A few weeks ago I was in a hotel room in Checotah, Okla., flipping through channel after channel of infomercials and reruns of '90s sitcoms, when a news headline on Fox News caught my eye: "Lindsay Lohan possibly targeted by lesbian prison gangs." The next read: "Inmates warn of lesbian gangs, grabbing, filth." While I admit I was curious as to what LiLo did this time to make headlines again, I was triggered by the words I was reading as they scrolled across the bottom of the screen. The last time I saw the phrase "lesbian gang" in the mainstream media was in 2007 when four young black lesbians from New Jersey were convicted of various degrees of assault and gang assault for defending themselves against a violent, homophobic, and misogynist attacker in New York City. The women received prison sentences ranging from three and a half to 11 years. They were demonized in the press and repeatedly described as a "lesbian wolf pack" and a "gang of angry lesbians." The highly publicized case of the New Jersey 4 even caused Bill O'Reilly to declare that the emergence of violent lesbian gangs was becoming a "nationwide epidemic." Three years later, and another one of these alleged gangs is making new headlines.
Reports of this most recent lesbian gang first appeared in early July in The Sun newspaper, a tabloid based in the UK, after Lohan had been sentenced to 90 days at Lynwood Correctional Facility in Los Angeles County. An inmate at Lynwood who was identified as Tamara Haley had leaked the story to The Sun and claimed that lesbian inmates at the prison were anxiously awaiting Lohan's arrival to publicly humiliate and assault her. Haley's relationship to the "lesbian gang" or how she self-identifies is not disclosed in the article that appeared in The Sun on July 13, 2010.
Regardless of whether this organized group of lesbians actually exists or not, and regardless of the validity of Tamara Haley as a source, the recurring presence of violent lesbian gangs in the media speaks to a much larger problem of the way queer and trans communities—specifically queer and trans communities of color—are regularly demonized and criminalized on the street, in the courts, and in the media. These embellished representations of queerness and criminality reinforce the intersecting stereotypes that queers are predators, people of color are dangerous, criminals are inherently evil, and any group of three or more young people of color are a "gang" and "belong" in prison in order to keep society "safe."
The media hype surrounding these alleged "lesbian gangs" that were awaiting LiLo at Lynwood Correctional Facility necessitate a closer look at the realities of queers in prison. Specifically, there needs to be a clear differentiation between these realities—which often go untold and unrecognized in the media—and the myths about queers in prison.
First, the belief that queers are main perpetrators of violence against other queers is not only inaccurate but also extremely harmful because it distracts us from a larger, much more dangerous source of anti-queer violence: the State. Violence inside prison cannot only be attributed to "criminals" who we tend to believe are inherently violent people. Rather, the institution of the prison itself, and the institutions that support it ( the police, the media, for-profit corporations ) all enact extreme levels of violence against individuals and entire communities. Furthermore, this also fails to hold correctional staff and other actual perpetrators of violence accountable for their actions. Sexual harassment or assault, physical harm, policing of gender expression, verbal abuse, medical neglect, and public humiliation are all manifestations of violence that queer and trans prisoners endure from correctional staff while incarcerated. Instances of interpersonal violence are almost always from correctional staff as well as homophobic/transphobic inmates—not other queers.
This narrative of lesbian prison gangs also undermines the solidarity and support networks that exist amongst queer and trans communities on the inside, by instead creating a myth of divisiveness. Forging these networks on the inside is a very common survival strategy for queer and trans prisoners. Any harm committed against Lohan would most likely be because of her celebrity status and not her bisexuality.
Lastly, the media frenzy over this story is grounded in the age-old binary of good vs. evil. In one corner of the ring we have LiLo: a wealthy, white, femme ( read: weak/defenseless ) , celebrity who doesn't really deserve to be in prison because she isn't a real criminal. In the other corner is the gang of lesbian inmates: a group of dangerous and violent sexual predators who embody the filthy, deviant side of queerness and who the white imagination has created to be a "gang" ( read: of color and tough/masculine/butch, as demonstrated in the profiling of the New Jersey 4 ) . These people are the real threats to society and are obviously in prison for a reason. The reality is that nearly half of the US prison population is serving sentences related to drug-related offenses, DUIs, and other nonviolent offenses—similar to the those Lohan is being charged with. What makes the women of Lynwood Correctional Facility any more dangerous or deserving of prison time than Lohan? What makes us think of these women as a threat and Lohan as a victim?
As LiLo ends week one at Lynwood Correctional Facility seemingly unharmed, queer cultures of self-defense and survival, whether on the street or inside prison walls, continue to be squashed by the media, the courts, the cops, and other entities of the State. When and if Lohan completes her 90-day sentence, there will still be millions of people behind bars for similar offenses ( nearly half of them people of color ) . We should be less concerned with mythical lesbian gangs and more concerned about racist and transphobic cops. We should not place more value on one bisexual celebrity's life over the lives of thousands of queer and trans people in US prisons who are targets of both State violence and interpersonal violence on a daily basis.
[ Editor's note: Lohan was released from jail in the early morning hours of Aug. 2. ]
John R. Thompson is a writer, activist and educator residing in Chicago. He is a co-founder of the Write to Win Collective, which is a penpal project for transgender and gender non-conforming prisoners in Illinois. He can be reached at john@tjlp.org .
