Features

[Love & Sex Issue 2016]

Red Light Women’ looks at the pioneers of Nevada’s sex trade

Image

The red light on the ceiling started to glow, alerting the ladies of Sheri’s Ranch brothel in Pahrump that a john was waiting to view his options. The girls ran down the hallway, stopping only to grab stilettos from the rack and check their makeup in the mirror.

They say prostitution is the oldest occupation, but has this practice—called “the lineup”—always been a part of selling sex? How did sex workers conduct business and live their lives in the early days of legal prostitution? That’s what Robin Flinchum explores in her book, Red Light Women of Death Valley. The author will be at the Pahrump Valley Museum this week to share a story not included in the text, so we skimmed what she already shed some (red) light on:

On the Comstock’s Barbary Coast that year, the notion that a man might skulk into a prostitute’s room late at night with malicious, rather than lascivious, intent wasn’t at all farfetched. Only five months before, Julia Bulette, one of the more genteel and well-liked of the Virginia City demimonde, had been found murdered in her own bed. … Rumors of similar killings in San Francisco left Comstock prostitutes on edge, even as 16 carriages full of them followed Julia’s body to the graveyard in the midst of a bitter winter storm.

The prostitutes of Virginia City were much more genteel and sophisticated in their attempts to bring Julia Bulette’s killer to justice than a group of their sisters in Las Animas, Colorado, in 1874. That year, when a man killed prostitute Lizzie Allen with a rock because he said she owed him a dollar, the prostitutes formed a vigilante committee and hanged him from a tree.

The early 1870s were difficult times for Virginia City’s “women of the town.” Several fires ravaged D Street, some perhaps deliberately set, pushing some prostitutes out of the legally sanctioned red-light district and into the rest of the city.

The Adobe [Dance Hall in Rhyolite] boasted a dancefloor and bar where lonely men paid women for the privilege of shuffling them around to live piano music or paid whiskey prices for tea and water drinks for their partners. For those who were more serious about their recreation, a long corridor ran alongside the dance floor leading to several small rooms where prostitutes accommodated their clientele.

Within the bounds established by the Rhyolite Board of Trade, the women were free to work at their chosen profession as long as they paid their monthly five-dollar-a-head license fees and did not stray outside the bounds of the established district.

The one place segregation didn’t extend, however, was the graveyard. Although some Rhyolite legends claim that prostitutes were denied burial in the local cemetery, surviving information indicates that this is not the case.

But it was hard to keep the children away from the red-light district, as the women who worked there not only held the attraction of the unknown and forbidden, but they were also often quite friendly and fun to visit. When Katie Peterson was a little girl in Rhyolite, one of the brothels had a swimming pool. Against her mother’s strict prohibition, Katie used to sneak down to the tenderloin, where the women treated her kindly and let her get some relief from the summer heat by taking a dip in their pool.

Robin Flinchum Author Talk February 13, 1 p.m., free. Pahrump Valley Museum and Historical Society, 775-751-1970.

Share
Top of Story