'Brothel' peeks behind the scenes at Mustang Ranch

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Here's one tailor-made for a late-night cable flick:

A brainy, attractive student goes to do the first live-in research at Nevada's infamous Mustang Ranch brothel. The research gradually becomes personal as she bonds with the "working girls" there. She even has the perfect name for the story: Alexa.

But this is no trashy movie. It's a book, "Brothel: Mustang Ranch and its Women" (Random House, $24.95), a meticulously researched and nonjudgmental glimpse into the world of legalized prostitution in Nevada. The author, Alexa Albert, is a 33-year-old pediatric resident at Seattle's Children's Hospital and Medical Center.

Book signing Alexa Albert will sign "Brothel: Mustang Ranch and its Women" at 7 p.m. next Wednesday in the Walker Ames Room of the University of Washington's Kane Hall.

Oddly, for a book set in a brothel, this isn't a particularly steamy read - other than the couple of times Albert gets to sit in and observe "dates." You can get all the sexual stuff about prostitutes on daytime talk shows, Albert said in a recent interview. "But they do such a poor job of getting to the humanity, the real people beneath it. There was so much more going on in this environment than the sex. And that blew my mind."

While Albert's book is more scholarly than salacious, she admits to being fascinated with prostitutes since childhood. In the acknowledgments, she thanks her mother, "who obliged my requests as a child to drive past the streetwalkers who lined the doorways of Seattle's First Avenue peep shows and porn theaters."

She recalled, "I saw one on the street and just became preoccupied with who these people were who stood out so much and nobody was even acknowledging. I wanted to know who they were. What did it feel like to be them? Why would people do something like what they were doing?"

Albert said she has always been interested in people who exist on society's margins, and began to think more about researching prostitution after working at a New York City drop-in center (run by an ex-prostitute) and doing outreach work with street kids.

She began petitioning Nevada Brothel Association director George Flint for access in 1989 when she was a senior studying psychology at Brown University. He was reluctant to admit an outsider, but Albert persisted until 1992, when he caved in. She made her first visit the next year, while engaged and doing pre-med work and applying to medical schools.

Ostensibly there to study condom use, Albert moved into a room in the house, where the sounds from adjoining rooms were inescapable. She found that the prostitutes there had the lowest condom-failure rate ever reported, and an incredibly low rate of sexually transmitted diseases.

Albert returned to Mustang over the next six years, spending a total of seven months soaking up the atmosphere and the personalities inside. Over coffee at Seattle Center recently, Albert was far more animated as she talked about her observations than the slightly Vulcan tone of her book suggests:

• The vibe inside was like a cross between a "Cheers" bar and a sorority, she says. "It was just like any other workplace where people were confined together for stretches of time, and you'd forget about it (the sex). And that is not what I expected."

• "The importance of sexual communication is a chief thing I learned," Albert says. Many of the customers turned to prostitutes because they were uncomfortable asking their partners for what they wanted.

• The women took pride in their work. "I think that these women honestly took their work seriously and felt they were serving a need, and felt if they were going to be asking for money they wanted to be good at what they did."

After her years of research, Albert looks poised to emerge as a national expert on the subject, with appearances ranging from the "Today" show to a book signing, at 7 p.m. next Wednesday at the University of Washington.

"I'm not condoning prostitution, but it's a fact of life," Albert says. "So our rigidness about how we deal with it has to evolve, too. I think we need to be practical about it and say, `Listen: People are having sex a lot younger; that's why we have to talk about condoms. Listen: Prostitution happens; let's do it safely.' Let's provide a way for these women to do it so people aren't getting hurt, people aren't getting diseased and we can basically protect a whole bunch of people. We just need to be social realists about it."

As it turns out, "Brothel" is also a historical document. Nevada still has more than two dozen legal brothels, but the Mustang Ranch, its first and most famous, closed its doors in 1999 because of racketeering and other charges against its notorious owner, Joe Conforte.

Albert, meanwhile, has married and lives with her husband and toddler on Seattle's Capitol Hill. She stays in touch with some of the women she got to know.

"I felt really privileged to be let in and trusted," she says. "I respected them for being up front about what they did."

Mark Rahner: 206-4664-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com.