Cherry Patch Ranch owner Joe Richards.
One thing that has changed, though, is the service Fleiss plans to offer. With Hof, Fleiss seemed to be hoping to create a boutique brothel (a brothel within a brothel) for the high-end whoremonger. Now, Fleiss, this time a mere 80 miles from Vegas, plans to bring a new product to the market: studs to service a female clientele.
Fleiss has some serious obstacles to overcome. The primary one is her felony convictions dating back to her Hollywood Madam days. While other brothel owners, apparently, have had felony convictions, the law seems written to make it very difficult to justify an exception in Fleiss' case: "No person shall be employed ... who has ever been convicted of a felony involving moral turpitude."
The stud-farm idea itself also faces regulatory challenges. The ordinance that governs brothels in Nye County uses "her" to describe prostitutes, and among the many requirements to be a licensed prostitute is to turn in a weekly cervical specimen. In order to accommodate male sex workers, the regulations would need to be entirely rewritten by the Nye County Commission and the Nye Country sheriff, who together form the commission that oversee the brothels.
If they refuse to change the rules to allow men to do a job that women are permitted to do in Nye Country, there certainly is the possibility of a discrimination lawsuit. Of course, even if gender discrimination is avoided on the supply side, wouldn't that principle also apply to the demand side? In short, could a gay male customer be refused service at Fleiss' stud farm because of his gender? And, since gay men are an obvious clientele for a brothel with male prostitutes, why hasn't anyone, including Fleiss, proposed that?
Even if you haven't given the male hooker concept a great deal of thought, the issues involved here should still seem a bit familiar, because, in fact, they mirror many of the questions raised in the debate over gay marriage. State-sanctioned marriage and Nevada brothels are, in opposite ways, historic, traditional institutions enshrined by laws. Laws are meant to change with the times and mores of the culture, while traditions work to preserve things unaltered. Our culture has changed to the point that now tradition must adapt or resist when questions like these are posed: Why should legal marriage be defined as exclusively male/female relationships, and why should only women be allowed to work in brothels?
In the case of marriage, the debate will continue no matter how ugly it gets. There is no widespread movement to get the government out of marriage, and so the debate is only over how government defines it. But Nevada brothels are an institution of a very different nature, a frontier tradition that was tolerated because it serviced miners and settlers; it exists into the 21st century solely by positioning itself as a relic from that earlier time. That is why Nevada has the only legal brothels in the United States.
And brothels can be voted out of existence any time. That's why Fleiss' plan is the most serious threat legal prostitution in Nevada now faces. Not because of Fleiss, but because her stud-farm idea represents a major change to the brothel tradition, and tradition is the only reason brothels are legal here. A discussion of altering the tradition could easily open a wide-ranging discussion that ends in a decision to close down the brothels.
Still, no tradition really stays as frozen in time as some would like to believe. What Fleiss proposes is a great leap forward in a transformation that has already begun. Locally, Sheri's Ranch has been the most aggressive in spending millions to transform itself from a trailer to a resort. But all Nevada brothels are also reaching more tourists than ever before, thanks to websites, porn-star workers and reality shows. So, the implicit question raised by Fleiss will in the end not disappear regardless of her success: Are Nevada brothels going to be allowed to transform from their low-down frontier tradition into contemporary adult entertainment, or will the effort to do so push them into extinction?