Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Don’t expect X-rated ads for X-rated activity

Brothel advertising may be about to be legal, but don't expect to notice a lot of it in the near future.

Sure, two weeks ago a federal judge ruled in favor of the Shady Lady brothel in Nye County and Las Vegas alternative weekly City Life and struck down a 1979 law banning brothel advertising in counties where prostitution is illegal. But the mainstream media are hesitant to run the ads and the brothel industry greeted his ruling with trepidation.

"If we got a brain in our freaking head, we'll be careful," said George Flint, lobbyist for the Nevada Brothel Association. "It is not our intention to abuse the privilege and the right to advertise. We're going to be very, very careful and very, very conservative."

Conservative may sound like an odd description for bordellos and an even odder strategy for selling sex in a town that uses sex to sell everything, but it's the watchword of Nevada's legal brothel owners, whose survival tactic is to hope most of the public forgets they exist.

Most of the owners, anyway.

To see the tensions roiling the industry, one need look no further than the passions stirred by Dennis Hof. The owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch outside of Carson City and America's self-declared Pimp Master General (he has business cards) is not shy about attracting attention. He's even gone so far as to have his brothel featured in the HBO reality show "Cathouse." For Hof, publicity isn't a problem but a business plan. It's about attracting customers. And he's thrilled to build on his national exposure by advertising.

He said he'll start small in Reno and Lake Tahoe, but eventually expand his ads to Las Vegas, which he said would-be customers travel to, not realizing his brothel is an eight-hour drive away. It's one of the hazards of being a national brand, he said.

His plans and boasts have not made him popular in more traditional quarters of the world's oldest profession and Nevada's most publicity shy.

"The guy is a living, breathing malignancy on our industry, and you brought his name up and I didn't," Flint said. "If we have a problem, it will be Dennis Hof. He's a big pimple on the issue."

Flint and traditional brothel owners worry that attracting attention could be a quick way to get their business outlawed. But Hof said times have changed and his success proves that attracting attention is good business.

"Fifteen years ago, here's what they told me: 'Dennis, lie low in the sagebrush. Don't tell anybody about your business,' " Hof said. "Well, we've had a 4,000 percent increase in our business since then. I'm so glad I didn't listen to them."

"It's a whole new world out there."

It is, Hof said, a much more sexual world. The public tolerance for raunch is much higher than it was.

And nowhere is there more public raunch than in Las Vegas. Restaurant billboards tease with naked women's backs. Topless revues and strip clubs abound, and that's just the legal stuff.

The yellow pages has 106-and-change pages of "adult entertainers." No doubt there are mere strippers hiding among the "girls direct to your room" but probably not the ones advertising "full service blue-eyed blonde," "19 & Very Naughty," "meet me first free" and "no happy - no pay."

So far the prospect of brothel advertisements has not caused crowds of concerned citizens to gather at public meetings and speak with foam-flecked lips.

Richard Ziser, whose Nevada Concerned Citizens led the successful campaign to outlaw gay marriage, said his group has yet to decide what, if anything, to do about the ads, but said they're "problematic," society-wise.

The Las Vegas Diocese of the Catholic Church declined to comment on the issue, though church doctrine considers prostitution a mortal sin.

And public outrage is probably not imminent. One reason is there won't be many places for the public to see an ad. Television stations here and in Reno either say that they haven't made up their minds about whether to run brothel advertisements or that they have and they won't. Ditto for the billboard companies.

The ads have a better shot in print publications, though not all of them.

The Greenspun Corporation, which publishes a number of magazines, weekly community papers, the tabloid Las Vegas Weekly and the Las Vegas Sun, will not accept brothel advertisements, said Chairman of the Board Brian Greenspun. The people of Clark County, Greenspun said, have already decided against prostitution.

"By this decision, we will forgo perhaps millions of dollars," Greenspun said. "But sometimes you make decisions for reasons that have nothing to do with money."

Sherman Frederick, publisher of the tabloid weekly City Life and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, said in an e-mail that he would accept brothel ads but where he would place them would depend on their content. Frederick would not rule out running brothel ads in the Review-Journal, but he said the ads would probably be better suited to City Life, alongside the racy, sometimes censored escort and massage ads in the back of the paper.

"We've been putting 'stars and bars' on Las Vegas advertising for years," Frederick wrote. "The family nature of the Review-Journal would be very, very restrictive for brothels."

And if media groups are being cautious, they're not being nearly as cautious as brothel owners.

Bobbi Davis, owner of the Shady Lady, may have sued for the right to advertise , but she doesn't want to do a lot of it or make it too noticeable.

"We don't want to go into neighborhoods or go by churches. We'll probably stick to the Strip like everybody else," Davis said. "You're not going to see anything worse or more distracting than what gentlemen's clubs already do , and I don't think a lot of owners will do even that."

Brothel owners, Davis said, are trying to figure out how to advertise without making any more waves than they already have. Most ads, she guesses, will be little more than the name of the brothel, the word "brothel," a phone number and maybe a map.

Even Hof, the brash, attention-seeking bad boy, is promising to be tasteful.

"There's no need to push the limit, to put scantily clad women on it, there's no need to do any of that stuff," Hoff said.

"We don't have to have anything suggestive for people to know what kind of business this is."

archive