Book tells Jessi Winchester's brothel, election tales

What's the next logical step after six years duty in brothels followed by respectable showings in races for Congress and lieutenant governor?

Write a book about it all, naturally.

And what better time to release a book about two of the oldest professions - prostitution and politics - than just before election day?

Jessi Winchester's autobiography, "From Bordello to Ballot Box," will be published Nov. 1. How much of a coincidence is the book's appearance only six days before the nation elects its next president?

"I'm not going to answer that one," Winchester said. "Let's just say my timing is usually very good."

Winchester's fame as a legal prostitute at the Moonlite Bunnyranch, while holding the Mrs. Virginia City title in the Mrs. Nevada pageant, mushroomed into a political activist career.

Winchester parlayed her 1995 pageant notoriety into populist political campaigns. These brought her 20 percent of the Democratic vote in the 1996 congressional primary and placed her third of nine candidates in the 1998 lieutenant governor's race, where she had switched to Republican.

Winchester, 57, insists she's done running for office, but she does say the Libertarian Party (her latest political persuasion) wants her as state chairwoman and others are wooing her to run for state Senate.

"Hopefully, my book is an inspiration for somebody stuck in a box," Winchester said. "Any readers with common sense will come away with a different view of brothels and politics and may be empowered to go and break free from society's limitations."

A Nevada publisher turned down Winchester's manuscript - political pressure, she claimed - but BainBridgeBooks in Philadelphia took "From Bordello to Ballot Box" as one of about 20 books the small press has published.

The imprint's most popular titles so far are "The Pilates Method of Body Conditioning" and a holocaust memoir called "God Does Play Dice."

"This is a book written by someone fairly intelligent who's done a lot of interesting things," said Ron Smolin, president of Trans-Atlantic Publications, BainBridgeBooks' parent company. "The whole story is fascinating. Her political involvement is an added interest, of course."

The first printing will produce 10,000 copies of "From Bordello to Ballot Box." The book will be distributed throughout the United States and Canada. Winchester said she will have a book-signing at Borders in Reno on Nov. 25.

Winchester, a Carson City resident for the past year, gained her first taste of politics as a teen when her family lost its farm in the small Iowa town where she grew up.

"That was my first experience of not trusting government," Winchester said. "I've always pretty much bucked the system and been a rebel."

While working for the vice-president of labor relations at Warner Brothers studios in Hollywood, she did part-time motorcycle stunt work on TV classics of two decades ago: "The Dukes of Hazzard," "T.J. Hooker," "The A-Team" and "Charlie's Angels."

She married a Las Vegas native, and two months after the wedding he went on disability, she said. They moved to Virginia City and Winchester was working in the Sparks mayor's office when both noticed ads in the Sunday paper for brothel prostitutes.

"Michael kept kidding me (to become a brothel prostitute)," she said. " I said, 'You keep doing this and I'm going to call your bluff.' I kind of wanted to see the inside of a brothel. I put on my Spandex and went. The madam said, 'We have a Bette Midler and Cher. You look like Ann-Margret. You're hired.'"

Jessi and Michael talked it over at length. With his disability and a foster daughter's affliction with elephant man's disease, Winchester gingerly committed herself to legal prostitution at the Mustang Ranch.

"He's an unusual man," she said. "He never questioned my love for him. That was never in question. I had a job and did it. The difference was, my emotions stayed at home."

Within months, she moved next door to the Old Bridge Ranch brothel, where she made her first public statement as a prostitute. Legislation was pending to treat prostitute rape less severely than normal rape.

"I was outraged and so were the rest of the girls," Winchester said. "We called the TV stations and said it wasn't right. The girls nominated me to be the spokesman. I was kind of a house-mother figure. That was a defining moment for me.

"After going public with that to fight injustice I did not have much of a choice but blatantly go public."

For years she has pushed for legislation to end the locked-down rules at most brothels, where working girls have to stay on brothel property for weeks at a time. She keeps pushing.

Winchester was in her mid-40s when she entered the brothel world.

"I was terrified," she said. "I didn't think I was going to live through it. I had stereotypes of pimps and drugs. But in reality it's basically a college dorm environment. We do each other's hair and nails. You develop a bond that nobody else understands."

She doesn't speak as fondly about politics.

"I believed what I had been told: that we have a fair system and your vote counted," she said. "I found a small handful of powerful men that chose the candidates and that starved out the ones they don't want. There are a lot of little things you see on the campaign trail. You see people on the trail with people they shouldn't be with. You see people with temper tantrums."

Title: "From Bordello to Ballot Box," 280 pages, $24.95

Author: Carson City resident Jessi Winchester

Claim to fame: She was a working girl at a brothel who went on to run for Congress and lieutenant governor.

Published by: BainBridgeBooks in Philadelphia

Publication date: Nov. 1

Locally available at: Kennedy Books, 108 E. John St.

Bookcellar, 1202 N. Carson St.

Also available online at amazon.com