I saw this beautiful image by artist Molly Crabapple and it is seared in my mind and has imprinted itself on my heart. I have looked at it a lot this week. I think it’s because I recognize the women on the line. I’m sure that I’ve never met any of them in person but I have… It’s difficult to explain and I am feeling particularly inarticulate today. I will revisit the emotions and thoughts that the image has triggered at a later date. But for today, I just wanted to share this.

Illustration for The Divide. by Molly Crabapple
Women waiting to visit their loved ones at Rikers. Based on sketches done from life.

This was originally published at In These Times. I am republishing it here with the permission of the author, my friend, Erica Meiners.

No More Nice Gays: The Trouble with the Good Gay Parent Argument
by Erica R. Meiners

On the heels of Vladimir Putin’s Olympic proclamation that (foreign) gays will be welcome in Russia as long as they leave the kids alone, America’s homegrown anti-gay coalition is headed to the courts to unfurl their “scientifically-endorsed” gays are bad for children banner. A challenge to Michigan’s constitutional ban on gay marriage started last week and “the kids” are center court.

By stoking associations like homosexual = pervert = sex offender = child molester, Putin and Team Anti-Gay Marriage USA are stirring a simmering cauldron that many LGBTQ people try hard to avoid.

To counter a long—and continuing—narrative of LGBTQ folks as criminals and deviants, advocates have worked feverishly to stamp out these linkages that some find unseemly. (Ex: Lesbians drive Subarus! Gays care for needy puppies and children! Transfolks make excellent soldiers!) These associations have proven difficult to negate, however, because a determined and bankrolled cadre of pseudo-scholars are always ready to wade in.

In Michigan’s upcoming constitutional battle on gay marriage, for example, sociologist Mark Regnerus is scheduled to testify for Team Anti-Gay Marriage USA and present his less-than-objective bad gay parents summary, which has been discredited as junk science for its flawed methodology and is overwhelmed with a landslide of research demonstrating the opposite.  Mountains of bona-fide blue chip scholarly research document that gays and lesbians are generally model parents, workers, soldiers, citizens and spouses. Homosexuals are statistically no more likely than heterosexuals to sexually abuse children and to stunt youth’s emotional or sexual development. And they do not turn their kids gay.

Despite this research, core associations between queers and people who harm children have not been eradicated. Homegrown evangelical Christians, crowds of Parisians protesting gay marriage, swaths of the Catholic Church, politicians and religious leaders in Nigeria and innumerable elementary school hiring committees, among others, find homosexual/child molester associations too convenient, convincing and fervor-inducing to not entertain or exploit.

Yet while Putin’s statement and Regnerus’s “research” elicited the dutiful response from LGBTQ organizations and allies, the fact remains that gays are no more a risk to children than anyone else. So what if queers shift tactics and refuse to line up experts to testify to this effect ad nauseam?

Instead of going on the defensive, there is a broader truth we could be exposing: This nation, and this planet, repeatedly and viscerally harms many of its occupants, including people who qualify as minors. In the U.S., 14-year-olds are tried as adults and sentenced to natural life in prison, and universal access to quality childcare programs is nonexistent. Most youth are denied access to meaningful sexual health education, and marginalized youth don’t get an equal chance at a quality education. Approximately 1 in 4 children live at or below the federal poverty level and roughly 16 million children live in households with severe food scarcity. And children are marshaled to sell everything, including themselves—just ask Honey Boo-Boo.

In this abysmal reality, devoting time and resources to convincing the public that gays don’t harm children or disrupt “normal child development” seems out of step, tone deaf and ludicrous. A bit like demanding that the Metropolitan Museum of Art add your homemade quilted Last Supper tapestry to their collection.

Beyond this landscape where institutional harm is a normalized component of everyday life, the image of the child itself requires a queer and critical engagement. As someone who has attended multiple neighborhood meetings where (imagined and real) children have been marshaled by a range of groups to install more blue-light street surveillance cameras, to stall discussions about low-income housing that might attract dangerous strangers to the neighborhood, to support increases in street policing for child protection or as a props to mete out increasingly austere allocations of resources, I can attest to how the “symbolic child” shapes our everyday lives.

And “child protection” justifies punitive practices and policies that frequently have little to do with the lives of real children. The enforced drug testing of pregnant women and the expansion of policing and surveillance make our lives less secure while supposedly securing the rights of the symbolic child. Or consider Marlise Muñoz, a brain-dead mother forced to “incubate,” as her partner Erick stated, a fetus—not a person but very much a symbolic child. A dozen states have laws on the books forcing pregnant women to endure a range of treatment or medical procedures without consent, in addition to the two dozen states with laws that require pregnant women, like Marlise, to be kept on life support without consent.

Instead of arguing that gays don’t compromise the safety of children, can we talk about how a focus on the lives of imagined children makes all of our lives unstable and precarious, and all our futures more vulnerable?

For in all this talk of children and our futures, there are real children who are left in the cold. As the late and beautiful scholar José Esteban Muñoz, put it: “Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity.”

This is, perhaps, the most dangerous trick of all. Not only are the kids wielded against many of us, but the shining and mythical innocence possessed by select children is not extended to others. Just look at Trayvon Martin.

So why not: Yes, Putin and Team Anti-Gay Marriage USA, queers are corrosive, unsafe for children. Our first perverted moves: Redistribute food and land to the hungry, open the prison doors and educate all, particularly children, about bodies and sex.

We recruit.

Warning: This post includes descriptions of extreme violence and brutality.

There have been a couple of stories in the recent news exposing the brutality of prisons in the United States. First, the on-going travesty at Tutwiler women’s prison in Alabama was revisited by the New York Times over the weekend:

For a female inmate, there are few places worse than the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women.

Corrections officers have raped, beaten and harassed women inside the aging prison here for at least 18 years, according to an unfolding Justice Department investigation. More than a third of the employees have had sex with prisoners, which is sometimes the only currency for basics like toilet paper and tampons.

But Tutwiler, whose conditions are so bad that the federal government says they are most likely unconstitutional, is only one in a series of troubled prisons in a state system that has the second-highest number of inmates per capita in the nation.

I’ve highlighted the situation at Tutwiler here a couple of years ago. Are sexual violence and brutality new for women prisoners? Of course not! In fact, in the mid-19th century after visiting Auburn State Prison in New York, the prison chaplain, Reverend B.C. Smith, remarked on conditions there: “To be a male convict would be quite tolerable; but to be a female convict, for any protracted period, would be worse than death” (Rathbone, 2005).

Randall G. Shelden (2010) wrote about how women prisoners were treated in the 19th century:

“The conditions of the confinement of women were horrible — filthy, overcrowded, and at risk of sexual abuse from male guards. Rachel Welch became pregnant at Auburn while serving a punishment in a solitary cell; she died after childbirth as the result of a flogging by a prison official earlier in her pregnancy. Her death prompted New York officials to build the Mount Pleasant Prison Annex for women on the grounds of Sing Sing in Mount Pleasant, New York in 1839. The governor of New York had recommended separate facilities in 1828, but the legislature did not approve the measure because the washing, ironing, and sewing performed by the women saved the Auburn prison system money. A corrupt administration at the Indiana State Prison used the forced labor of female inmates to provide a prostitution service for male guards (p.134).”

The guard who beat Rachel Welch so brutally was named Ebenezer Cobb. He was convicted of assault and battery and fined $25. He was allowed to keep his job.

The second development in the past few days involves the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern Law School which brought a class action lawsuit against Cook County Jail alleging a “sadistic culture.” Conditions are described as “hellish.” As someone who has had to visit the Jail pretty regularly, I concur with this assessment. I have written about the fruitless struggle to reform Cook County Jail dating back to the 1870s. Still, today, detainees continue to be abused and harmed even after countless lawsuits and federal intervention.

Read more »

“So Quietly”
by Leslie Pinckney Hill

News item from The New York Times on the lynching of a Negro at Smithville, Ga., December 21, 1919: “The train was bored so quietly…that members of the train crew did not know that the mob had seized the Negro until informed by the prisoner’s guard after the train has left the town… A coroner’s inquest held immediately returned the verdict that West came to his death at the hands of unidentified men.”

So quietly they stole upon their prey
And dragged him out to death, so without flaw
Their black design, that they to whom the law
Gave him in keeping, in the broad, bright day,
Were not aware when he was snatched away;
And when the people, with a shrinking awe,
The horror of that mangled body saw,
“By unknown hands!” was all they could say.

So, too, my country, stealeth on apace
The soul-bright of a nation. Not with drums
Or trumpet blare is that corruption sown,
But quietly — now in the open face
Of day, now in the dark — when it comes,
Stern truth will never write. “By hands unknown.”

New York is banning solitary confinement of children under 18 along with implementing other reforms. But as the Center on Investigative Reporting points out:

“…the rule does not apply to city and county jails, like New York City’s Rikers Island, which houses hundreds of minors as young as 16. Although most of them have not been convicted, they still can be punished as adults for breaking jail rules. That often means weeks or months in solitary confinement.”

Some of you reading this might be surprised that any state would use such a practice at all. A couple of years ago, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a wrenching report about the scope and impact(s) of solitary on children. Basically, they reaffirmed that the practice amounts to physical and psychological torture. HRW produced the video below to accompany the report.

Solitary confinement or what many prisoners call “the hole” can only accurately be considered torture. Charles Dickens recognized as much in the 19th century. Too often, however, the practice is either ignored or discussed euphemistically. America has ALWAYS been pro-torture of certain people. I offer as exhibit A the spectacle lynching of black people in the U.S. So we shouldn’t be surprised at the fact that we still torture so many people in prison through the use of solitary as well as other forms of physical, psychological, and emotional brutality. CIR produced an excellent animated video to illustrate how solitary confinement is experienced by children. I recommend that everyone watch it.

We should end solitary confinement in general as a practice in our prisons. We should abolish prisons.