May 09 2007

Book Review: Skin City

by Megan Edwards
Skin CitySkin City
by Jack Sheehan

If you’re interested in finding out more about what’s happening in Vegas these days (and staying here), allow Jack Sheehan to be your Sakajawea. In Skin City: Uncovering the Las Vegas Sex Industry, he takes his readers on a tour to gentlemen’s clubs, swing parties, porno video awards ceremonies, interviews with madams, sheriffs, strippers, prostitutes, gigolos, and many other hard-working folks who help keep Las Vegas’s reputation for sin fresh and well-deserved.

Sheehan spent two years researching his topic, coaxing sometimes reluctant interviewees to reveal scads of details about such topics as how call girls operate with impunity in a county where prostitution is illegal, how limo drivers augment their salaries tax-free, and how college coeds arrive on the weekends to pick up a few grand dancing in gentlemen’s clubs. Each chapter opens a door into another parallel universe.

Two things unite everything Sheehan covers in Skin City: sex and money. When I spoke with him at the party celebrating the book’s publication, I asked if he had found anything in his research particularly surprising. “The amount of money involved,” he answered without hesitation, and now, having read Skin City, I have to say I agree. While I did learn a few new details about the carnal activities people engage in, I was out-and-out amazed by how much money they shell out for the privilege.

Sheehan skillfully lets his subjects do all the talking in Skin City. Porn film stars reveal themselves in their own words, as do people like David and Virginia Cooper, enterprising recent arrivals to Las Vegas who host parties for swingers in their home seven nights a week. But Sheehan himself is part of the saga, too. Raised a Catholic, Skin City is partly the story of how he emerged from his parochial school childhood to forge a career as a writer and teacher in Las Vegas. When he writes about observing the “Oscars of Porno” ceremonies while sitting at a table marked “Talent,” the irony of the situation comes through.

Also a credit to Sheehan’s journalistic skill is his even-handed treatment of all his subjects, regardless of how they earn a living or which side of the law they operate on. The only person he judges is himself, as he wonders whether the price of his research will be a stint in purgatory or a surefire sentence to eternal damnation.

I for one am very grateful Sheehan risked his immortal soul to poke around in Las Vegas’s dark underbelly. I was curious about it, and I didn’t really want to go there myself. Thanks to Skin City, I don’t have to, and if I change my mind, I have a much better idea of who and what I might find there. Oh, yeah, and how much money to take.

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