GLR November-December 2023

ESSAY

Prison and Privilege M ARK O LMSTED

T HE TERM “PRIVILEGE”—white or other wise—was not really in vogue when I spent nine months in the California prison system in 2004. And it certainly wasn’t a word that any of the men I served time with would have ever thought to apply to their experience while behind bars, or, for that matter, to any other part of their lives. In fact, it was n’t until a few years ago that I realized that prison is where I learned about unexpected forms of privilege that I had no name for at the time. The first kind was extremely personal. G AY P RIVILEGE T HE PHRASE “ GAY PRIVILEGE ” may conjure images of velvet mafiosi clinking glasses at a bisexual billionaire’s swank Hamp ton digs, but I came to know an extremely specific and rare manifestation of it at the worst moment of my life. It was right after I had been arrested. After a week under suicide watch (a place to make you suicidal if you weren’t already), I was ush ered in to see an avuncular officer who wanted to make sure I genuinely qualified for one of the three gay dorms at the Los Angeles County Jail, collectively known as “K-11.” I passed

with flying colors, having no trouble listing a wide sampling of gay bars, one of which had even employed me as a bartender. As a first-time offender, he put me in the “least hectic” of the three dorms, 5100. Once there, I soon discovered that a third or so of the in mates were nominally straight on the outside, but here had sex ual or romantic interactions with other inmates who were trans (usually breast implanted but retaining male genitalia, so housed with the men) or temporarily adopting a female presentation as a survival strategy in prison. Some straight men had no such re lationships but had learned how to lie their way into these pro tective dorms, because there were no racial politics there, and it was far safer than “gen-pop.” They preferred rumors of their sexual preference filtering back to their homeboys rather than being the potential target of violence by gang-bangers settling scores. I resented them, wondering if they had displaced actual queer boys who should have been here, but they weren’t the kind of men you challenged. Those of us who were HIV-positive had another layer of privilege in the dorms. We were given an extra peanut-butter and jelly sandwich at night, a legacy from the days when wast

Mark Olmsted, author of Ink from the Pen: A Prison Memoir , will be the subject of three episodes of the podcast Everything Is Stories in spring 2024. Any gay privilege I was lucky enough to have experienced immediately evaporated the second we left county jail and headed upstate, and from the bus ride on, you quickly high tailed it back into the closet. Prison culture im posed race as your primary identity, conferring supposed protection in case a riot “broke out”—which you were repeatedly warned could happen with minimal or no warning. My disclosure that I was incorrigibly nonviolent and could not imagine attacking anyone on the basis of race served to out me weeks before the question of whether I was gay was ever asked ing was uncontrolled by drug cocktails. Most of us were indeed quite thin, not from HIV but from the crystal meth addiction that seemed to have brought almost all of us there in one way or another. I often gave my extra sandwich away to inmates who had no family or friends to put money on their books so they could buy food at the commissary. In exchange, a pair of them took it upon themselves to teach me all of the rules of the “mainline,” the designation for any state facility we were shipped to after sentencing.

Collage by Mark Olmsted. Selected by the author to illustrate this essay.

TheG & LR

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