Vegas' Adult Industry Minds Its Businesses
LAS VEGAS — It is an alternative chamber of commerce, one for a group of merchants who say they've been ostracized, denigrated and disrespected by the larger business community.
The annual barbecue is held at the Chicken Ranch, a brothel in Pahrump, Nev.
Other mixers include outings to strip clubs. Power-brunch speakers are expected to "motivate, inform and educate without being dry, dull or boring," as chamber literature puts it.
"We actually have a voice now," said Peppy Huffman, marketing director for Paradise Electric Stimulations, a Las Vegas-based manufacturer of erotic-aid products. "The way I see it, somebody's sticking up for the little guy here."
Bill Krane, who operates a holistic wellness center and the adjoining Night Moves, where people come to see racy lingerie modeled, said he would have joined the regular chamber if he had been made to feel welcome -- "but quite frankly, I wasn't."
So Krane, Huffman and 260 other merchants joined the Sin City Chamber of Commerce, a sort of renegade chamber run from a cramped room in a nondescript office complex it shares with mortgage brokers and a branch of the Dairy Council of Utah/Nevada.
The year-old chamber is run by two former employees of the much larger and mainstream 94-year-old Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, which calls itself the "Voice of Business."
The idea sprang up last year when one of the former employees, Loretta Holt, was surprised to hear that a local company was being struck from the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce's roster. The firm, she was told, operated a site offering sexually explicit photographs for downloading.
"I remember thinking, 'Now wait just a minute,' " said Holt, a membership-retention specialist for the chamber at the time. "Adult entertainment is the lifeblood of our community. It's a multibillion-dollar business here."
Holt, a grandmother of 19, now serves as president of the alternative chamber.
The Sin City chamber represents strip clubs, "adult toy" manufacturers, pornography publishers, escort services and telephone-sex merchants, and some members who don't have anything to do with adult industries but who joined for the networking and referral opportunities.
"Strip clubs need copying machines, for example," said Sin City's chief executive, Wayne Bridge, pointing to a copy machine in the chamber's cramped office. "Dancing girls buy cars. Everybody needs their taxes done. There's a lot of business to be done with our people."
