Badpuppy Gay Today

Friday, 30 May 1997

The jailed face of AIDS in America is sad and gaunt, hopelessly imprisoned and without access to proper health care, without even a brief hope of fighting the disease.

HIV-positive drug treatments can cost--per prisoner-- as much as $13 thousand annually. Presently, AIDS now infects prison populations at 6 times the rate of the general population. "The spread of AIDS in prison can only be met with smiles by fiends and prudes--and they're out there, dammit, and they're in charge and they're laughing about doing nothing for sick prisoners in their care," said a former inmate of a Florida correctional facility.

Reports, in fact, of jail rapes, and thereafter of HIV positive outcomes have long been circulating within limited circles. Some activists--starting in the early 1990's have made impassioned pleas on behalf of so-called Christian or American values in the treatment of prisoners, both for those still H.I.V.-negative, and for those positive or with AIDS in prisons.

Health care professionals are now calling for the use of prisons as a prime place to attack the disease. Some prisoners balk at the idea of being guinea pigs, though others would much welcome the presence of health care experts.

Plenty of voters see health care in prison as a luxury, one they can't even count on themselves. But without allowing for this so-called luxury, the dreaded disease returns silently and untreated into the community. Health care professionals propose lessening the strength of the virus so as to lower its chances of being transmitted both in prison and upon the prisoner's release.

In-prison transmission suggests widespread male-on-male rape. Another cause is the proximity, under such conditions, of intravenous drug users. The prevalence of both these behaviors become too conveniently ignored.

"Condoms for prisoners?" roars one bourgeois taxpayer,"Hell no, better dead than in bed.--especially two dangerous men in bed!" With this ostrich approach, however, comes the fact many given AIDS-in-prison, often people who themselves may not have expected to go there, return after paying for their crimes into general society. The false protective barrier between prisoners and society--a figment of slow imaginations--dissolves in the presence of AIDS.

One prison-rape activist, Stephen Donaldson (1946-1996) also known as Donny the Punk, gave instructions in many venues about how to avoid prison rape. Shortly before his death, Harper's Magazine published his detailed, homoerotic instructions to the potentially jailed, explaining how, to avoid multiple rape, they must find a protector-daddy-hubby. Donaldson, at age 20, was a 1967 founder, at Columbia University, of the Student Homophile League, the nation's first on-campus gay activist group. Later, in the early 70's, kneeling with Quakers and Buddhists opposing the Vietnam War, Donaldson was arrested on President Nixon's White House lawn. In prison his gang-rape by 50 inmates impelled him to devote his energies to stopping prison rape for others.

Whether jail rape can be prevented remains debatable, but it is certain that many, under such harrowing conditions, would gladly use condoms were they distributed. Condom distribution is still viewed by orthodox citizens on the outside, however, not as a protection against disease, but as a technology for inviting unmarried sex. People who don't have sex have no worries, these citizens say. But one big curve ball the citizens get without knowing it, as Stephen Donaldson knew, is prison rape.

Prisoners, after all, don't choose to have sex, though these facts would not stop conservative religious groups from protesting bitterly if it were known a warden was distributing condoms.

"There has certainly not been a recognition of the magnitude of H.I.V. behind bars in most areas of the country," said Frederick Altice, the director of the H.I.V. in prisons program at Yale Medical School.

Most prison systems, including Federal facilities, have only recently begun to address AIDS, or to attempt making guidelines. A few, inadequately, insist that prisoners receive an AIDS education that varies from one locale to another. Many institutions remain captives of anti-sexual attitudes that are coupled with a vengeance positing AIDS as the price of having landed in jail and surrendered to rape.