Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (60 page)

Although I believe that masochism is often a dynamic in homosexuality, I am not suggesting that it is in some way integral to noncoercive, one-sex relationships
·
or predilections. More signifi-

*
Genet was not the only brilliant homosexual to have suggested the deli ciousness of rape. The half-humorous doubie-entendre of Lytton Strachey before the Hampstead Tribunal in
1916,
when he argued his case as a con scientious objector, has been widely retold. "Mr. Strachey, what would you do if you saw a German soldier attempting to rape your sister?" the examiner asked. Strachey responded with "ambiguous gravity" according to his biog rapher, "I should try and come between them."

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AGAINST OUR WILL

cant, perhaps, than the masochistic factor has been the blanket assumption of masochism-in the belief that all male homosexuals wish to be forcibly violated-that has been used with telling effect by heterosexual men who wish to avoid the implications and reality of a man's rape by other men. Here again, the parallels to the woman's experience are obvious. I have listened more than once to the story of a homosexual youth who tried without success to convince his local precinct that he was beaten and raped by some strangers he met in a gay bar and thoughtlessly decided to entertain at home. To the cops in the precinct the raped youth was nothing more than a faggot who was "asking for it." Along the same lines,

T.
E.
Lawrence's account of his gang rape by the soldiers of the

Nuri Bey in Deraa, laundered in many editions of Seven Pillars of
Wisdom,
has been quartered and dissected by a host of Lawrence scholars who feel that the "truth" of the brutal sodomizing hangs on Lawrence's alleged or suppressed homosexuality. Indeed, I have heard the argument that Lawrence's sphincter muscles should have been sufficient to ward off unwelcome penetration. Correspond ingly, some modern sociologists have tried to downplay homosex ual rape in American prisons by making use of the biased belief that-this is a direct quote from an accepted source-"there is some question, as in heterosexual situations, as to whether the situation is really in fact rape or whether it is a seduction which has simply gone wrong."

A comprehensive study of rape within the Philadelphia prison system was jointly conducted in 1968 by the district attorney's office and the Phildelphia police department af ter two embarrass ing incidents came to light. One was a gang rape by detainees in a sheriff's van upon a youth who was being transported to court for his trial; the second incident concerned a youth who was sexually assaulted "within minutes of his admission" to the Philadelphia Detention Center for a presentencing evaluation. ( In both cases the youth's lawyer reported his rape to the court.)

Alan
J.
Davis, the chief assistant district attorney who was put

in charge of the resulting investigation, was forced to conclude that sexual assault in Philadelphia prisons was "epidemic." Meticu lously documenting 156 cases of rape during a two-year period through task-force interviews with more than
3,000
reluctant in mates and guards, the use of lie-detector tests and examination of prison records, Davis believed he had merely touched "the top of

the iceberg," and that the true number of rapes during this period was probably closer to
2,000
in a shif ting inmate population of
60,000
men. However, a total of only
96
rapes had actually been reported by victimized inmates to prison authorities, and of this number only 64 had been written up in prison records. Prison officials had imposed some form of internal discipline on 40 of the offenders and
26
of the cases had been passed on to the police for legal prosecution.

Davis disclosed that "virtually every slightly built young man committed by the courts is sexually approached within a day or two af ter his admission to prison. Many of these young men are re peatedly raped by gangs of inmates. Others, because of the threat of gang rape, seek protection by entering into a homosexual relation ship with an individual tormentor." Homosexual assault, this dis trict attorney learned, had become an extra form of punishment that was part and parcel of imprisonment, a punishment never intended by the sentence of the court. "Only the tougher and more hardened young men," he wrote, "and those few so obviously frail that they are immediately locked up for their own protecti n, escape homosexual rape."

Homosexual rape in the Philadelphia prisons turned out to be a microcosm of the female experience with heterosexual rape. Davis discovered that prison guards put pressure on inmates not to report their rapes by using the argument that the victim wouldn't want

his parents and friends to find out about his humiliation. But not
·
telling did not cause the humiliation to "go away": "After a young man has been raped," Davis learned, "he is marked as a victim for the duration of his confinement. This mark follows him from institution to institution. Many of these young men return to their communities ashamed and full of hatred."

Matching the woman's experience with rape in the outside world, Davis found that in a closed society without women, men who raped other men in prison as a group were on the average three years older, one inch taller and fifteen pounds heavier than their prison victims. Also in parallel to the outside world, prison rape appeared to be a function of youthful aggression. Although the average age of an inmate within the Philadelphia prison system was
29,
the average prison rapist was found to be
2
3 years old and the average age of his victim was slightly under
21.
Men who raped in prison had usually been put there for crimes of violence: rob-

26<:
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AGAINST OUR WILL

bery, assault and heterosexual rape. Men
who
were raped in prison looked young for their years, appeared unathletic and were notice ably better looking than their predators. Their crimes, as might be expected, were usually on the nonassaultive end of the spectrum: auto thef t, going
AWOL,
or violating parole. The one criminal category in which there were as many prison victims as prison rapists was homicide, proving once again that the profile of the murderer is unto himself. (See page 184
.
)

Davis' report was unflinching when it came to interracial rape in prison. Eighty percent of the inmate population in Philadelphia was black but the pattern of sexual assault revealed 'f{hdispropor tionate number [of] Negro aggressors and white victims." White on-white rape accounted for
15
percent of the documented as saults, and black-on-black rape accounted for
29
percent. Davis found
no incidence
of white-on-black rape in the Philadelphia prisons, but black-on-white rape registered 56 percent of the grand total. The district attorney reasoned, correctly I think, that it is "safer" for a member of a powerf ul majority group, in this case the prison blacks, to aggress against a weak minority group, in this case the prison whites, and he also took note that "Negro victims seemed more reluctant than white victims to disclose assaults by Negro aggressors," but he could not escape the inevitable conclu sion: "It also seems true that current racial tensions and hostilities in the outside community are aggravated in a criminal population."

Haywood Patterson had stated forthrightly that by taking a gal-boy he preserved his stature as a man. Davis reported that he nd his team of investigators were struck by the fact that the man who rapes another man in prison "does not consider himself to be a homosexual, or even to have engaged in homosexual acts. This seems to be based upon his startlingly primitive view of sexual rela tionships, one that defines as male whichever partner is aggressive and as homosexual whichever partner is passive."

Homosexual rape in prison could not be primarily motivated by the need for sexual release, Davis observed, since autoerotic masturbation to orgasm is "much easier and more normal." But conquest and degradation did appear
·
to be a primary goal:
.
"We repeatedly found that aggressors used such language as 'Fight or fuck,' 'We're going to take your manhood,' 'You'll have to give up some face,' and '\Ve're gonna make a girl out of you.' " Signifi cantly, in the penal institution, economic clout proved as persuasive as physical force: "Typically, an experienced inmate will give cigarettes, candy, sedatives, stainless-steel blades, or extra food pilfered from the kitchen to an inexperienced inmate, and af ter a few days the veteran will demand sexual repayment." In the fear charged atmosphere of prison society, the "threat of rape, expressed or implied, would prompt an already fearful young man to submit" for a guarantee of future protection from gang assault or for an easier time of it. "Prison officials," Davis concluded, were "too quick to label such activities 'consensual.' "

In sum, Pavis· found that prison rape was a product of the
,
violerit>'. subctilture s definition of
..
masculinity. through ,physical triumph, and' those who· emerged as "women" were those who w re ,

··
subjugated•byrealor
1
threatened force ·,, ,.

Here I shall add my own coda to the Davis report. Well meaning people from time to time put forward the suggestion that the way to curb homosexual activity in prison lies in supplying real women-wives, girlfriends and volunteer prostitutes-for the in mate population, a highly touted feature of some Mexican jails. At their most sincere those who advocate this solution hold to the mistaken belief that prison homosexuality is the fallout of an unfortunate situation in which men have no heterosexual outlet for their emotions and physical needs, and that so-called "deviant" behavior can be curtailed by a stock of willing women.''Besides
·
being
·
:
a
·
n·, embarrassingly , ·simplistic view of . the nature of . true homosexuality, which: is not dependent in ' the slightest on the. availability of women, this "solution" misreads the ideology of rape. in the prison experience: that is, the need of some men to prove their mastery, through physical and sexual assault, and to establish,

ost striingly within the special crucible of the male-violent, a
1
Cioercive hierarchy of the strong on top of the weak
'
'

Incidents of rape by guards, trusties or other inmates also surface from time to time in periodic exposes of mental hospitals, women's prisons and juvenile detention centers. An imitative rape ideology among females is not unknown in the women's institu tions, although it nowhere matches the male experience. The in mate hierarchy in a women's prison, according to those who have made a study of it, expresses itself in an intricate emotional super structure imitative of an extended family life rather than in raw domination by physical power. Women who remain in prison for any length of time tend to form families consisting of a butch