Content warning: drugs, gender and sexual violence, incarceration.

Alisha Kohn: I was sitting in the bullpen, just a big plexiglass room with benches made to be uncomfortable, wearing the same clothes I'd had on eight months ago: a polo shirt, Aeropostale jeans, and a pair of Nikes. I was an 18-year-old white boy from the suburbs placed in there with handcuffs around my wrists, shackles around my ankles, and chains to connect it all. Me and two men were all headed to the same place, state prison. The ride was a short one, but at the same time, it was the longest ride of my life. The van that took me to state prison drove me through my hometown before getting on the highway. It would be the last time I would see it. What started as a ride in a police car to answer some questions landed me in handcuffs, put me before a judge, and took me away from the only family I'd known for something I never did—but that I said I did, because I thought sex meant love, and when you love someone, you do anything for them, even if that meant doing fifteen years in prison.1

Though I entered a boy, I emerged from my prison journey as a transwoman. My transition was not just my own, but co-created by the collective love of queer community inside New York State's prison system—a community that taught me queerness is the radical expression of self-love. My community taught me to think outside oppositional categories, beyond binaries to defy what I had been taught to think about gender, the carceral system, community, and most important, the right way to love. Prison takes your hair, your clothes, your name. You are given a number and are expected to forget every part of your life before prison in order to become “rehabilitated.” Needless to say, the system cannot give you what you need. In fact, the major thing you learn to do is to think outside of it to survive and redefine who you are, who you can become, and how you can belong. As my friend and elder, political visionary, Paris writes, “[T]he institution is designed to erase away every part of human individuality. . . . The system seeks to stamp out ideas of Blackness, nonconformity, and queerness. The very act of being and remaining queer in these spaces is an act of protest. My power is in resisting the status quo.”

How does one be queer inside the most binary system known to humankind: prison? The testimonies featured in this piece center the experiences of being “Queer Behind the Wall,” and show how survival isn't black and white, but requires community and co-creating radical expressions of self-love for ourselves inside to survive one of the most violent corners of this oppressive system. In this piece, I introduce you to my chosen family: Brian, Paris, and Kitty. Each of them has set the path for me to be clean from heroin after using for a period that spanned fifteen years, the time leading up to and throughout my time in prison. It was not until I was released from prison that I made the decision to get clean and thrive as the amazing transwomxn I am today.

I met Paris in 2015 in Coxsackie Prison. When Paris came to Coxsackie all of my queer family was talking about them—I had to know who they were! Paris became my big sis inside. Paris is Black, gender nonconforming, and doing twenty-five years to life for something they did not do. Paris inspired me and believed in me before I even knew who I was. They told me that I was better than being in prison, spending my time getting high. They told me my story can change people's lives.

“The battle to remember to survive and to thrive”

Paris E. Whitfield: I entered the industrial prison complex in 2002.2 Each day since, the battle is not so much about my submitting to the violence, social roles, and adherence to prisoners’ politics, which are akin to rules in an “upside-down-kingdom.” Instead, my battle has been in remembering who I am and striving towards becoming even better.

Prisoners, for the most part, exist within a warped sense of reality. When you think about it, the prison forces an artifice on its environment as well as the people who reside within it. Our time is out of sync with reality. The rottenness of days is reduced to humans being counted like sheep. Like, why are there not a lot of clocks in areas where incarcerated people reside or congregate? Without a sense of time, one cannot maintain a material sense of reality.

The facade of prison, in my experience, relies on perceptions versus reality. Being “queer” in prison is not the proverbial sin that it is outside. Being gay for the stay is part of prison life. But being more than the “decadent” queer is what draws the ire of prison social order. In the shadowy cave of some prisoners’ minds, “queerdom” is a license to have sex and give sexual favors. As an extension of self-worth, sex gets substituted as love, concern, and even care, but more so, it becomes what is expected of a LGBTQ+ person.

Here, I've found having solid alliances with guys I work around or attend college with buffer these sort of situations from taking root and keep me from relying on sex for safety—not through physical protection, growth of consciousness, or sense of right/wrong—but because the potential violator fears for his reputation. In this way, having alliances (versus tricks) proves vital for survival.3

What is glaring in prison is that the institution is designed to erase every part of human individuality. I think here is where incarcerated people share the most. The system seeks to stamp out ideas of Blackness, nonconformity, and queerness. The very act of being and remaining queer in these spaces is an act of protest. My power is in resisting the status quo. In resisting, I thrive and find ways to stay educationally active, socially engaged, and purposefully alive.

Despite the system in which I am present, I wholeheartedly believe my life has a purpose: I live, without permission, as if I already have my liberty. I gift myself with seeing myself so that I cannot lose that essence of humanity in seeing others.

With purpose, I do live despite the circumstances I am presently in. I can live my truth wherever I am. In fact, I hardly think I am one of the ones who could hide it, even if I wanted to, which I don't. Survival is in not conforming to people's prejudices regarding who they think I am.

My sights aren't glued to the perceptions. I work from within, with outsiders, to abolish the system. The truth, for anyone who may be disillusioned, is that the carceral system works just as it is designed to, placing Black, Brown, im/perfect bodies out of sight, in the shadows, as it destroys individuality (in all its forms) and serves as the pruning device for producing societal “sheepeoples.”

In a space that is predicated on perceptions, the authenticity of being one's true self, at first glance, does not appear to garner many fans. But eventually it does garner respect by many. I/us/we who identify as our authentic selves are brave individuals to do so in an environment that is otherwise hostile.

The reality is this: I/us/we, create the narrative rather than be defined by others who can barely make out who they are in these spaces, and then it becomes apparent that they too live in a space of fear and an “internal” prison, of sorts.

I am hard-pressed to find anything—and increasingly few people—within prison that reinforce who I am, or more important, who I am striving to become. My queerness, specifically my gender nonconformity, forces me to look outside of this prison structure to see myself. Given that I looked outside of the binary of heteropatriarchy, it isn't as much of a stretch to look outside of the PIC system (or any system) to seek clarity and truth of myself.

Sources renew my strength outside of this system. I stay connected to and draw on my foundational familiar family love, mentors, and friends I've met along the way, as well as my activist work. Adding to the perceptions about LGBTQ+ people in prison does not make me oblivious to the forces at play, which seeks to erase me (and others like me); but I'd instead work on myself in this storm, as well as lend a hand to my queer siblings because sunlight does come, a new day to rise happens.

Those that are closest to the issue, being gender nonconforming and surviving and thriving while within the PIC, are better able to reimagine a world without prisons for all, or in the least, we can reimagine the inhumane spatial environ, prison, as more than its outmoded models, involving all.

Alisha Kohn: Paris is a scholar, a poet, a big sister, and a prophet who has used their time inside to advocate for others. Unfortunately, Paris is a rarity inside the system, despite a sentence to twenty-five years to life for being Black and queer, Paris continues to thrive in a space that locked them up and threw away the key to be forgotten by the rest society. Even though they are innocent Paris continues to appeal to the courts to prove their innocence and are repeatedly denied. They continue to accumulate multiple college degrees inside, and still inspire so many behind prison walls and in the community. If it weren't for Paris then Brian, myself, and the twenty-seven incarcerated graduates of 2022 from Bard College likely would not have had the support to earn their degrees. In addition to the political vision and scholarship they bring to the prison community, Paris has played a crucial role in shaping and mentoring college students interested in prison reform and abolition at Vassar College. Despite everything they have done, they have not even been given a chance to ask for parole and won't for another five years.

Paris and every prisoner in New York State goes through the court process, gets sentenced, goes through state reception, and finally comes to their first facility. Mine was Mid-State, a medium-security facility. The grass was green. Prisoners walked without an officer, and in a weird way it almost felt like touring the college campuses I was on just a year before with my Mom. At first glance it felt like I belonged in prison, like this place was going to help me. I did have a drug problem and I thought this place was going to turn me straight. I learned very quickly that the perception of security and support the facility presented was just for show, just as trying to appear straight had been for show. When I looked just above the horizon past the high colonial architecture, I saw the barbed wire fences with gun towers ready to take my life. In my attempt to conform to society's standards, I used heroin, I was raped, I lost my family, I lost my hope, I lost faith in a world that never even existed. I started to think that maybe I was wrong even though I was innocent, that I needed to conform to society's standards of what is acceptable. It took me twenty-five years to realize that all I ever needed and wanted was to be accepted for being my most authentic queer self.

When I think about who inspired me to be my most authentic queer self I think about Kitty. A women with thirty-plus accumulated years of incarceration who has lived every moment of them as her most authentic queer self. Kitty's experience being queer behind the wall precedes my time, but precedes Paris's and Brian's times too. Kitty was there before gender affirming hormones were available in prison, or LGBTQ mental health groups, before the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). Kitty made it possible for Paris, Brian, and me to live our most authentic selves building love, community, and care for one another.

Peace within Myself: Being Transgender in Prison

Kitty Rotolo: Being transgender in prison to me is a statement. Everything's got to be perfect: the hair, that face, the clothes, etc. People's expectations of us are a lot higher than that of the average Joe. I strive for perfection. Unfortunately, there's a lot of hatred and violence behind these prison walls, so I'm used to being ostracized and ridiculed. So many times I have to hold my tongue and curb my attitude when I'm down by the exchange of confinement and oppression. A lot of times I've got to deal with the ignorance of both the corrections officers as well as the civilian staff. I have learned to hold my head high and keep it moving forward after thirty years of incarceration. I find peace within myself by dealing with outside organizations that both understand me and help me to become a better woman. I read a lot of LGBTQ books and write a lot, so it breaks up the monotony of having to deal with ignorance.

To me being transgender in prison means holding onto one's mental stability. There is so much mental illness in the penitentiary, it's sickening. One of the tricks that the Department of Corrections has is to put us in the Box. It's a small cell located in an isolated area of the facility with no property and no human contact. The sounds of silence are deafening. I used to count the cracks in the wall and then the floor just to keep busy.

There are things about life in prison that make it not so bad. They do issue us bras and panties and we get female hormones, but I can remember first coming into prison in the early 1990s when there was none of that. Eventually, though, we got it. However, there are things that make prisons look like they're actually doing good but sadly, they are not. If you have mandatory programming for drug treatment or anger management, the program is sickening—a mandatory program that is six months of pure nonsense, discussing topics that have absolutely nothing to do with the core of the problem.

To me being transgender in prison means I keep it real with both myself and others. I was a girl when I came to prison, so all this comes naturally to me. Being in a relationship in prison comes hand-in-hand with doing time. Although relationships can be very challenging—there's so much jealousy and such—I have had two weddings in the prison yard and I've been married more times than that! It always starts out good and it's nice to be in an intimate relationship with someone else, but after a while, the silliness starts, and your other half wants to know your every move: what you're talking about, who you're talking to, why you're talking to this person, why was he looking at your ass, etc. Keeping a relationship is stressful because if there's no trust in a relationship, then there is nothing. When you're having a bad vibe with your husband you tend to take it out on other people, which can be dangerous. In my older age, I have discovered that it is just less trouble not to be romantically involved with someone else. This is not the place for that.4

To me being transgender means that you never have to say you're sorry. Just keep your head up and keep moving forward, flaunt your beauty, and it will keep you free on the inside. Never let them see you sweat either—so much ignorance and negativity surrounds us here. The negativity surrounds me in here so much that I sometimes have a hard time just to get through. I don't tolerate disrespect and if I wasn't letting people get away with it in New York then I'll be damned if I allow them to in here! Whenever a queen has a fight in jail it's a big to-do. Even if you lose the fight the boys will talk about that one punch you got in like it was a legend. When you stand up for yourself it's a good thing because you're showing the general population that you're not the one for the silliness. Never let anyone play with you out-of-pocket because once the boys think it's a choice, it becomes open season. And just mind your business.

To me being transgender in prison means I've always got to be at the top of my game. Having been incarcerated as long as I have, I know well enough not to let them look and see me slippin’. People take every little thing in here for weakness so you got to remain strong always. Even laughter can be interpreted as weak.

Another trick the PIC has in here is to take your release date away for getting into trouble. Not this girl though. I get released in 2023 after thirty years locked up. I will be on parole when I am released. It is a whole different ball game. For one thing, you are home, so you got to be on your best behavior because they can send you back to prison for a violation.

To me being transgender in prison means to live my best life despite all the forces trying to take my existence away. I have seen a lot, did a lot, because I am a lot and no one can stop me from living my best life, prison or no prison.

Alisha Kohn: Kitty is an elder who has lived and learned how to do their time by setting an example to the new girls just coming into the system. One of the things we learn is to stick with each other, to find other queer people to be in community with, and how to do time and stay safe. In the prison social hierarchy, queer people get treated less than by the correctional officers and prisoners amongst us. Finding a queer family has helped me embrace my own queer identity and discover that I am no longer a gay male but a transgender woman named Alisha. Having a queer family not only made it possible to help me survive another day but find peace in myself, as Kitty taught me. Being transwomen in a men's prison we were treated like men, not the women that we are. Despite not being affirmed in all of my womanness the majority of the time, those few brief moments when you see your queer family, no matter if it's in the yard for an hour or just passing each other in the halls, that affirmation of having other queer family with you gives you the strength and willpower to keep surviving and being queer behind the wall

Despite the trauma and the stripping of my humanity piece by piece inside the prison system, I was able to find my true self. I was able to bring Alisha into the world. I was able to find love, to find friendship. I just wish I did not have to go through trauma to see myself. I wish I did not have to go to prison to find the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. The man I love, Brian, is sitting behind bars, a man who may, one day, for the first time, lay next to me in our bed, or maybe he won't ever.

Brian is cisgender, Black, straight, trans-attracted, and doing thirty years to life for defending his sister's honor after she was raped. When he came in he had a mind frame of a sixteen-year-old boy from Harlem. His words take us from that child who had been outcasted by society to the man who I will one day say I do to.

He was one of the few straight men I met inside who was openly trans-attracted. When I met him, he was just another guy, a trick, someone to pass the time and support me until I went home. As our relationship started, I caught feelings for him, and I don't do feelings very well. We ended on not-so-good terms. However, the very last day that I saw Brian while I was in prison with him was June 15, 2017, six days away from release date. He told me that day to go home and put down drugs. He gave me a hug and gave me his cousin's number to call when I got safely to where I was staying. The next day I went into prerelease locked down without any drugs. The last time I got high was a little after the 10:00 pm count on June 15. It would be the last bag of dope I would ever do. The first time I saw Brian after getting out it was a little over three years since we had last said goodbye to each other. We reconnected because his cousin contacted me saying that Brian had been transferred to Fishkill Correctional Facility just miles from my home. We talked first by email then by a phone call and finally I started to visit him in person. That first visit was my first time entering a prison again, but this time I went willingly. I was nervous going in. I felt like it was all a trap, that I was not going to be let back out afterwards. For support I brought Lex, a member of my queer family on the outside. Not only were there fears about going into the prison but since my release there have been these uncomfortable feelings about being in society, dealing with the panic attacks, and the overall trauma of being in prison. From reading Brian's words, to hearing his voice, to that very first hug after three long years, he makes the discomforts all go away. In the brief moments I am with him, he calms everything for me. He is my heart, my soul, my everything.

“I am a Black Man, Dancing to the Beat of Others”

Brian Boles: My journey started back in 1996 when I was in Great Meadows Correctional Facility, if I was to be honest with myself. The first time I saw a trans girl, I was walking to chow with my company, and my initial thought was, “I didn't know that they let girls in here,” then it hit me, hold up, that isn't a woman.5 But I had an image to uphold, and I'm not any punk or faggot, so being turned on by the mere sight of their femininity had to be a secret that was never shared, not even with my closest comrade. But that all changed in 1998. Sitting in the box, I had time to reflect on the past, present, and future of my life. Two of the most cited sayings in prison are, “I'm a grown-ass man,” and “I dance to my tune, don't nobody tell me what to do.” Even though the first may be true for some, the second could not be further from the truth. In some form or fashion, everyone in prison dances to the beat of others whether it's admitted or not.

Whether you are in a gang, follow certain religious beliefs, or have a particular group of friends that you chill with, each is dancing to that group's culture and therefore are dancing to the beat of the other. It was coming to this understanding in early 1998 that forced me to analyze how I wanted to live my life. Did I want to live my life at another's approval or was I going to be what I claim to be, “a grown-ass man”? To me, being a grown-ass man in prison entailed being accountable for your actions—owning up to your shit. So when I got out of Attica and landed in Greenhaven, I was presented with the opportunity to put my words where my mouth was at, so to speak, because one of the first trans girls I saw was Jerry, a.k.a. J-Lo. It is crazy because as I reflect on that time in my life, I was like a toddler on his first day of kindergarten. I didn't want to let my parent's hand go, and I was afraid to stand on my own two feet. My parent, in this case, was the opinions of those around me. I wondered: What if I fell? Who was going to help me back up? What was I going to do if people made fun of me or tried to disrespect me? These questions and many others were the focal points of my thoughts as I lay alone in my cell. But ultimately, the decision to date trans girls in prison came down to me not wanting to be alone and having someone willing to take care of my sexual, financial, and emotional needs.

Despite me being Godbody at the time, I left the Nation and didn't run into any real problems right away.6 I would have to admit that many of my conflicts resulted from me not owning up to my shit. Coming to prison, one of the first things that you would hear someone tell you is not to get involved with any of the three G's—gangs, gays, and gambling—if you plan on avoiding the bullshit. But I am not gay. Gays like someone of the same gender as one's self, which I don't. But what I failed to take into account is that, in the eyes of others in prison, there is no separation between a trans woman and a gay man; they are all the same. So one of the hardest things I had to learn to do was put my pride, ego, and insecurities in my pocket. I used to be quick to think that because people knew I dated trans girls, they felt that I was gay or that I was some weak individual and tested my manhood, so I was always quick to participate in the dick-swinging contests. But then, one day, I asked myself why I care so much about what the next person has to say about how I'm living my life—as though their opinions matter one way or another. From that day on, I stopped caring what the next person had to say and just focused on living my life and making myself happy. As long as you didn't disrespect me, I no longer cared what you had to say about me. Sure, now and then my insecurities will pop their evil little heads up, but I learned how to ignore them.

Ever since I came to prison, I have always focused on bettering myself. Dating trans girls has taught me to be a better listener, understand another's mental and emotional state, and be more patient with people's moments of needs. I feel I still have a lot of work to do on myself when interacting with trans people in and out of prison, but the important thing is not being afraid to ask for help, patience, and understanding when need be.

Alisha Kohn: When I first entered prison, I did not have queer family. I pretended I was straight just like the world wanted me too. My lack of confidence and uncertainty made me prey to those who held more power. I believed that kindness in prison was authentic and that everyone was there trying to do the right thing and get home to their families. I wish that were the case. I wish that I did not have be raped five different times in ten years. I wish that I did not fall prey to victimhood, to becoming property, to being reduced to nothing at the hands of other prisoners, correctional officers, and heroin. It was not until my sense of purpose was taken completely in my first year that I experienced authentic kindness from another. The authentic kindness that came from Mr. Tate. We met during my time in Mid-State. Mr. Tate is a tall Black man, so tall you felt small looking up at him when he talked in his old raspy voice. Mr. Tate, one of the youngest members of the Harlem chapter of the Black Panthers and was sixteen years old when he went to prison, sent to Attica Correctional Facility upstate New York in 1971 just weeks before the Attica uprising. I would meet Mr. Tate thirty-eight years after the uprising. The community care practices that he learned from the Black Panthers, from Attica, from thirty-eight years of prison experience were all part of the way and reason he cared for me and loved me after I was gang raped. He put his reputation on the line with the correction officers so that he could shower me, clothe me, feed me, and do so while left unbothered by officers and prisoners. Before that moment he chose to care for me, Mr. Tate and I had a casual relationship as one does when you live in Dormitory with sixty other people. From that point until I would leave Mid-State in 2010, Mr. Tate taught me how to use safely in prison and how to safely satisfy my sexual wants. And most important, he was my friend. With Mr. Tate's help I managed to become eligible for an area preference transfer to get me closer to my family. Mr. Tate encouraged me to go to Woodbourne Correctional Facility, a thirty-minute drive from my family's home in addition to being a state prison with the most volunteer programs. Many of the same programs that were offered at Woodbourne I am still connected to today. I became president of the Alternatives to Violence Project in 2022. If it were not for Mr. Tate's care and friendship, I would never have been able to find the courage within myself to seek out and build the community care networks I would need to survive the nine different state prisons I would go to before my release, skills to survive the State itself. I was able to find my most authentic self with the support of those many queer communities. I would learn what being transgender means. Prior to coming to prison, my concept of a transgender person was based on things I had seen on the Jerry Springer Show. It was not until a queer family member in Woodbourne got her hands on a censored 2011 article in Sports Illustrated about transgender athletes that my perception of what transness is would begin to change. It would further change when I went to Gowanda Correctional Facility and met Gigi, who helped me see that I am transwoman. At the time this self-discovery almost felt pointless to me because I could not get gender-affirming hormones or clothing, or even be called what I wanted to be called: Alisha. It was not until my release and then, with help of my queer family outside, that would discover that transness is more than gender-affirming hormones or clothing or a name change. Those things help affirm me and other trans people. Tranness in itself, as Kitty says, is less about how we look, and more about how we live. “[Being] transgender in prison [and beyond] means to live my best life despite all the forces trying to take my existence away.”

Don't take my transformation or Brian's, Kitty's, or Paris's as a sign that the system works, because if the system worked then Paris, who is innocent, would not have been locked up for twenty-plus years. If the system worked, then Kitty would not have come back to prison repeatedly. Brian's sister would never have been raped and he would never have lost two children and a wife due to a car accident on the way to see him while he was incarcerated hundreds of miles from his family home. If the system worked, then I would not have gone to prison for a drug problem. I would have not been raped repeatedly before and after my incarceration. I would not have had to overcome impossible defeats to be accepted in this academic article. The system does not work but the community created to support each other through the trauma of oppression does.

Notes

1.

My sentence was five to fifteen years, which means at five years I was eligible for parole. However, it was not until I did ten years that I was allowed to go home.

2.

The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term that encompasses the concentric cycles of systemic oppression prisons that rely on keeping large populations of people under surveillance and warehoused even before folks enter brick and mortar prisons, and can include everything from police and courts to public institutions that support education, health care, and housing.

3.

Not all prison family is built on sex. The majority of the community care networks inside that I continue to work with from the outside were cultivated by Paris, whose family includes the love and support of so many heterosexual men—even more militant conservative religious types such as Muslims and Christians—they all claim Paris as their brother. On the inside when you claim someone as family, it's a sign saying I would do anything for you, and I know you would do anything for me, that we are all in this together.

4.

Prison weddings are makeshift events created by other queer folks in the prison to celebrate two people getting together. Having a relationship is against the rules, and in fact, is considered rape because you don't have ownership of your own body. The Department of Corrections does.

5.

Transwomen are women. My comment reflects my mindset at the time.

6.

“Godbody” is a slang term for the “Nation of Gods and Earth,” also known as the 5 Percenters. The Nation of Gods and Earth is a branch of the Nation of Islam.