Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (59 page)

.
ing on the silence which rape victims have maintained. In the past most of the victims have been kids with hang-ups about their masculine image. There have been countless rapes in there, but I'm the first one who has stood up to make it public.
If
something can be changed, my experience will have been meaningful.",

Public recognition of rape in prison is increasing. From a pile of newsclips I can pull the following items:

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AGAINST OUR WILL

• Nine inmates at Sumter Correctional Institute in Florida are charged with raping other prisoners during a prison riot.
  

• Two inmates at Florida's Raiford Prison are charged with raping other inmates at knife point.
  

• A county judge in upstate New York refuses to send a young offender, who is homosexual, to Attica. His stated reason: "I just couldn't see throwing him into that situation. He'd become an object of barter there, completely dehumanized if he wasn't killed. This is a heck of a thing, and the public ought to know about it."
  

• Two bright young Nixon aides who plead guilty to Water gate offenses and know they face a jail sentence admit they are apprehensive about the possibility of a sexual assault.
  

(The concern of the Nixon men, as a matter of fact, was exaggerated, since federal prisons hold the least violent criminals, those convicted largely of white-collar crimes. Prison rape is more typically a product of state and city penal institutions, where those convicted of crimes of violence predominate.)

A straightforward account of the hierarchic sex code as it operated in prison almost forty years ago appears in the autobiog raphy of Haywood Patterson, chief defendant in America's most famous rape case, the Scottsboro affair. (See pages 230 to 235.) By his own admission the most ornery and unbowed of the Scottsboro "Boys," when Patterson landed in Alabama's tough Atmore State Prison Farm in 1937 he was confronted with a cut-and-dried option: either submit to the older men and become a "gal-boy" or defend his bodily integrity by becoming a "wolf." The issue, as the 2 5-year-old Patterson saw it, was manhood. He reasoned,
"If
any of that stuff goes on with me in on it I'll do all the fucking myself. I been a man all my life."

There was little neutral ground at Atmore in Patterson's esti mation. Some inmates escaped becoming predator or prey but "that was a minority." Rape was tolerated, even encouraged, by the prison authorities, Patterson believed, because "it helped them control the men. Especially the tough ones they called devils. They believed that if a devil had a gal-boy he would be quiet. He would be a good worker and he wouldn't kill guards and prisoners and try to escape. He would be like a settled married man."

The most sought-af ter raw material for a gal-boy was a tender young teen-ager. "A fif teen-year-old stood no chance at Atmore," Patterson reported. "Prisoner and warden were against him and he

was quickly made into a woman." The womanizing process
.
was methodical and brutal. "I've seen young boys stand up and fight for hours for their rights," he related. "Some wouldn't give up." Pris oners and guards would watch the assaults on young boys with impassive interest. "They knew a young woman was being born. Some just looked forward to using her a little later themselves."

Af ter a gal-boy was broken he might accept his new nature with abject, promiscuous surrender. "Some carried on like real prostitutes," Patterson told in wonder. "They sold themselves around on the weekends just like whore women of the streets. . . . Usually you could hunk up with a gal-boy for two or three dollars. Gal-boys got sold off to different men.
If
a guy had a gal-boy but didn't get along with him any more, he could put him up for sale. He could sell him for twenty-five dollars. News of a sale went through the prison pretty fast and bids came in every time." Pat terson mentioned with satisfaction, "I once heard Deputy Warden Lige Lambert tell some state patrolmen that fif ty percent of the Negro prisoners in Atmore were gal-boys-and seventy percent of the white."

Patterson's own acid test came early in his stay at Atmore. He had already determined,
"If
I had to be a part of this life I would be a man," and the first step toward manhood was to patronize the weekend gal-boys. "I called them fuk-boys. I called them all sorts of sorry names. . . . I would say to one of them, 'You come here taking your mommy's and your sister's places. You rotten.' " Pat terson gradually began to relish his wolf role, but his status had to be periodically defended. In the prison hierarchy there were wolves and bigger wolves. "Even af ter I had my regular gal-boy it didn't end my troubles with wolves who wanted to use me that way.'' A wolf named John Peaseley let him know he thought the Scottsboro Boy was too young to be a man-"He wanted to use both me and my gal-boy." Patterson went af ter the older wolf with a switch blade knife, and this event became the turning point of his stay at Atmore. He reported succinctly, "Peaseley didn't try to make a girl out of me no more. Nobody did. I had taken a gal-boy, whupped a wolf, and set myself up as a devil."

A reversed set of values permeates the prison writing of Jean Genet. Sartre, his interpreter, has called Genet "a raped child" whose early violations determined his "passive" homosexuality, but Sartre sees both rape and homosexuality as metaphor:

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An actual rape can become, in our conscience, an iniquitous and yet ineluctable condemnation and, vice versa, a condemnation can be felt as a rape. Both acts transform the guilty person into an object, and if, in his heart, he feels his objectification as a shameful thing, he feels it in his sex as an act of coitus to which he has been subjected. Genet has now been deflowered; an iron embrace has made him a woman.

.
There is no doubt from a reading of Miracle of the Rose that Genet was subjected to repeated assaults by the older boys at Mettray Reformatory, and that he accepted his gal-boy status with gratitude and humility. At Mettray and other prisons inhabited by Genet, wolves and gal-boys are "big shots" and "chickens" and chickenhood to Genet becomes the ultimate in saintliness. No abject humiliation is too degrading for him and he carries his tube of Vaseline with pride, his own inverse stiff prick. In Genet's prison experience, too, chickens are bought and sold, and guards are com plicitous in beating youths into girls.

Beauty and tenderness form the fatal attraction, as in the case of Winter: "His pretty mug and his nonchalance excited the big shots. . . . The toughs took a fancy to him, and he had to suffer being reamed by twelve cocks and the shame of its happening almost publicly." Winter cuts off his eyelashes "to be less hand some." Bulkaen, a chicken's chicken, a "jerk," falls victim to a gang spitting. Nine toughs line up and expectorate into his mouth. Bulkaen speaks through Genet: "I was no longer the adulterous woman being stoned. I was the object of an amorous rite. I wanted them to spit more and thicker slime. . Deloffre was the first to realize what was happening. He pointed to a particular part of my tight-fitting pants and cried out: 'Hey! Look at his pussy! It's making him come, the bitch!' "
.

To read Genet is to read a male Story of 0. Male homosexual masochism is in its finest flower, and flower not incidentally is Genet's chief metaphor for the love he finds in brutal assault. What is a feminist to make of a man who professes to see a compliment in the threat, "I'd like to give you a shot in the pants," and who considers a furtive tap on the anus the equivalent of a stolen kiss? Genet poses a real problem. His equation of his own male masochism with the female principle is dangerously false. His adoration of the muscular thighs on crooks, cops, Nazis and revolu-

tionary blacks, his personal icons, is no different from the routine stuff, the standard fare, of hard-core heterosexual pornography. Genet worild like to see his chickenhood accepted as the true femininity and he toys with the concept in Our Lady
of the
Flowers that "a male that fucks another
-
male is a double-male." Sartre explains for us that in one masturbatory gesture Genet is "the criminal who rapes and the Saint who lets herself be raped," a religious postulation that is tenable only if God is indeed a phallus.*

Within the current Gay Liberation Movement there is a bois terous minority contained within the outposts of leather bars that would like to see consensual sadomasochism, including the para phernalia of whips and handcuffs, accepted as a civil-libertarian right, as drag queens are demanding the right to dress in tradition ally female attire. Again, what is a feminist to make of this? Does homosexual sadomasochism have its own, peculiarly male, dy namic, or is it an aberration masquerading as the newest issue? The international language of sadomasochism, from the prison argot to the intellectual's musing, and its immutable rites and practices are too revealing to ignore. Sartre explains for Genet that "the rump is the secret femininity of males, their passivity," and both men agree that passivity is defined as being on the receiving end of a penis. In the man-on-man definition, fellatio, too, is a passive act and cock sucker is the equivalent of chicken. Hardly by accident, sadomaso chism has always been defined by male and female terms.
It
has been codified by those who see in sadism a twisted understanding of their manhood, and it has been accepted by those who see in masochism the abuse and pain that is synonymous with Woman. For this reason alone sadomasochism shall always remain a reac tionary antithesis to women's liberation.