I got back to David’s after a only moderately fun afternoon at Long Beach Pride (I’m afraid I’m going to leave such celebrations to the young and drunk ones in the future) and he got a call from his gay brother, Santos, calling from San Francisco, who asked to speak to me. He told me that a friend was reading an article in Pride Guide, and said to him, “Hey, you should read this. It’s good.” Santos looked at it, exclaiming, “I know this guy!” and proceeded to read it himself. He was equally effusive.
If the Pride Guide was available in Long Beach, I didn’t see it, but although San Francisco’s Pride celebration is not for a month, the Guide is already in the bars, on the Castro etc. It was great to hear, and gave me a shot in the arm. When I got home I perused the archives, but don’t seem to have posted it. So here it is. I can’t remember the title, but it’s probably along the lines of my Being Alive articles, something like “Inside Out: The Story of a Gay, Incarcerated HIV+ Male.”
I learned my first big lesson about incarceration when I was in the West Hollywood Sheriff's station trying to make bail. Cell phones can't receive collect calls. It didn't really matter. Not too soon afterward my bail went up from $!5,000 to $40,000. I could have conceivably raised the $1500 (10%) but not $4,000. I was fucked, and I said so out loud, several times over, oblivious to the guy in there with me. "I am fucked, fucked, fucked!"
I thought I couldn't get any lower and desperate than that weekend, but I was in for a surprise. In a misguided attempt to gain sympathy from the judge and get sentenced to a lockdown rehab instead of prison, I told the psych intake coordinator down at Twin Towers that I had thoughts of suicide. I was handcuffed and my glasses were taken away. I was forced to strip and put on a heavy apron--sort of like the shield you put on to protect you from X-rays at the dentist--that fastened with Velcro, and escorted to the psych ward. A kind guard let me put on prison garb, but otherwise I spent a week in that cold cell behind a glass door, with absolutely nothing to do but eat the food shoved to me and sleep. Another kind C.O. let me out to take a quick shower and make two phone calls, and I was visited by my lawyer and a friend. But I could not shave, brush my teeth, or have anything to read Toilet paper was passed under the door, and the toilet was flushed by a guard with a key. I took to ripping up my milk carton and constructing a chess game, and talking to dead relatives. I mused that if I had not been suicidal going in, I certainly was by the time I saw the psych and she cleared me to rejoin "gen-pop"
It was the worst week of my life until then, and a blessing in disguise. Because from then on, everything was up. Or so I thought. (I recount less than 10% of my story here, due to space limitations. These are the "highlights" of the lowlife I was to lead for the better part of a year).
I spent the next month and a half in one of the gay dorms at County Jail. I made friends, and it was loud, but tolerable (unlike the inedible food). I didn't get into any fights (I am almost genetically non-violent) and wisely did not have any sex, as I saw that any entanglements had to take place in the fishbowl atmosphere of the dorm. I found out a lot of the guards were homophobic, and delighted in the opportunity to make life difficult for us. I was incredibly grateful though, that there were gay dorms, because race was scarcely an issue. In fact, there were more than a few straight inmates masquerading as gay because they couldn't deal with the "politics," elsewhere, with which I was soon to become very familiar.
After I was sentenced, to 16 months (which, with half-time, meant 8 months--or almost 11 months in total), I was told to get ready for a trip to Delano, a reception Center near Bakersfield. That night I was called into a holding cell, where blessedly I was allowed to bring a book. In the cell were three others, including a man who writhed on the floor for four hours insisting he had had a heart attack the week before. To no avail, I pressed the "emergency" button every once in a while, but basically read my book and tried to ignore him. When they finally came for us, the guy actually managed to convince the guard he needed to see a doctor.
Some guys at County had a least prepared me for intake at Delano. You had to squat and cough, in case you had "keestered" something up your butt. All in all it was like being processed through an assembly line. Fast and furious and scary. Here I was, this educated gay white male rubbing elbows with the flotsam and jetsam of society. Everyone called each other "dawg," which was appropriate, considering it wasn't much better than a kennel.
For two weeks I was in a cell with another first timer, a very nice young recovering alcoholic named Mike, who found out when he was six months sober that he was wanted for a robbery he had committed in a blackout. It turns out he threatened a woman with his finger under his shirt, but she didn't know it wasn't a gun. He was convicted of "making terrorist threats," and sentenced to 9 years at 80%. This is one of the legacies of the Patriot Act. Zealous prosecutors are dragging that charge out for all manner of crimes completely unrelated to what we associate with terrorism. Thank-you, John Ashcroft.
After various intake tests were completed, I was processed into a cavernous dorm of 200 men, supervised, at any one time, by one guard behind a podium. I learned that I was first a foremost a "Wood" (white), and was not to socialize or exchange anything with any of the Blacks. (With the Hispanics, more interaction was permitted, but not much). Luckily, the white "shot caller" bunked near me, and took a liking to me, and I had no hassles for the first six weeks. Every week, transfers were announced, and the 12% or so who were moving on to their permanent destination reacted with delight or disappointment, which perversely reminded me to friends' reactions to getting into (or not) the college of their choice.
I learned at Delano that racial classification rules the California State Prison system. 90% of discipline is inflicted intra-race, not by guards. If inmates violate "rules" determined by the member of their racial group, punishment is meted out by their peers in their own race. This can range from 100 "burpies" (squat-thrusts, sort of) to 23 seconds in the bathroom, where everyone gets one punch. But still, at all times, each race is on the "alert" and is told to be ready for a race riot.
There was no sex at Delano, unless you include covering a bottom bunk with sheets and jerking off. I told everyone the meds I took every day were post-Prostate Cancer medication, and was only challenged on this when a skinhead named Chainsaw took over the helm of the "Woods." Chainsaw asked me if I was "homosexual" and HIV-positive and I told him it was none of his business, unless he was planning to have sex with me. (He was very hot, truth be told, unfortunately, he was a racist asshole). He didn't take kindly to my response, and I had a very few tense days before I was blessedly transferred.
I went to the California Institute for Men, at Chino, which is considered the armpit of the California Prison system. After a harrowing week in Sycamore ("Stickamore") Wing, in a cell with an Aryan supremacist named "Drifter" (almost everyone in prison had such a nickname) I told a sympathetic female guard I was gay and HIV+, and she immediately got me transferred to a protective custody dorm. There I spent a month and a half with informers, sex offenders, men over 40 with health problems, drag queens, and a few gay men, one of whom I'd known "on the streets."
Finally, I made it to where I spent my last four months, a minimum security dorm called Redwood Hall. I blessedly made instant friends with a gay 33-year old named Earl, also in for selling meth, and we weathered being gay and HIV+ in an (at first) hostile environment. When it was discovered I was getting a package, rumor had it that I would be "taxed" i.e. a portion of the contents sent to me would be forcibly requested. I was told I had to send the word out that if anyone tried anything, I would fight back, and I made sure they were reminded that my blood was toxic. The threat passed.
Luckily I am blessed with an extraordinarily loving and supportive family and I had plenty of mail and plenty of money on my books. When my turn arrived at canteen, I filled the larder, and rarely was anyone turned away from a shot of coffee. Ironically, no one was allowed to eat food prepared by someone with HIV, (mostly endless variations on Ramen soup packets) so Earl and I feasted pretty unmolested.
I filled up much of time writing letters to my family that my sister said were so readable she started to blog them. I started to write daily entries that documented my experience, and word spread that the experiences of these mostly forgotten men were being recounted on the outside. Eventually Earl and I became protégés of the head of the Whites, a soap-opera-handsome rake by the name of Jimmy. After that, being gay and positive was a relative non-issue.
By the time of my release, the blog achieved book length, and all you want to know about life in prison can be perused therein. But let me just share a statistic. The population of Germany is well over twice that of California, and yet they have 1/3 as many prisoners. . Your tax dollars are paying for a broken system, catering to powerful interest groups like prison builders and guard unions, who are in turn catered to by politicians petrified of appearing "soft on crime" by a hysterical public drunk on if-it-bleeds-it-leads news. I can tell you with complete certainty one thing: that if the money spent building prisons and wherehousing uneducated men in the past 20 years had been spent instead on building schools and training teachers, California would have half as many nmates as Germany.
For the curious, I didn't have sex once during the eleven months of my incarceration. No privacy, for one thing. And I witnessed no rapes and only a few relationships. Frankly, I didn't mind getting off that merry-go-round for a while, as compulsive drug-fueled sex can be its own prison. Hell, incarceration may have even saved me from infection with the new supervirus that could well be spreading.
Being gay and HIV+ made prison more difficult, to be sure. But I left more anxious to advocate for all of those inside, not just the gays. And to denounce this absurdly damaging Prohibition called the War on Drugs, which causes far more harm than it prevents.(And I tell you this as a sober person who never intend to do drugs again.)
We have a society that dehumanizes and demonizes drug dealers and prisoners, and gay people have extra reason to be wary of such blanket social and cultural marginalization, as we are often its victims at well. The first step in turning the political tide is awareness, first and foremost of one's tendency to be co-opted by majority thinking. I didn't have any more in common than most of you with the men I met inside--regardless of the reality that we had both broken the law. But I discovered human beings there who most of society just want to go away. There are no quick-fix solutions, only a clear-eyed assessment from someone whose been there that the present system constitutes no solution either. On this Pride Day, remember your brothers and sisters behind bars, especially, but not just, the gay ones.
Marc Olmsted lives in Los Angeles. His blog can be accessed at www.marcolmsted.com/blog.
MCO 2005
