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Fiction & Poetry

That magical moment

A look back at the impetus for “GAY LIT.”

Winner of BEST OF IMAGINE (SO FAR) for “GAY LIT”


In the poem “GAY LIT” I wanted to capture a moment in time that changed the way I look at the world. I’ve had several life-altering moments like this over the years — moments after which nothing is ever the same again, and the universe looks different from that point forward.

My mother and I moved to San Francisco from New York City in 1963, right after the Kennedy assassination. Art and music were everywhere, and I knew early on that I wanted a career in the arts. I started out as a writer, but got derailed at age 10 when I started taking children’s parts in plays for the American Conservatory Theater. I also learned to play the guitar, and by the time I graduated high school I had joined the musician’s union and was playing five nights a week in nightclubs that I wasn’t old enough to be in without my cabaret card.

My father died in the Air Force so I was eligible for V.A. benefits. I studied creative writing and music at City College of San Francisco on the G.I. Bill and got an apartment in Chinatown. I picked up some bad habits along the way, and 15 years later, at age 38, I was in the county jail facing three-to-five years imprisonment for possession of heroin. In court they would decide if I could do 18 months of residential substance abuse treatment in lieu of prison time.

I had distinguished myself by getting caught bringing dope into the jail, so I was placed in the so-called “gladiator school” cellblock, with people who were much more dangerous than I was. Except for me, everyone in this corner of the jail was waiting for a bus: the “immigration bus” that took people to Tijuana; “the grey goose” that took people to the state penitentiary; and for some, “the happy bus,” which took people to Atascadero, the California state prison for the mentally ill.

These buses would come in the middle of the night and everyone on the line would wake up. Those who were leaving were taken out of their cells, and for a few transitory minutes they could walk around the dayroom that was in the center of the cellblock. They would walk up to different cells to say their goodbyes, bequeath their candy bars and other jailhouse treasures to their homeboys, and maybe ask a good friend to call their loved ones.  

During my second night on the floor, the grey goose came and I got up at 3 a.m. to watch the ritual. Virtually everybody was standing near one of the cells that lined the dayroom, saying goodbye. But one person was sitting in the dayroom alone. This guy had the typical prison-issue insignias, but instead of “White Pride” down the back of his biceps, he had “Gay Pride.”

I had one of these moments that I was telling you about. I had a crystal-clear revelation that everything that I believed to be true was in fact not true; that reality was only perception, and different for everyone. I changed in that instant into a wiser, but weaker, man. I also felt a deep sadness for this guy going to the joint with “Gay Pride” tattooed on his arms and no one to say goodbye to, no place to call home, and no one to love. Maybe you’ve never done time, but I’m sure that you know enough to understand why I considered this tattoo to be an incredible act of courage. Still, I saw in that moment that this man was as frightened and vulnerable as a baby.

I considered calling him over to my cell and asking him if there was someone that I could call for him. And I’d like to tell you that I’m that kind of hero, but I was scared, man …

I have always regretted not talking him that night — maybe that’s why I wrote the poem.

I got out of my prison sentence and went to the drug program. While I was in there I started writing again — success stories for the agency newsletter. The people running the place asked me if I thought I could write a grant proposal; I said I thought I could.

For the last nine years, I’ve worked in some of San Francisco’s largest human service organizations as a grant writer. In the last place, all the people that worked with me had master’s degrees and I started getting an inferiority complex. Then my mother went back to school (at age 73) and got a master’s in gerontology and the carnage was complete — I enrolled in San Francisco State’s creative writing program. By the time you read this in December, I will have graduated.

I wrote “GAY LIT” for a workshop. Our class went out and sat on the grass near the Humanities Building on an exquisite April day and I received critiques of my poem from a group of intelligent and extremely attractive women who were half my age. They liked “GAY LIT” but they wanted me to change some things, which I did. Then one of these elegant young women read a poem about masturbation. I lay back in the grass and asked myself, “When did I become a king?”  

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Tanya Smith experienced sexual harassment and medical neglect while incarcerated in California prisons.
News

Gender Outlaws

Best of In The Fray 2005. Transgender prisoners face discrimination, harassment, and abuse above and beyond that of the traditional male and female prison population.

Story and photos by Emily Alpert
Tanya Smith, former prisoner
Tanya Smith experienced sexual harassment and medical neglect while incarcerated in California prisons.

In Idaho, inmate Linda Patricia Thompson wanted a transfer to a women’s prison. A male-to-female transgender woman, or MTF, she had been living as a woman for several years, had changed her name legally, and was taking black-market estrogen when she could. Thompson had never been able to afford sex reassignment surgery, nor could she obtain hormones legally: the signatures of two physicians and a psychiatrist were required, and she couldn’t afford the visits. Still, Thompson was assertively feminine, even in handcuffs. At the time of her arrest, she wore a dress and high heels.

But prison officials refused to transfer Thompson or to provide her with estrogen. Inmates are housed on the basis of genitalia, they told her, and in their eyes she was incontestably male. So Thompson took matters into her own hands — literally. In two separate incidents, she amputated her own male genitalia, nearly bleeding to death in the process.

“I thought she had to be nuts,” recalls attorney Bruce Bistline, who handled Thompson’s case. “But apparently that sort of self-mutilation is not extraordinary in the transgender prison population. The level of desperation is just that high.”

“I’ve been raped, physically beaten, extorted, pimped out/sold, intimidated, manipulated, threatened, humiliated, [and] harassed by both officers and inmates,” writes transgender prisoner Meagan Calvillo of her experiences in various California prisons since 1999. Calvillo’s description is not unusual. Outside of prison, transgender people are among the most marginalized in the United States; inside it, they confound a system that’s ill-prepared to serve them, or even to decide where to put them.

“There’s no real legal standard” for determining the placement of transgender prisoners, says Chris Daly, director of the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco. At present, most California prisoners are assigned to male or female prisons on the basis of their genitalia, the same method applied by most states. “There’s a state-level mandate that prisons be segregated by sex, which they’ve interpreted to mean genitalia. Every prison we know of has interpreted it the same way.” As a result, transgender people who choose not to undergo sex reassignment surgery — or lack the means to do so — are housed with people of their birth gender.

“For instance,” says Daly, “someone who’s male-to-female, if she hasn’t had surgery or hasn’t been able to access it yet, will be housed with men — regardless of how long she’s lived as a woman, or what her gender presentation is like.”

One such person is Dee Farmer, an MTF whose landmark 1994 Supreme Court case, Farmer v. Brennan, found that prison authorities are liable for “deliberate indifference” to inmates’ safety, including situations of likely sexual assault. Farmer brought the suit in 1990 after she was brutally raped and beaten by another inmate in an Indiana prison. The assault occurred two weeks after she was placed in the general male population, despite her breast implants and longtime use of estrogen.

When housed with male prisoners, MTFs rapidly become the targets of sexual assault, as Farmer’s case illustrates. Some, like Farmer, have developed breasts from surgery or years of estrogen treatment. Others, though male in appearance, are immediately relegated to the bottom of prison’s social hierarchies by virtue of their feminine self-presentation.

As for female-to-male transgender people, “while they don’t face the same type of violence [from fellow prisoners], they face a lot of oppression on the part of guards,” explains Judy Greenspan, cofounder of the Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee (TIP). “When they’re strip-searched, many FTMs who have had their breasts removed or take hormones are put on display. It’s psychological brutality … They’re demonized.”

Everyday humiliations for both MTFs and FTMs include verbal harassment, frivolous strip searches, and gender-stereotypic “grooming standards,” which set requirements for men and women’s hair length, facial hair, and use of cosmetics. “Prison guards refuse to call them by their chosen names or use their correct pronouns,” says Greenspan, exasperated. “They look at trans- and gender-variant prisoners as deviant.”

Attorney Alex Lee
Attorney Alex Lee directs the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project, based in Oakland, California.

Protective custody for so-called vulnerable inmates, including those who are HIV positive, offers a modicum of safety to transgender prisoners — at least from assaults by other inmates. Another, more common option is to confine transgender prisoners individually, in what is known as administrative segregation.

“It’s pretty much standard throughout California — except for San Francisco — that housing tends to be separate” for transgender prisoners, explains James Austin, a physician affiliated with the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department. “So most of the facilities are single cells. We don’t have any ability to accommodate them otherwise.”

However, when assaults come from prison guards, as they frequently do, administrative housing isn’t safe, either, and may even be worse. Many individual confinement pens are intended for short-term punitive stays, or for highly aggressive, violent prisoners.

“Administrative segregation is basically punishment,” explains attorney Alex Lee, director of the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP). “In prison, people call it the jail. It’s much more restrictive, and a lot of trans folks in prison get put there … simply because the prisons don’t know how to take care of them, and they’d rather err on the side of being more restrictive than not.”

In 2004, a Wyoming judge ruled that prison officials violated the constitutional rights of Miki Ann Dimarco, a person with an intersex condition, by placing her in an isolated high-security lockup for over a year. At the time of her conviction for check fraud, Dimarco was placed at the Wyoming Women’s Center: an unintentionally appropriate choice. Born with genitalia that might either be classified as a microphallus or an enlarged clitoris, Dimarco identifies and lives publicly as a woman.

However, when medical staff saw Dimarco’s genitalia, flustered officials decided to hold her in complete isolation in the prison’s maximum-security wing. Though a prison evaluation placed Dimarco at the lowest possible risk level, and doctors concluded she posed no sexual threat (she was “not sexually functional as a male,” according to staff), she was subjected to the same living conditions and restrictions as the Center’s most dangerous prisoners.

Administrative segregation “may ostensibly be a safer place,” Lee remarks, but “where are they going to put you to be away from the guards?” Many of Lee’s own clients won’t report abuse from other prisoners for fear of being placed in isolation. Or, as in the case of Tanya Smith, they’ll endure abuse to avoid it.

In 1995, when Tanya Smith was first incarcerated, she was immediately isolated as “a threat to the safety of the jail population, as a transgender,” she recalls.  Smith is a tall African American transwoman with warm, dark eyes and a dainty silver nose ring. Recalling isolation, she purses her lips. “I couldn’t access any visitors. The mental health ward would not come see me at all.” Smith suffers from borderline personality disorder and requires a steady hormonal regimen. After six months, she was finally released to the general men’s population, a situation she found far preferable to isolation, which she refers to as “the hole.”

Three years later, when Smith returned to prison, a prison guard came on to her, saying “‘Ooh, you’re a real woman. Do you fuck?’” Smith says she sometimes stripped for officers to get medical attention, but this guard wanted more. “He threatened that I’d go back to the hole if I didn’t have sex with him — or oral copulation.” In exchange for sex, claims Smith, the guard kept her out of administrative segregation, protected her from other prisoners, and provided her with food, medicine, and clothing, even alcohol and drugs. When asked how she felt about the officer, Smith merely shrugs. “It was a way of survival,” she says simply. “Why complain when I’d get thrown into the hole?”

In California, the most notorious isolation facilities are known as Security Housing Units, or SHUs. Antoine Mahan is a board member of California Prison Focus, which opposes the use of SHUs. He is also a former prisoner who spent two years in a SHU at Corcoran State Prison. Mahan’s rounded face is both feminine and masculine at once: he wears his hair long, and favors women’s blouses and headbands. “People think I’ve taken hormones,” he divulges, “but I never have. That’s just my androgynous features.” He identifies as an African American gay male cross-dresser, but in prison, he says, “I was seen as transgender.”

Homeless, drug-addicted, and HIV positive, Mahan ricocheted between prison and the street from 1991 to 1997. Like Smith, he was approached by officers and prisoners for sex, regardless of his HIV status. Some assailants may have been HIV positive already; others may have wanted oral sex, which has a relatively low transmission rate.  At a reception center for HIV-positive inmates, an officer began courting Mahan with food and gifts, hinting that he wanted sexual favors. Later, at the California Men’s Colony (CMC), Mahan says, “I had a lot of guys getting at me, and a lot of officers harassing me sexually. I was what they call in prison terms ‘fresh booty.’”

But the SHU, says Mahan, was far worse. In 1997, following a scuffle with another CMC prisoner, Mahan was transferred to Corcoran State Prison, one of the few California prisons equipped with an SHU. There, he says, “I went through more hell than I’ve ever been through in my life.” Mahan describes the SHU as “a nine-by-five cell — nine by five by six, that’s the length, the width and the height. It was a box. No ventilation whatsoever.” According to California Prison Focus, SHU prisoners spend at least twenty-three hours a day in their cells, have no phone access, compromised medical care, and no work training or educational programs.

It is unclear whether transgender prisoners are routinely assigned to California’s few SHUs, but California Prison Focus alleges that inmates accused of gang affiliation are regularly assigned there, regardless of their behavior, in a “draconian” effort to wipe out gangs. If transgender prisoners are perceived as making trouble — or provoking it — a similar rationale might apply.

“There were a lot of queens in jail,” Mahan mentions offhandedly. Transgender and gender-variant people, as a population, are incarcerated at even higher rates than the general population of African American men, although the majority of those incarcerated are also people of color. In San Francisco, a 1997 study conducted by the city’s Department of Public Health found that 67 percent of MTF respondents and 30 percent of FTM respondents had a history of incarceration. Almost a third of MTF respondents had been jailed in the past year. The numbers are staggering: among U.S. adults, only 3 percent are or have been incarcerated. Overall, “unless they’re rich, [most transgender people have] spent a little time in jail,” says Judy Greenspan.

TIP volunteer Nedjula Baguio, an MTF, offers one explanation: employment discrimination. Trans people are at a disadvantage in today’s service economy, she says, regardless of whether they can “pass.” Trans people who pass are more easily recognized as their presented gender: they may have taken hormones for many years or opted for breast implants or removal. Those who don’t pass are less easily categorized. Some are mid-transition, some lack the funds for hormones or surgery, and others feel at home between — or across, or beyond — the categories of male and female.

“I don’t think I ever pass,” says Baguio, despite her lean figure and softly curving mouth; she recalls a tense stop at a rural diner while en route to Vacaville, and winces. Her light skin is patterned with evocative tattoos: a heart being sewn up, a marionette cut from its strings.

Trans people who don’t pass “freak people out,” Baguio says simply, and in a service economy, that’s fatal. “Most people don’t want to have anything to do with you as a potential employee, for all the obvious reasons. Your gender presentation is going to be perceived as ‘freakish,’ and nobody will want to deal with you, period. You’re seen as interfering with moneymaking.”

Smith agrees. Drug-free and out of prison, her job search hasn’t been easy, as a former inmate or as a transwoman. “There’s not a lot of people willing to hire us,” she complains.

But finding work is no picnic for trans people who pass, reports Baguio. When supplying references or a work history for employers, they face another dilemma. If a prospective boss calls a former employer and asks about Susan — only to hear all about Sean — their reaction may not be charitable.

Consequently, a disproportionate number of trans people engage in sex work. Many turn to drugs to cope with the degradation they experience as transgender people and as sex workers, and are eventually incarcerated for prostitution or drug-related offenses — what Lee calls “survival crimes.” Others develop mental illness, another risk factor for landing in jail. Because employment discrimination, arrests, and sentencing patterns fall hardest on low-income people — predominantly people of color — transwomen of color are the majority of the trans prison population.

“It affects queer and transgender people across the board,” explains Baguio, “but for those communities [low-income people and people of color], you’re dealing with a double whammy.” Baguio offers her own experience as a multiracial transwoman for contrast. “I’m perceived as lighter-skinned. I’m not targeted a lot. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of hip artists; I’m not living in Lincoln, Nebraska. I have a job where they’ve been accepting of my transition, and it’s not an issue. I make a decent wage and have been able to spend a fair amount of money on my transition, including electrolysis, health care, and access to hormones.”

Baguio also transitioned after college, insulating her from the hazards of the service economy. She hasn’t needed to engage in sex work, and hasn’t been exposed to its attendant health risks.

Dr. Lori Kohler is the founder of California’s only health clinic for trans prisoners, located at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. The dominant health issue among trans prisoners, she reports, is HIV/AIDS. “Anywhere from 60 to 80 percent [of transfeminine prisoners] at any given time are HIV infected,” she says. “And many are also Hep-C infected. The next greatest problem is addiction.”

Most of the prisoners Kohler sees are transwomen of color, incarcerated for nonviolent offenses related to drugs or sex work. Like Baguio, she cites the cycle of unemployment, sex work, and drug addiction. “These are not women that are working to pay for their drugs — these are women who are working for their lives, and end up using drugs to tolerate the life they’re forced into.”

Kohler has been working with transgender patients since 1994, when she took a job at the recently founded Transgender Clinic of the Tom Waddell Health Center in San Francisco. In 1999, the chief medical officer of the Vacaville facility approached Kohler and asked her to establish a clinic for the prison’s trans inmates. At the time of the clinic’s founding, the chief medical officer estimated that Kohler would be serving a total population of ten to fifteen patients. Six years later, Kohler says she’s seen roughly 3,000 unduplicated patients, and that there are about sixty trans prisoners at CMF at any given time.

Kohler says that her exposure to trans health issues is unusual among health professionals. “Care of trans people is not something that most medical people understand,” she says, and sighs. This ignorance is manifested most clearly, she says, in the issue of cross-gender hormone provision.

“As far as I know of, CMF and now CMC [California Men’s Colony] are the only two prisons in the country that actually have a physician who’s dedicated to providing good care, including cross-hormone therapies,” says Kohler. “In all other California prisons, access to cross-gender hormones is not guaranteed. It’s sporadic and inconsistent, and only given to very few people.”

In 2003, a U.S. District Court in Boston ruled that transgender prisoner Michelle Kosilek was entitled to hormone therapy; in the same year, New Hampshire ruled in favor of similar claims by state prisoner Lisa Barrett. Courts have generally recognized the responsibility of prisons to continue hormone treatment and psychological therapy, in compliance with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, which courts have interpreted to include the deliberate withholding of medical treatment.

However, prisons have often been reluctant to provide hormone therapy if inmates do not have an existing prescription. Because low-income transwomen of color usually acquire hormones through the black market, few can furnish legal prescriptions.

As a result, explains Kohler, “most transwomen who are incarcerated end up being taken off of their hormones unless they can get a court order — they have to use the legal system to have access to their appropriate medical care.”  And in other states, she adds, “it’s virtually impossible for them even to get a court order to access care.”  Side effects of hormone deprivation can include depression, heart problems, and irregular blood pressure.

Undeterred, Kohler prescribes cross-gender hormones to any trans-identified prisoner: a renegade position among prison medical staff, who routinely ignore her prescriptions. “I’d say about half the medical staff will refill my medical orders if I’m not around, and the other half will not recognize my recommendations,” she says. “But I don’t think that’s any different than the medical community outside the prisons.”

Photos of female and trans prisoners
Photos of female and trans prisoners cover the walls of Lee’s Oakland office.

After her life-threatening self-mutilation and the lawsuit that followed, Linda Thompson was eventually transferred to Kohler’s Vacaville facility in California. She was also granted a cash settlement contingent upon a confidentiality agreement about the suit. However, Bruce Bistline’s cocounsel, Lea Cooper, says that Thompson chose to violate the terms of the settlement agreement, foregoing most of the settlement money.

“Linda decided that she wanted to get the word out,” says Cooper. “That meant more than money to her.”

In California prisons, Thompson was finally able to access estrogen. Because her genitalia are not readily identifiable as female or male (something of a conundrum for prison assignment), she was housed in a small facility with other transwomen and gay men. After her release, Thompson sought jobs in Oregon, Wyoming, Los Angeles, and Washington, but couldn’t find paid work — not even sex work.

“She said she was too masculine to turn tricks,” Cooper explains. Eventually, at a loss for what to do next, Thompson got arrested for stealing copper wire from a construction site. “She told the judge she did it [got arrested] on purpose, because she didn’t have any more options,” Cooper says. Thompson is currently incarcerated at the Monroe Correctional Center in Monroe, Washington; on the basis of her birth genitalia, she has been housed in the men’s facility. As Cooper describes it, “Linda jokes, ‘What do I have to do, start menstruating to be considered a woman?’”

Though both do work that benefits trans prisoners, neither prisoners’ rights groups nor transgender advocates have specifically taken up their cause. “Transgender issues are not on the radar screen of most prisoners’ rights groups,” says Judy Greenspan, “and the transgender movement may not be prioritizing prisoners’ issues because they’re involved in trans survival and support services on the street.”

The Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee, cofounded by Greenspan, and the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project, founded by Alex Lee, are two notable exceptions. Greenspan identifies as a gender-variant white woman: biologically female, she doesn’t conform to societal expectations of female behavior or appearance. She wears men’s clothing, cuts her hair short, and is occasionally taken for a man. For twenty years, Greenspan has worked with transgender prisoners, including Dee Farmer of Farmer v. Brennan. Lee is an FTM Asian American attorney who became interested in prison issues during law school and sought to connect them to transgender advocacy.

Lee believes the void in advocacy results from mainstream queer organizations’ “assimilationist politics … They want to pretend that we are all law-abiding citizens, that we’re perfect angels who want to be just like ‘normal’ straight people.” In doing so, he says, such groups jettison trans prisoners, who are predominantly low-income people of color.

Both TIP and TGIJP advocate for trans prisoners who are currently incarcerated, but Lee says that the long-term change needs to happen “before people go to prisons.” As Greenspan explains, “prison mirrors what’s going on in the outside, so-called free world. There are really no rights in the community, unless you’re living in San Francisco.”

But even in San Francisco County Jail, reports Tanya Smith, trans people are reviled. “You’d think the officers out here would think outside the box, in this liberal city, but they don’t. It’s horrible.”

In light of this reality, Linda Thompson’s choice to be rearrested makes sense, despite the harassment she continues to face as a prisoner. For many trans people, all the world’s a prison — on both sides of the bars.

UPDATE, 3/8/13: Edited and moved story from our old site to the current one.

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Tanya Smith experienced sexual harassment and medical neglect while incarcerated in California prisons.
News

Gender outlaws

Best of IDENTIFY 2005

Transgender prisoners face discrimination, harassment, and abuse above and beyond that of the traditional male and female prison population.


 

In Idaho, inmate Linda Patricia Thompson wanted a transfer to a women’s prison. A male-to-female transgender woman, or MTF, she had been living as a woman for several years, had changed her name legally, and was taking black-market estrogen when she could. Thompson had never been able to afford sex reassignment surgery, nor could she obtain hormones legally: the signatures of two physicians and a psychiatrist were required, and she couldn’t afford the visits. Still, Thompson was assertively feminine, even in handcuffs. At the time of her arrest, she wore a dress and high heels.

But prison officials refused to transfer Thompson or to provide her with estrogen. Inmates are housed on the basis of genitalia, they told her, and in their eyes she was incontestably male. So Thompson took matters into her own hands — literally. In two separate incidents, she amputated her own male genitalia, nearly bleeding to death in the process.

“I thought she had to be nuts,” recalls attorney Bruce Bistline, who handled Thompson’s case. “But apparently that sort of self-mutilation is not extraordinary in the transgender prison population. The level of desperation is just that high.”

When genitalia — not gender identity — decides placement

“I’ve been raped, physically beaten, extorted, pimped out/sold, intimidated, manipulated, threatened, humiliated, [and] harassed by both officers and inmates” writes transgender prisoner Meagan Calvillo of her experiences in various California prisons since 1999. Calvillo’s description is not unusual. Outside of prison, transgender people are among the most marginalized in the United States; inside it, they confound a system that’s ill-prepared to serve them, or even to decide where to put them.

“There’s no real legal standard” for determining the placement of transgender prisoners, says Chris Daly, director of the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco. At present, most California prisoners are assigned to male or female prisons on the basis of their genitalia, the same method applied by most states. “There’s a state-level mandate that prisons be segregated by sex, which they’ve interpreted to mean genitalia. Every prison we know of has interpreted it the same way,” says Daly. As a result, transgender people who choose not to undergo sex reassignment surgery — or lack the means to do so — are housed with people of their birth gender.

“For instance,” says Daly, “someone who’s male-to-female, if she hasn’t had surgery or hasn’t been able to access it yet, will be housed with men — regardless of how long she’s lived as a woman, or what her gender presentation is like.”

One such person is Dee Farmer, an MTF whose landmark 1994 Supreme Court case, Farmer v. Brennan, found that prison authorities are liable for “deliberate indifference” to inmates’ safety, including situations of likely sexual assault. Farmer brought the suit in 1990 after she was brutally raped and beaten by another inmate in an Indiana prison. The assault occurred two weeks after she was placed in the general male population, despite her breast implants and longtime use of estrogen.

When housed with male prisoners, MTFs rapidly become the targets of sexual assault, as Farmer’s case illustrates. Some, like Farmer, have developed breasts from surgery or years of estrogen treatment. Others, though male in appearance, are immediately relegated to the bottom of prison’s social hierarchies by virtue of their feminine self-presentation.

As for female-to-male transgender people [FTMs], “while they don’t face the same type of violence [from fellow prisoners], they face a lot of oppression on the part of guards,” explains Judy Greenspan, cofounder of the Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee (TIP). “When they’re strip-searched, many FTMs who have had their breasts removed or take hormones are put on display. It’s psychological brutality … They’re demonized.”

Everyday humiliations for both MTFs and FTMs include verbal harassment, frivolous strip searches, and gender-stereotypic “grooming standards,” which set requirements for men and women’s hair length, facial hair, and use of cosmetics. “Prison guards refuse to call them by their chosen names or use their correct pronouns,” says Greenspan, exasperated. “They look at trans- and gender-variant prisoners as deviant.”

Isolation is no safe haven

Protective custody for so-called vulnerable inmates, including those who are HIV-positive, offers a modicum of safety to transgender prisoners — at least from assaults by other inmates. Another, more common option is to confine transgender prisoners individually, in what is known as administrative segregation.

“It’s pretty much standard throughout California — except for San Francisco — that housing tends to be separate [for transgender prisoners],” explains James Austin, a physician affiliated with the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department. “So most of the facilities are single cells. We don’t have any ability to accommodate them otherwise.”  

However, when assaults come from prison guards, as they frequently do, administrative housing isn’t safe, either, and may even be worse. Many individual confinement pens are intended for short-term punitive stays, or for highly aggressive, violent prisoners.

“Administrative segregation is basically punishment,” explains attorney Alex Lee, director of the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP). “In prison, people call it the jail. It’s much more restrictive, and a lot of trans folks in prison get put there … simply because the prisons don’t know how to take care of them, and they’d rather err on the side of being more restrictive than not.”

 

 

In February 2004, a Wyoming judge ruled that prison officials violated the constitutional rights of Miki Ann Dimarco, a person with an intersex condition, by placing her in an isolated high-security lockup for over a year. At the time of her conviction for check fraud, Dimarco was placed at the Wyoming Women’s Center: an unintentionally appropriate choice. Born with genitalia that might either be classified as a microphallus or an enlarged clitoris, Dimarco identifies and lives publicly as a woman.

However, when medical staff saw Dimarco’s genitalia, flustered officials decided to hold her in complete isolation in the prison’s maximum-security wing. Though a prison evaluation placed Dimarco at the lowest possible risk level, and doctors concluded she posed no sexual threat (she was “not sexually functional as a male,” according to staff), she was subjected to the same living conditions and restrictions as the Center’s most dangerous prisoners.  

Administrative segregation “may ostensibly be a safer place,” Lee remarks, but “where are they going to put you to be away from the guards?” Many of Lee’s own clients won’t report abuse from other prisoners for fear of being placed in isolation. Or, as in the case of Tanya Smith, they’ll endure abuse to avoid it.

Former prisoners: Sex was “a way of survival”  

In 1995, when Tanya Smith was first incarcerated, she was immediately isolated as “a threat to the safety of the jail population, as a transgender,” she recalls.  Smith is a tall African American transwoman with warm, dark eyes and a dainty silver nose ring. Recalling isolation, she purses her lips. “I couldn’t access any visitors. The mental health ward would not come see me at all.” Smith suffers from borderline personality disorder and requires a steady hormonal regimen. After six months, she was finally released to the general men’s population, a situation she found far preferable to isolation, which she refers to as “the hole.”

Three years later, when Smith returned to prison, a prison guard came on to her, saying “‘Ooh, you’re a real woman. Do you fuck?’” Smith says she sometimes stripped for officers to get medical attention, but this guard wanted more. “He threatened that I’d go back to the hole if I didn’t have sex with him — or oral copulation.” In exchange for sex, claims Smith, the guard kept her out of administrative segregation, protected her from other prisoners, and provided her with food, medicine and clothing, even alcohol and drugs. When asked how she felt about the officer, Smith merely shrugs. “It was a way of survival,” she says simply. “Why complain when I’d get thrown into the hole?”

In California, the most notorious isolation facilities are known as Security Housing Units, or SHUs. Antoine Mahan is a board member of California Prison Focus, which opposes the use of SHUs. He is also a former prisoner who spent two years in a SHU at Corcoran State Prison. Mahan’s rounded face is both feminine and masculine at once: he wears his hair long, and favors women’s blouses and headbands. “People think I’ve taken hormones,” he divulges, “but I never have. That’s just my androgynous features.” He identifies as an African American gay male cross-dresser, but says that, “in prison, I was seen as transgender.”  

Homeless, drug-addicted, and HIV-positive, Mahan ricocheted between prison and the street from 1991 to 1997. Like Smith, he was approached by officers and prisoners for sex, regardless of his HIV status. Some assailants may have been HIV positive already; others may have wanted oral sex, which has a relatively low transmission rate.  At a reception center for HIV-positive inmates, an officer began courting Mahan with food and gifts, hinting that he wanted sexual favors. Later, at the California Men’s Colony [CMC], Mahan says, “I had a lot of guys getting at me, and a lot of officers harassing me sexually. I was what they call in prison terms ‘fresh booty.’”  

But the SHU, says Mahan, was far worse. In 1997, following a scuffle with another CMC prisoner, Mahan was transferred to Corcoran State Prison, one of the few California prisons equipped with a SHU. There, he says, “I went through more hell than I’ve ever been through in my life.” Mahan describes the SHU as “a nine by five cell — nine by five by six, that’s the length, the width and the height. It was a box. No ventilation whatsoever.” According to California Prison Focus, SHU prisoners spend at least 23 hours a day in their cells, have no phone access, compromised medical care, and no work training or educational programs.

It is unclear whether transgender prisoners are routinely assigned to California’s few SHUs, but California Prison Focus alleges that inmates accused of gang affiliation are regularly assigned there, regardless of their behavior, in a “draconian” effort to wipe out gangs. If transgender prisoners are perceived as making trouble — or provoking it — a similar rationale might apply.

Sky-high incarceration rates among trans people

“There were a lot of queens in jail,” Mahan mentions offhandedly. Transgender and gender-variant people, as a population, are incarcerated at even higher rates than the general population of African American men, although the majority of those incarcerated are also people of color. In San Francisco, a 1997 study conducted by the city’s Department of Public Health found that 67 percent of MTF respondents and 30 percent of FTM respondents had a history of incarceration. Almost a third of MTF respondents had been jailed in the past year. The numbers are staggering: among U.S. adults, only 3 percent are or have been incarcerated. Overall, “unless they’re rich, [most transgender people have] spent a little time in jail,” says Judy Greenspan.

TIP volunteer Nedjula Baguio, an MTF, offers one explanation: employment discrimination. Trans people are at a disadvantage in today’s service economy, she says, regardless of whether they can “pass.” Trans people who pass are more easily recognized as their presented gender: They may have taken hormones for many years or opted for breast implants or removal. Those who don’t pass are less easily categorized. Some are mid-transition, some lack the funds for hormones or surgery, and others feel at home between — or across, or beyond — the categories of male and female.

“I don’t think I ever pass,” says Baguio, despite her lean figure and softly curving mouth; she recalls a tense stop at a rural diner while en route to Vacaville, and winces. Her light skin is patterned with evocative tattoos: a heart being sewn up, a marionette cut from its strings.

Trans people who don’t pass “freak people out,” Baguio says simply, and in a service economy, that’s fatal. “Most people don’t want to have anything to do with you as a potential employee, for all the obvious reasons. Your gender presentation is going to be perceived as ‘freakish,’ and nobody will want to deal with you, period. You’re seen as interfering with money-making.”  

Smith agrees. Drug-free and out of prison, her job search hasn’t been easy, as a former inmate or as a transwoman. “There’s not a lot of people willing to hire us,” she complains.

But finding work is no picnic for trans people who pass, reports Baguio: When supplying references or a work history for employers, they face another dilemma. If a prospective boss calls a former employer, and asks about Susan — only to hear all about Sean — their reaction may not be charitable.

Consequently, a disproportionate number of trans people engage in sex work. Many turn to drugs to cope with the degradation they experience as transgender people and as sex workers, and are eventually incarcerated for prostitution or drug-related offenses — what Lee calls “survival crimes.” Others develop mental illness, another risk factor for landing in jail. Because employment discrimination, arrests, and sentencing patterns fall hardest on low-income people — predominantly people of color — transwomen of color are the majority of the trans prison population.

“It affects queer and transgender people across the board,” explains Baguio, “but for those communities [low-income people and people of color], you’re dealing with a double whammy.” Baguio offers her own experience as a multiracial transwoman for contrast. “I’m perceived as lighter-skinned. I’m not targeted a lot. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of hip artists; I’m not living in Lincoln, Nebraska. I have a job where they’ve been accepting of my transition, and it’s not an issue. I make a decent wage and have been able to spend a fair amount of money on my transition, including electrolysis, health care, and access to hormones.”  

Baguio also transitioned after college, insulating her from the hazards of the service economy. She hasn’t needed to engage in sex work, and hasn’t been exposed to its attendant health risks.

HIV prevalent, hormone provision a battle

Dr. Lori Kohler is the founder of California’s only health clinic for trans prisoners, located at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. The dominant health issue among trans prisoners, she reports, is HIV/AIDS. “Anywhere from 60 to 80 percent [of transfeminine prisoners] at any given time are HIV-infected,” she says. “And many are also Hep-C infected. The next greatest problem is addiction.”  

Most of the prisoners Kohler sees are transwomen of color, incarcerated for nonviolent offenses related to drugs or sex work. Like Baguio, she cites the cycle of unemployment, sex work, and drug addiction. “These are not women that are working to pay for their drugs — these are women who are working for their lives, and end up using drugs to tolerate the life they’re forced into,” she contends.

Kohler has been working with transgender patients since 1994, when she took a job at the recently founded Transgender Clinic of the Tom Waddell Health Center in San Francisco. In 1999, the chief medical officer of the Vacaville facility approached Dr. Kohler and asked her to establish a clinic for the prison’s trans inmates. At the time of the clinic’s founding, the chief medical officer estimated that Kohler would be serving a total population of 10 to 15 patients. Six years later, Kohler says she’s seen roughly 3,000 unduplicated patients, and that there are about 60 trans prisoners at CMF at any given time.

Kohler says that her exposure to trans health issues is unusual among health professionals. “Care of trans people is not something that most medical people understand,” she says, and sighs. This ignorance is manifested most clearly, she says, in the issue of cross-gender hormone provision.

“As far as I know of, CMF and now CMC [California Men’s Colony] are the only two prisons in the country that actually have a physician who’s dedicated to providing good care, including cross-hormone therapies,” says Kohler. “In all other California prisons, access to cross-gender hormones is not guaranteed. It’s sporadic and inconsistent, and only given to very few people.”

In 2003, a U.S. District Court in Boston ruled that transgender prisoner Michelle Kosilek was entitled to hormone therapy; in the same year, New Hampshire ruled in favor of similar claims by state prisoner Lisa Barrett. Courts have generally recognized the responsibility of prisons to continue hormone treatment and psychological therapy, in compliance with the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, which courts have interpreted to include the deliberate withholding of medical treatment.

However, prisons have often been reluctant to provide hormone therapy if inmates do not have an existing prescription. Because low-income transwomen of color usually acquire hormones through the black market, few can furnish legal prescriptions.

As a result, explains Kohler, “most transwomen who are incarcerated end up being taken off of their hormones unless they can get a court order — they have to use the legal system to have access to their appropriate medical care.”  And in other states, she adds, “it’s virtually impossible for them even to get a court order to access care.”  Side effects of hormone deprivation can include depression, heart problems, and irregular blood pressure.

Undeterred, Kohler prescribes cross-gender hormones to any trans-identified prisoner: a renegade position among prison medical staff, who routinely ignore her prescriptions. “I’d say about half the medical staff will refill my medical orders if I’m not around, and the other half will not recognize my recommendations,” she says. “But I don’t think that’s any different than the medical community outside the prisons.”

No option but jail: Linda Thompson today

After her life-threatening self-mutilation and the lawsuit that followed, Linda Thompson was eventually transferred to Dr. Kohler’s Vacaville facility in California. She was also granted a cash settlement contingent upon a confidentiality agreement about the suit. However, Bruce Bistline’s co-counsel, Lea Cooper, says that Thompson chose to violate the terms of the settlement agreement, foregoing most of the settlement money.

“Linda decided that she wanted to get the word out,” says Cooper. “That meant more than money to her.”

In California prisons, Thompson was finally able to access estrogen. Because her genitalia are not readily identifiable as female or as male (something of a conundrum for prison assignment), she was housed in a small facility with other transwomen and gay men. After her release, Thompson sought jobs in Oregon, Wyoming, Los Angeles, and Washington, but couldn’t find paid work — not even sex work.

“She said she was too masculine to turn tricks,” Cooper explains. Eventually, at a loss for what to do next, Thompson was arrested for stealing copper wire from a construction site. “She told the judge she did it [got arrested] on purpose, because she didn’t have any more options,” Cooper says. Thompson is currently incarcerated at the Monroe Correctional Center in Monroe, Washington; on the basis of her birth genitalia, she has been housed in the men’s facility. As Cooper describes it, “Linda jokes, ‘What do I have to do, start menstruating to be considered a woman?’”

“Prison mirrors what’s going on in the outside, so-called free world”

Though both do work that benefits trans prisoners, neither prisoners’ rights groups nor transgender advocates have specifically taken up their cause. “Transgender issues are not on the radar screen of most prisoners’ rights groups,” says Judy Greenspan, “and the transgender movement may not be prioritizing prisoners’ issues because they’re involved in trans survival and support services on the street.”

The Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee, cofounded by Greenspan, and the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project, founded by Alex Lee, are two notable exceptions. Greenspan identifies as a gender-variant white woman: biologically female, she doesn’t conform to societal expectations of female behavior or appearance. She wears men’s clothing, cuts her hair short and is occasionally taken for a man. For 20 years, Greenspan has worked with transgender prisoners, including Dee Farmer of Farmer v. Brennan. Lee is an FTM Asian American attorney who became interested in prison issues during law school and sought to connect them to transgender advocacy.

 

 

Lee believes the void in advocacy results from mainstream queer organizations’ “assimilationist politics … They want to pretend that we are all law-abiding citizens, that we’re perfect angels who want to be just like ‘normal’ straight people.” In doing so, he says, such groups jettison trans prisoners, who are predominantly low-income people of color.

Both TIP and TGIJP advocate for trans prisoners who are currently incarcerated, but when asked, Lee says that “the [long-term] change needs to happen before people go to prisons.” As Greenspan explains, “prison mirrors what’s going on in the outside, so-called free world. There are really no rights in the community, unless you’re living in San Francisco.”

But even in San Francisco County Jail, reports Tanya Smith, trans people are reviled. “You’d think the officers out here would think outside the box, in this liberal city, but they don’t. It’s horrible.”

In light of this reality, Linda Thompson’s choice to be rearrested makes sense, despite the harassment she continues to face as a prisoner. For many trans people, all the world’s a prison — on both sides of the bars.

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Reviews

Don’t believe the hype

A trip Beyond the Down Low offers an honest look at stereotypes about sex and sexuality in Black America.


(Carroll & Graf)

Keith Boykin has no idea what he has just done. Apparently, he thinks he has written a book about duplicity. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the first chapter of his latest book, Beyond the Down Low: Sex and Denial in Black America, Boykin, former Special Assistant to President Clinton and one of the nation’s leading commentators on race and sexual orientation, writes, “This is a book about lies.”  As a literary device, this statement works as a hook to lure readers in.  But as a summary, it fails to capture both the breadth and depth of the text. Boykin has not written a book about lies. What Boykin has instead created is a book of truths.

Beyond the Down Low: Sex and Denial in Black America stands as the most accurate and informed treatment of homosexuality, sex, blackness, and the AIDS epidemic to date. Previous coverage of this topic by Linda Villarosa in The New York Times and Benoit Denizet-Lewis in the New York Times Magazine failed to capture the intricate social and political webs buttressing this “phenomenon.”  Just as the title of his book promises to take readers Beyond the Down Low, Boykin goes beyond the sensationalized and, according to him, fallacious media hype about “down low” (or “closeted”) gay and bisexual black men spreading AIDS to black women, to give us the truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God.  According to Boykin, the truth is that the “down low” phenomenon in neither a new occurrence, nor exclusive to black men.  

Black men lurking in the dark

From racial lynching to racial profiling, the history of black men in the United States is a minefield of stigma and dishonor. And the term “down low,” which refers to black men who secretly sleep with other black men while maintaining heterosexual relationships, is just the latest dishonor to curse black men. Black gay men suffer a double hardship, living as an oppressed minority not only in America at-large, but also in both the gay and black communities. Amidst such doom and gloom, the lyricism of James Baldwin, the activism of Bayard Rustin, and the vocalism of RuPaul serve as beacons of light, flags of hope waving from distant shores. There is, unfortunately, a gaggle of sensationalists and worry mongers who threaten to extinguish these lights. Their tool of choice: the “down low” phenomenon.

Inspired by J. L. King and his book, On The Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of Straight Black Men Who Sleep with Men, journalists and other media personalities have flurried around this so-call new phenomena of “straight-acting” black men sleeping with other black men.  The New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Jet Magazine, and the Village Voice have all run articles alluding to the down low. Many of the articles related the “down low” men with the spread of the AIDS virus.  

According to J. L. King, the salacious and unsafe practices of down low black men are the primary reason for the increasing prevalence of HIV and AIDS among heterosexual black women. “If I was a gay man, I may want to be in a relationship with another gay man and play house,” King told Oprah during his 2004 appearance on her show. “But when you are on the ‘down low,’ all you want to do is have sex.” Here, King reduced gay and bisexual black men to sex-starved, sex-crazed liars, reminiscent of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 portrayal of black men as villains and violent rapists in Birth of a Nation.  In Griffith’s film, which pays homage to the Ku Klux Klan, an animalistic black character chases an innocent, chaste white woman in hopes of sexual conquest.  The misinformation conveyed in the “down low” media hype is especially deleterious because it fosters the stereotype of black men as devious, sex-starved ruffians, a stereotype activist and civil rights leaders have worked three centuries to unravel.

Let there be light!

In the wake of this skewed portrait of the black male as sex fiend, along comes Boykin, illuminating the intricacies of the down low phenomenon with Beyond the Down Low . Fusing critical analysis with opinionated essay, Beyond the Down Low skillfully deconstructs popular myths about black male homosexuality and bisexuality. In the chapter entitled “It’s Not Just a Black Thing”, for instance, Boykin de-racializes the down low phenomenon by providing examples of prominent white men, such as former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, former Congressman Michael Huffington, and music mogul David Geffen, who have lived on the “down low.”  

In his book’s aptly titled third chapter, “Everybody’s Doing It”, Boykin launches a rapid-fire attack on the term “down low” itself. Borrowing lyrics from TLC, Brian McKnight, Salt-N-Pepa, R. Kelly, and other music artists, Boykin traces the etymology of “down low,” only to discover that the term has heterosexual roots.  In heteronormative discourse, “down low” merely referred to secret intimacy outside a relationship.  This term, whose roots are centered in black pop culture, not black homosexual culture, rose to popularity in the early 90s.  Heterosexual slang evolved, moving on to terms such as “creepin’” and “playin’” to refer to “down low” relationships, while black gay men continued to employ the latter argot.  “Down Low” was not considered a term specific to black gay men, inside or outside of the community, until it was deemed such by the media.  

The chapter entitled “D. L. Detectives” offers a more critical look at J. L. King’s On The Down Low, the book to which Boykin is obviously responding.  Boykin challenges King’s assertion that there are five  “DL behavior types,” (ranging from the “Rough Neck Players” to the “Brooks Brothers Brother”) bringing to light the circular reasoning on which King’s down low book relies.  After delineating the five behavior types, King states, “DL men don’t stand out.”  “But if that’s the case,” Boykin asks, “then why go through the whole exercise of writing a chapter about five behavior types?”

Boykin’s 32-page reproof of King’s down low book, however founded, walks the floss-thin line of exposé, with such statements as “I knew much more about [J. L. King] than I could say on the phone call … I knew men who had dated him and I knew men he had tried to date.”  At points, Boykin clicks his heels on the side of unabashed ridiculing, after which he straightens his tie and resumes his journalistic composure.  “To listen to [J. L. King] on the telephone,” Boykin writes, “I did not get the impression that he was the most articulate communicator …” Despite these minor bobbles, Boykin balances the bulk of the text well, using an effective combination of personal anecdotes and investigative reporting.  Boykin ushers us through his personal interactions with King to chronicle the evolution of King’s contradictory and misinformed narrative on the down low phenomenon.  

In doing so, Boykin acts as a DNA test for an unjustly convicted criminal. With Beyond the Down Low, Boykin reopens the “down low” debate and performs a second, more thorough autopsy. And the verdict?  Sexuality, as postwar sexologist Alfred Kinsey found, is determined by a complicated fusion of biology, psychology, sociology, and politics.  Black men are not the culprits in the war against AIDS, and the fight isn’t as simple as stitching a scarlet “DL” on the label of same-gender-loving black men in America. Tackling the AIDS epidemic requires open dialogue, not scapegoating. As Boykin suggests, “Sex is a wonderfully healthy form of human expression, and we would be wise to learn to talk about it.” And thanks to Boykin, perhaps we — black, white, gay, straight — can finally begin to engage in that conversation.

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Fiction & Poetry

My blue angel and Women

Two poems contemplate our hungry unsatisfied souls.


Women  

Since the beginning, women were sharks,
rocking their pain and causing waves in the ocean.
On moonless nights, their hearts throb; by morning
their love floods the shoreline.

A woman is a finicky shark, swimming
in a male dominant sea of obscurity — waiting
to swallow man’s fish-eyed soul
or fillet him of all living lies.

My blue angel

In all the circumstance of delight and grief,
my bottle bum is punctual in picking at my garbage
each morning. Embracing beer cans like a lover,
he clenches each aluminum can to his heart
before placing them into his stolen shopping cart.

His tattered blue polyester suit, unboxed
by someone long ago, whirs behind him,
like the frayed wings of a fallen angel; thick hair
like static-electric fur reaching for the empty sky.

On warm windy days, his presence
makes me feel like someone just pissed
in my nostrils, and though I gasp for air, I dare not blink —
for I fear that I might miss
his gullish blue wings take flight.

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News

A drop in the bucket

In Burkina Faso, an unlikely duo works to gives water pushers a raise.


On a suffocating afternoon in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, a group of 15 young men turn a dusty corner and descend upon the Yangoseen Water Pump I. Ten others, who had been napping under a tree, wake to the sound of the men’s arrival. It is not the perfect way to start a revolution, but it will have to do. What transpires in this dusty lot is part family reunion, and part political rally. It is also history: A group of young men attempting to transcend their meager economic existence to take control of their destinies, if only for a few minutes. The groups greet each other with handshakes amidst the noise of broadcasts coming in over the pocket-sized AM/FM radios that seem to be ever-present in Burkina Faso.

These young men are water pushers, delivering water to the many houses built without indoor plumbing. Watching these teenagers, it’s hard to picture them doing anything other than this work. Their uniform consists of ripped jeans, flat-as-a-pancake flip-flops, and t-shirts with the sleeves cut off. Their bodies are hardened from lugging water over pot-holed roads and uneven courtyards in a barrique, a 55-gallon drum turned sideways and placed on two (often wobbly) wheels.

Youssef Ouedraogo and Hamidiou Sandwidi call the meeting to order. They are two of oldest, most respected pushers in the adjoining Dapoya neighborhood. They are also exact opposites. Tall and lanky, 23-year-old Youssef is known around the neighborhood as Capitaine Américain, because he wears T-shirts emblazoned with American patriotic themes, and his red, white, and blue barrique can be seen flying a 14-star Betsy Ross-style flag that a friend purchased in a dollar store in the United States.

Hamidou, in his late 30s, is shorter and quiet, and works under the name Le Gouverneur. He has been pushing since 1983, when a load brought in 12 cents. Today, pushers charge 40 cents per load. This is the point of the meeting: the 40-cent fee has been in place for the past seven years. Isn’t it time that the pushers charged a bit more?  

Capitaine Américain does most of the talking. He’s got sheets of paper in his hand (written by Le Gouverneur) that explain the proposed 10-cent price increase, slated to go into effect tomorrow. He reads a little of it, but the papers are mainly meant for the local radio stations. Capitaine Américain proposes putting the matter to a vote, but is held off by the concerns of the pushers — “How will our customers react? Aren’t these the same customers who break windows at gas stations when the price of fuel rises? Aren’t these the same customers who burn tires in the street when the price of bread goes up?” These are honest questions, and Capitaine Américain knows it.

If all area pushers simultaneously raise their prices, the Capitaine asserts, customers will have no choice but to pay up. By the looks of it, the pushers are not yet convinced. They ask more questions, this time in harsh, aggressive tones: “What happens if the customers reject our price? What happens if they go elsewhere to for their water?”

To some of the pushers, this is beginning to sound like a pipe dream.

Capitaine Américain’s barrique is up front with its patriotism.

Pushing a union

I met Capitaine Américain standing in front of the U.S. embassy. He was patiently asking to see someone inside about getting another U.S. flag. His khaki uniform, colored for desert warfare and adorned with American flags, fell over him like a large dress. Behind him stood four young body guards who, when they spotted me, jumped to attention and majestically unrolled a Tommy Hilfiger bath towel containing the image of an American flag. They held the towel/flag in place while Capitaine Américain looked at me, tightened the beret on his head, and offered a very formal salute.  

“So, someone stole your flag?” asked the guard at the gate. “Yes,” Capitaine Américain explained, wearily. “He is known as ‘Osama bin Laden’ and he stole my flag because he hates Americans like me. I am an American. I am Capitaine Américain.” At this, he was politely told to go home.  

Back at the water pump, Capitaine Américain and Le Gouverneur receive similar treatment: Twenty-five men, hundreds of flailing gestures, and enough shouts to wake the entire neighborhood out of its afternoon slumber. There are very few nice words spoken about the price increase. Their faces all say the same thing: It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

Water pushers live in fear, Le Gouverneur tells me, and that’s part of the problem. Every day, hundreds of people abandon their homes in Burkina Faso’s countryside and set their sights on the bright lights of Ouagadougou — the Promised Land! When they arrive, they seldom find much hope or redemption. Instead, it’s only Ouagadougou, the sprawling, dusty capital of the world’s third poorest country, where under-educated and low-skilled workers need not apply.  

There are jobs in Ouagadougou, but they can only be found in the informal sector: an underground economy of low-wage service or sales positions that barely provide a living wage. These jobs remain outside the legal realm of the state, keeping the thousands of water pushers, street vendors, and parking lot attendants unprotected by Burkina Faso’s generous labor laws that guarantee paid holidays, sick leave, and protection from dismissal.

All of the water pushers were newcomers, at one point. Now, they fear that the latest crop of newcomers will walk off with their customers by undercutting their prices, offering the same services at rock-bottom prices. Customers leverage these age-old worries to drive down the price of labor, leaving the pushers with nothing.

A few younger pushers at the pump tire of the political talk and retire to a foosball table. Capitaine Américain quickly joins the game, and Le Gouverneur makes his way over to personally address Yangossen’s head water pusher. Le Gouverneur speaks in low, hushed tones, almost forcing his listeners to lean in as he speaks. The two look over the press release, and the older pusher summons a few others. Then, something strange begins to happen. As more pushers speak to the leader, the mood of the crowd shifts. People are soon speaking positively about the increase. It’s as if the bitter argument had been purely for show. After more talk, everyone gives their thumbs-up to the increase. A cheer breaks out among the crowd.

We walk back out to the blinding sun, our crowd swelled a little. Only five more pumps remain.

Pushing and suffering

Who says the informal sector is really that bad? Ask Le Gouverneur. Like every other water pusher, he pays 50 cents a day to rent his barrique. On top of that, he must reimburse the local water company 12 cents for each load of water drawn from the public pump. An average day consists of between five and seven deliveries, which earns Le Gouverneur about $1.40 (after costs). This amounts to just enough to buy breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with a bit left over to send his family in the village.  

His earnings won’t pay many bills — especially if he gets injured while steering his unstable barrique down the unpaved streets, or if one of his cuts becomes seriously infected. “All we do is push water and suffer,” says Le Gouverneur. “You can’t eat with that.”

Still, the informal economy is on the march. Africa’s sputtering commercial sector and shrinking state apparatus lead the International Labour Office to predict that the informal economy will create 90 percent of new jobs on the continent. This unprotected economy is already responsible for more than three-quarters of the non-agriculture jobs in Africa, and more than 60 percent of its urban employment.

We all stand at the next pump, Yangossen II, which lies at the edge of a wide road lined with low-slung houses and a few semi-permanent kiosks that contain small businesses. The neighborhood, Yangossen, is named after a word in the Mossi language (Burkina Faso’s predominant ethnic group) for welder, since metal workers traditionally inhabited this part of town. Metal shops, constructing anything from agricultural tools to school desks to large art pieces, still occupy many buildings here, their stock often spilling out into the street.

Across from the pump there is an earthen mosque, and a few old men in long, white robes sit against the building, reading the newspaper. We all look on as Le Gouverneur speaks to the pump’s lead water pusher, who wears a baseball cap low over his eyes and reclines in a small chair, a radio sitting in his lap. As the Muezzin summons Muslims to prayer, the two mosque speakers crackle with a low, throaty “Allah u Akbar, Allah u Akbar.” The old men fold their newspapers, get up, and go inside.

Le Gouverneur continues his plea. An older woman approaches the group and begins to lecture the idle pushers. “It’s going to start raining soon and nobody is going to buy water anyway, so why would you raise the price?” she asks, indignant. A chunky girl of six or seven years, wearing only underwear, begins harassing Capitaine Américain. “Capitain, Capitain,” she calls. He smiles and gives her a few cents, which she takes before running off.

By the time the prayer is over, the old men are once again reading their newspapers, and the pusher in the baseball cap nods. He mutters something to those sitting next to him, and Le Gouverneur grins. Things are definitely looking up, and a small cheer rings out. “This is just like the Americans: fighting for what is right,” says Capitaine Américain, walking to the next pump. “Cool.”

The African dream

The American dream is that anyone who works hard enough will be justly rewarded. In Africa, the dream is to travel beyond your borders to find good work and riches. This dream is especially powerful in Burkina Faso, a country that is not blessed with many resources. At one point, claims popular opinion, the country’s greatest export was its workers.  

For decades, the Cote d’Ivoire, just to the south of Burkina Faso, was the most popular destination of Burkinabé workers. Packed with thousands of acres of cocoa, banana, and rubber plantations, hundreds of miles of coastline, nearly 50,000 French expatriates, and pragmatic political leadership, the Cote d’Ivoire held the crown of West Africa’s economic engine. It attracted millions of émigrés trying their luck in its rural areas and teeming urban centers like Abidjan, the commercial capital. Before the civil war began there, nearly one quarter of Cote d’Ivoire’s population were immigrants, and half of those immigrants came from Burkina Faso.

It was in Abidjan that Capitaine Américain was born, and was raised with the knowledge that he had to leave Burkina Faso for a better life. His father had immigrated there as a young man, rose through the ranks to become the assistant to the manager of the Treichville market — an endless, chaotic, sprawling bazaar. As proof of his financial success, his father eventually took three wives, and Youssef was the second child born to the first. His blanket of prosperity was pulled out from under him at the age of 10. His mother and father died in an automobile accident, and he was sent to live in central Burkina Faso, where he spent his time tending cattle and attempting to avoid his uncle’s frequent beatings. He lasted two years before running away to Ouagadougou.

He doesn’t talk much about those times, living alone, sleeping on the streets of Dapoya. He first made ends meet by selling cigarettes and lottery tickets in front of bars in the neighborhood, and traveled the city selling shirts and music cassettes. He also tended cattle for a while, transporting a herd down to Ghana on foot.

Six years ago, he was accepted by members of the Dapoya water pushers, where he was allowed to rent a barrique and begin pushing for himself. A friend helped him move into an apartment, where he still lives with his younger brother. It doesn’t offer much for his oversized personality, but the place is neat and organized. The apartment is teeming with American paraphernalia, like the flags that ring the television set that is run on battery power. The Tommy Hilfiger towel hangs proudly on the wall. He will gladly show you pictures of the days before his large flag was stolen. Mostly, the apartment is notable for what it does not reveal. How did Youssef Ouedraogo, runaway, morph into Capitaine Américain?

Last stand

Let it be known that Ouagadougou’s ubiquitous art sellers — dealers in batiks, statues and other forms of folk art — are official members of the informal economy. Let it also be known that a certain art dealer next to the Sankaria I pump can be thoroughly annoying. Flying high after one more “yes” vote at the pump in the Nioksin district, we made our way through a large market area, weaving through hundreds of idling trucks waiting to be filled with sacks of rice and millet. We were about to descend upon the Sankaria I pump until a tall man cut through the group and stopped me in the middle of the road, demanding that I accompany him to his shop to buy some art. Typically large and aggressive, these salesmen beg your pardon, and then require you to just look at their beautiful wares. You don’t have to buy — just look, for the pleasure of your eyes.

I tried to pass him, but the grotesque fanny pack hanging under his shirt blocked me. From afar, I glimpsed Capitaine Américain and Le Gouverneur beginning their arguments. The art dealer was pointing me in the direction of his shop, and I watched the Sankaria’s lead pusher interrupt Le Gouverneur by holding his hand in front of his face. For the pleasure of your eyes, my friend. But my eyes don’t have any money. You know, I don’t make very much money, myself. I could only watch from a distance as Capitaine Américain tried to interject before a few pushers with thick necks began to mock him.

By the time I escaped from the vendor, I heard the head pusher impatiently explain to Capitaine Américain that a lack of houses near this pump forces pushers to charge a mere 150 West African francs (30 cents) a load — far less than the going rate. This puts any increase out of reach. Capitaine Américain was openly agitated, talking loudly and gesturing wildly. Le Gouverneur, who had walked away and turned his back to the small group, pleaded with them to reconsider. Nothing came of any of it.

The group walked off, heads down. Half a block away, a few younger pushers violently turned back and started back towards the pump. They huffed at Sankaria’s pushers, forcing others to rush back and restrain them. Capitaine Américain was incensed. “They’ll have to respect the boundaries between neighborhoods,” he said of the pushers at Sankaria I. “They can’t cross the line and sell water for 150. That’s taking away our food.” What happens if Sankaria pushers will not respect the boundaries? “There will be combat.”

The pushers at the next pump are waiting for us. They are all young and aggressive. Groups of three or four chase each other around, punching and kicking. Others harass the young women walking by. Capitaine Américain is still too angry to talk; Le Gouverneur finds few people willing to listen.

“It’s not easy, working this hard,” says Idrissa, another pusher, between fights. “You can’t find enough money for food.” He is 21 years old, and began pushing water six months ago. “I’ll be doing this for the next three to four years.”  

Capitaine Américain entered the tent that covered the pump. Pushers crowded in, jockeying for position. Voices boomed, but Capitaine Américain’s was the loudest. It was the same debate as before. Pushers work too hard to get paid so little, he’d say, which elicited a great cheer. Multiple discussions broke out for a few minutes before people began laughing and clapping, signaling their ratification of the price increase. Finally, Capitaine Américain emerged from the tent with an older pusher in a grey cutoff shirt, grabbed his hand, and shook it. The older pusher pointed at Idrissa who, with the least seniority, had to chip in for the radio advertisement. “He’ll help pay,” he said. The other pushers stopped running around as Le Gouverneur approached Idrissa, who placed his hands in his pocket and turned it inside out, indicating he was empty. “The other one,” asked Le Gouverneur. Idrissa gave his boss a distressed look, but the head pusher repeated the command. He pulled out a wad of coins and glumly handed over the equivalent of 50 cents.

52 States of America

That left only two pumps, and they were pushovers. Looking back, Sankaria I proved to be the only hurdle to the water pushers’ first raise in seven years. Most pushers, as Le Gouverneur and Capitaine Américain had predicted, were only too happy to go along with the plan.  

Nearly as impressive, the customers had only mild reactions when the price increase went into effect. Most grumbled, but everyone was resigned to paying a bit more. This, of course, didn’t stop people from trying to sweet-talk their way into a deal. “I have been like a mother to you, so you should charge me 200 [the equivalent of 40 cents],” a woman pleaded with Capitaine Américain. He smiled. “If I do that, Le Gouverneur will find out and he’ll be all over me.”

For Capitaine Américain, the euphoria over the price increase only lasted a few weeks. By then, the rains began to fall more frequently and customers cut back their water deliveries. He was already starting on his next project: to get a visa to the United States. I should have guessed it all along, with his dropped hints, and his complaints about life in Burkina Faso. His friends made the first overtures (“He’s so American, it scares me,” someone said), but one day he finally broached the subject himself. He showed me his new tattoo, for which he had paid a fortune. It had the name of his latest girlfriend next to a large American flag, and the words: “U.S.A. — 52 States.” I was angry about the money he had spent. As for the visa, I told him I couldn’t promise anything. There just isn’t a big market for water pushers in those 52 states. He took it in stride, letting me know that he won’t give up just yet. “I am American; I need to be doing better,” he told me. “That much is clear.”

A final salute.

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Photo Essays

Vanishing Heritage: Bolivia

Best of In The Fray 2005. Photographing rural ethnic minorities in China, Bolivia, and Thailand before it is too late. Part two of a three-part series.


Click here to enter the photo essay.

Three nations on opposite sides of the globe are linked by indigenous culture and the threat of industrialization on its preservation.

In China, Tibetans have for decades struggled to regain their freedom. But now, for the first time, Tibet’s people are becoming a minority in their own homeland as their culture is quickly evaporating into the Chinese landscape. To many there, political freedom is no longer a realistic quest but the freedom to preserve a centuries-old cultural heritage remains in question.

In Bolivia, the autonomy of more than 300 minority ethnic groups is threatened by the rapid modernization of Bolivian society. Tibetans and the people of Bolivia’s largest minority community, the Aymara, share a striking physical resemblance; some anthropologists claim that an ancient migration across the continents may in fact connect the cultures by blood. I photographed at elevations ranging from 11,000 to 17,000 feet in each country while seeking to compare and contrast two cultures sharing common bonds.

In Thailand, the society of the Akha minority group is now losing its cultural identity. As electricity comes to each village, in turn, its inhabitants begin to realize the homogenized and idealized life portrayed on satellite television. The young often choose to leave the simple village life behind, in search of work and the other lures of city life.

As each culture rapidly modernizes, its cities swell with rural peoples, many of them ethnic minorities seeking economic opportunity. On the surface, life in the countryside remains largely unchanged. However, the autonomy of ethnic peoples, such as the Ani and Tumu in China, and the Quechua in Bolivia, becomes endangered as community members leave traditions behind and migrate to urban areas.

In 2004, I had the opportunity to witness rural life in mountainous regions of Tibet, southwestern China and Bolivia.  Each country is undergoing dramatic change. Rather than photograph such transition, I decided to try to do my small part to document the traditions of country life.

I believe that it is of significant importance to document the traditions of indigenous cultures that are rapidly fading throughout the world. As a documentary photographer, it is my goal to document such traditions before they disappear and it is my hope that viewers may consider assisting in their preservation.

Part 1: China

Part 3: Thailand

For information on obtaining prints from the Vanishing Heritage series, please contact John Kaplan at kaplan@writeme.com.

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Commentary

Full disclosure

A Canadian attempts to shed her inhibition — and her clothes — on a nude beach in Spain.


“Te enseño una playa nudista cuando vienes.” (I’ll show you a nude beach when you come.) “I’ve never seen so many penises in my life.”

And with that, my friend Beth, a fellow Torontonian, signed off on yet another email to me. She was living in Cádiz, a port city in the southern Andalucía region of Spain where some of the country’s most beautiful beaches are located, and I was going to visit her in two weeks. I had just learned that a nude beach was on the itinerary.  

Going nude was not an option for me.

My friend Joe tried to convince me otherwise over drinks in Toronto one afternoon before I left. “No one knows you there anyway, so what difference does it make?” Yet to me, it made all the difference.

I have always equated nudity with intimacy. Being naked with someone makes me – especially as a woman – feel vulnerable to that person. When we’re nude, we reveal ourselves in a profound way where nothing is hidden. The mere thought of being nude in front of people I didn’t know made me cringe.

But I didn’t rule out making a visit to a nude beach. Curiosity, and that sense of adventure that takes hold of me as soon as I board a plane, got the better of me.

This beach is too permissive …

And so, a day after arriving in Cádiz, I found myself — a tall, slender 25-year-old woman — lying rigidly on a beach towel under the searing sun at Caños de Meca, a nude beach 45 minutes from the city centre.

No, I wasn’t nude. I was wearing a low-cut, black designer bikini with ivory-hued straps. The loose ends on each side of the bottoms tied right at my hips. Top and bottom fit perfectly, and flattered my hourglass figure. (Not that I was showing off, lying prone on my towel.)

From that awkward position, I began to take in the sights. This was my first trip to a real, functioning beach. Born and raised in Toronto, Lake Ontario never looked very clean to me, despite those safe-for-swimming “Blue Flags” awarded to the beaches once certain environmental criteria were met. City Hall must have shared my doubts because they strategically placed a public swimming pool directly in front of one of the beaches.

The beach at Cádiz was stunning. Hidden beneath a hilly terrain, we had had to hike down to reach its shores. Golden sand glistened beneath the sun and gentle waves whistled a soothing melody in our ears.

Eventually I mustered up enough courage to check out my fellow beach bums at Caños de Meca. What I saw were far too many harried potbellies, dangling private parts of the young and old, sagging breasts flopping about, and yes, bouncing bums. I saw pierced nipples being erotically rubbed; people sensually lathering sun block on their partners’ most private parts; nude families building sandcastles as they shared refrescos (cold drinks) with each other. Dozens of random strangers willingly sharing their bodies with me.

And there I was: A subdued, self-conscious Canadian in a bikini who, rather than feeling covered up in the midst of all these naked people, was feeling rather naked herself.

I found it difficult to believe that so many people could be comfortably naked in front of each other. But that’s what my eyes were telling me. People frolicked about playing Frisbee, the girth of their bellies visible to everyone in their midst. Lumps, bumps, stretch marks, and all that cellulite we normally try so hard to hide, on public display.

I felt like a criminal, surreptitiously stealing glances at the women around me, comparing the size of my waist, hips, thighs, and breasts, with theirs. When naked men walked by and smiled at me, I couldn’t look. Perhaps it was my conservative Palestinian background, but I felt I shouldn’t look. That I would be invading people’s privacy if I did.

Carlos, a Spanish friend and regular nudist, playing the guitar at Caños de Meca.

And this beach is too restrictive …

My only other memories of being at a beach are from ten years ago when I last visited family in the Gaza Strip. I was 15 and I remember the sense of peace I felt while I was there. At Gaza of all places, it was easy to forget your worries while staring into the vastness of the Mediterranean and listening to the lapping of its calm waves. Everything — from the laughter of the children bathing in the sea to the sight of ladies from the local refugee camp carrying pots and pans back and forth to be washed at the shore — remains etched in my memory.

I wanted to swim in those salty waters so badly.

But I knew that I would have drawn a lot of unwanted attention to myself if I dared take the plunge. We were in a predominately Muslim area and, only in the still of night, when the lurking eyes of men were fast asleep, did a few intrepid women slip off their sandals and lift up their long flowing gowns for a quick wade in the calm waters. I spent my time sitting in a hut drinking diet Pepsi, chatting with my brother, or adding to our growing collection of seashells.

Fast forward 10 years. Here I was on another beach and not much had changed.

For the most part, I had overcome the self-consciousness about my body that plagues most young women my age. But I still wasn’t home free. Even in my bikini, it took me a long while to muster up the courage to get up off my beach towel and take a dip in the Spanish waters, or walk along the shore with Beth. Even clothed, I felt that all eyes were upon me.

I wasn’t brave enough to break local customs in Gaza, and I wasn’t brave enough to follow them in Cádiz. Where did I fit in?

As my friends and I stood up to leave, a middle-aged man with piercing blue eyes made eye contact. Keeping his intense gaze fixed on me, he began stroking his penis. It was definitely time to leave. I lowered my head as I quickly stuffed my belongings into my beach bag and scooted off.

As I walked back up the hill to my friend’s car, I made a mental note to myself to give one of Toronto’s staid beaches a try when I returned to Canada. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Maybe that beach would be just right, for me.

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Fiction & Poetry

Land of Enchantment

Best of In The Fray 2005. A relationship withers under the New Mexico sun.


Though they’re advertised on license plates, billboards, and in roadside souvenir shops, I managed to overlook my first three New Mexico sunsets. My boyfriend kissed me under the fourth one. So, I do have something nice to say to my grandchildren about the time I dropped out of school and hitchhiked across the country. New Mexico sunsets are really pretty.

Also, there are plateaus. I grew up in a town where the ground was flat and I learned what the world outside was supposed to look like from a diagram that crammed every possible geological feature into one neatly-labeled color-coded box. River, hill, plain, valley, delta, fill-in-the-blank. The hardest vocabulary word was plateau, and judging from the awkward illustration, I suspected that these decapitated mountains had just been made up to give public school children something to memorize in Social Studies class. But here, in New Mexico, there are plateaus.

It’s early morning on sleepy I-25 South, surely one of the least-used stretches of highway in the country. The cars don’t come and, when they do come, they don’t stop. For hours we sit by the side of the road, waiting. Far away there are mountains, covered all over with trees. There’s no tree line. A manicured RV park lies on the other side of the freeway, before you get to the rusting piles of construction junk further on down. There are the green Interstate signs, always, and the same well-known logos floating in the sky. Texaco, McDonald’s, Pedestrians Prohibited.

The light is relentless, and a broken-limbed black umbrella serves as my parasol. I’m this sitting girl, held impossibly still by the heat. The shadow of the crippled umbrella falls on my dirty, sweaty clothes, graying out my patchwork sketch-palate jeans (ripped at the knees) and the faded yellow head-scarf that hides my greasy, unwashed hair. A dog barks. The bark crosses the freeway from the RV park and settles in my shade. I try to see myself from a driver’s eyes. A speck in the distance, slowly coming into focus. This skinny, raggedy, overgrown child, rained on by the New Mexico sun. A queer, enchanting sight. I could pass for a mirage. Maybe that’s why no one pulls over.

A few feet away, my boyfriend reads from our tattered, rained-on, duct-taped copy of War and Peace. In his other hand, he holds the sign: SOUTH TO ALBUQUERQUE. His long, matted hair drips over a black t-shirt plastered with a gray wolf howling up at a yellow moon near the left shoulder. On the bottom, it says “Texas.”  It’s from a truck stop – three for $10.

My boyfriend feels me staring, looks up from the gnarled book (attacked by a pack of dogs after I finished it and before he started) and asks, “When was the last time you remember having fun?” An accusation. Our trip was supposed to be an adventure. We were supposed to be seeing the country.

Maybe he is still seeing something when he looks out there, but when he looks at me, he sighs. He sighs a lot. What does he expect? After all, I stood in the sunset. I let myself be kissed in a photographic style. A pink glow rose and fell upon my cheeks. That was only last night. Still, his fairytale is no longer my problem. Conjuring happiness is no longer my concern. What I wouldn’t give to become scenery.

“Fun?” I reply, “I like playing checkers.”

Occasionally, we play pennies against nickels on a hand-drawn board. We do this in air-conditioned fast food restaurants, filling the brightly-colored booths with our hiking packs, sleeping bags, water bottles. We sit and play checkers with our change until some stranger offers to buy us a pair of Value Meals. One such stranger actually complimented my boyfriend on me.

“Dude,” said the long-haired man, dropping some quarters on our table, “I hope you know how lucky you are to have such a beautiful companion on your awesome trip.”

Of course, he said he knew. You have to keep up appearances for the ones who wish they were you. If you’re a young couple hitchhiking together, half the people who help you do it because they wanted to be you in the 60s. But not everyone.

There was the man with the blue shirt and cigarettes who walked up to my table at Wendy’s, where I was making a friendship bracelet from embroidery floss. I was dressed in a threadbare hippy skirt and dirty red tank top from a California Goodwill store, and my boyfriend was in the bathroom.

“Hey, do you need a job?” asked the man.

“No, we’re just traveling, but thanks.”

“You need money?”

“We’re okay.”

“‘Cuz I could give you a job.”

I didn’t catch on. I didn’t want to be mean. “What kind of a job?”

He sat down in my boyfriend’s chair. “It’ll just take 15 minutes.”

“I’m not interested.” Staring at the thread in my hands.

“I’ll give you $50.”

“I’m not interested.” Staring at the floor.

I must’ve said it three times before he finally said okay and walked off. My boyfriend passed him on his way out, coming back from the bathroom.

“Don’t leave,” I told him, as soon as he reached the table. I meant that.

Checkers was a weak answer. I should have said, “When was the last time we had sex?” An accusation. We ran away for love.

Not only is he no longer able to view our sex life – in the tent, under overpasses, in truck stop showers – as a form of escapism, he avoids it specifically to make it easier for him to escape once this is over. It is one thing to say you want to leave someone you’re completely isolated with and fucking regularly. It is another thing to say you want to leave someone you’re sleeping with in close quarters and refusing to touch. Someone whom you’ve already touched in the ultimate way.

“It must be hard for you, doing this now,” he offers.

I want to say, “You have no idea.” I want to tell him all about it, how I cannot experience anything outside my own skin anymore. How even his ambivalence is dulled to me, like those famed New Mexico sunsets I daydreamed through for days. How every place we go is the same. The changes in landscape are miniscule compared to the changes happening inside.

I cannot tell him these things. I write them down in my hand-softened journals. I think about them, and the tears peek out. They sometimes, silently, fall. I open my mouth to tell him how I really feel, and the only sounds that will come are complaints. I complain constantly. I say that I am tired, I am dizzy, I am sick, I am hungry, I am afraid. I say these things even though they are obvious. We were supposed to be in love. We’ve been on the road for five months now, and we’ve finally passed the point where things could not possibly get better, and things cannot possibly get worse.

Today is the last day I could’ve gotten the pill. I think of sharp and silver things; my stomach turns.

We have $65; we need at least $300. The signage blitz isn’t working. TRAVELING AND HUNGRY, ANYTHING HELPS. It was for food, once. We were even happy, really, in the beginning. We flashed peace signs at the SUV’s waiting at busy intersections on their lunch breaks. We believed the stories we told the strangers who picked us up. But the charm wore off, even before we found ourselves worse off than broke.

We try to fake it now, this idea that our life before was the limited, slave-like one. The bullshit of the daily grind. Commercialism, television, academia, responsibility. Oh, to simply see. Oh, to be alive and free.

Maybe the intersection strangers know they’re being duped. Maybe they know that I’ve never appreciated a 99-cent corporate hamburger so much in my life. That whereas before, TV was merely a procrastination tool, now, I would give anything to be able to lose myself in a stupid sitcom. Not that there are even any intersections to try here. We’re in the middle of nowhere, trying to get to…

“Do you have a better idea?” he asks. “Do you want to try something else? Do you want to call your parents?”

No. My parents haven’t heard from me in months. I ran away for love.

When my mother was pregnant with me, she dreamt she gave birth to a kitten instead of a girl, and after bringing it home from the hospital, she accidentally left it in a dresser drawer, where it died. I haven’t dreamt of children or of cats, but I’ve dreamt of becoming huge. I am scared I will just wait and wait, until I’ll have no choice. The highway is no place for children.

I also dreamt of tearing open chickens. And I dreamt that a man picked us up in his car and told us that he knew that there were people like us, people with our very names, but he did not know that we were those people. He told me the version of my boyfriend that he knew cared for me so much more than for anything else in the world. But my real boyfriend, who sat next to me in the dream, only snickered.

I want to rest. I want to sleep in. I want to eat something that isn’t from the 99c menu, that isn’t peanut butter sandwiches or oatmeal. I want to get away from the sun. I want to wipe out the red, the orange, the yellow. These New Mexico colors are everywhere: on the ground, in the sky. My tan is spattered with this paint. I am burning; I feel like I’m going to vomit up a sun-baked baby.

I’m sitting on a rolled up sleeping bag. He’s sitting on his pack. A Jeep just passed us by, with talk radio spilling out its windows. If I stood up, I would fall down. One of the floating signs says there’s a Holiday Inn at the next exit. I want. Our water is tinted with Hawaiian Punch, from the soda fountain where we filled up our dented plastic bottles last. It tastes bad and I don’t want to drink it, but I’m so thirsty and my yellow piss says I’m not drinking enough.

I take down the umbrella to write in my diary. The sun squints my eyes and muddles my thoughts. My nose is stinging. My arms are stinging. Sweat drips slowly down my neck, leaving furrows in the dirt. Next to me on the concrete shoulder are a small pelt and a smear that used to be an animal. On the entrance ramp, I saw a mummified dog, the grotesque version of those animal skins that sleep in the parlors of the rich, with their heads still on. It occurs to me that if I never moved from this spot, the highway’s next rug could be me, the fried remains of a girl who ran away for love, climbed her first plateau, and died trying to see the country.

Such a death is too pure for me. I am not so idealistic as I used to be. Eventually, I will get up. Eventually, I will come down. I will get an abortion and I will get an apartment. I will let him leave me. It will be hard, but I will do it. I will live to tell the tale. New Mexico sunsets are pretty.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Photo Essays

Vanishing Heritage: China

Best of In The Fray 2005. Rapid industrialization is making it difficult for ethnic minorities in China, Bolivia, and Thailand to preserve their cultural identity. Part one of a three-part series.


Click here to enter the visual essay.

Three nations on opposite sides of the globe are linked by indigenous culture and the threat of industrialization to its preservation.

In China, Tibetans have for decades struggled to regain their freedom. But now, for the first time, Tibet’s people are becoming a minority in their own homeland as their culture is quickly evaporating into the Chinese landscape. To many there, political freedom is no longer a realistic quest but the freedom to preserve a centuries-old cultural heritage remains in question.

In Bolivia, the autonomy of more than 300 minority ethnic groups is threatened by the rapid modernization of Bolivian society. Tibetans and the people of Bolivia’s largest minority community, the Aymara, share a striking physical resemblance; some anthropologists claim that an ancient migration across the continents may in fact connect the cultures by blood.

In Thailand, the society of the Akha minority group is now losing its cultural identity. As electricity comes to each village, in turn, its inhabitants begin to realize the homogenized and idealized life portrayed on satellite television. The young often choose to leave the simple village life behind, in search of work and the other lures of city life.

As a documentary photographer, it is my goal to document the traditions of rapidly fading indigenous cultures before they completely disappear; it is my hope that viewers may consider assisting in their preservation.

Part 2: Bolivia

Part 3: Thailand

For information on obtaining prints from the Vanishing Heritage series, please contact John Kaplan at kaplan-at-writeme-dot-com.

 

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

Reflections on a new democracy

A decade after the demise of apartheid, South Africa is a democratic society. But the country still has miles to go before it can be considered egalitarian.


Students at Frank Holele Preschool and their families create paintings of the South African flag during a parents’ day event in October 2004 at the educational facility in Bendel, South Africa.

It’s sometimes difficult to really understand why I’m here.

I get up every morning, take a bucket bath with two scoops of water, gather my daily teaching materials, and trudge to school through two miles of thick sand.

Through the peak of the mid-morning heat, I move from classroom to classroom, hoping to catch teachers on their breaks, trying to convince them, indirectly, that they have an impact on the lives of children. I cringe as a teacher strolls into the room after her tea break and pinches a misbehaving child in the arm. She repeatedly insults him for being noisy while she was out of the room. He squeezes his eyes shut to hold back tears, wondering why the other children didn’t get equal punishment. Historically, wrong answers have been met with physical and emotional punishment, so I try to work with teachers on methods of discipline and praise.

I encourage them to allow conversation in the classroom, and show them that peer teaching and learning are important ways for children to gain the critical thinking skills necessary for participation in a changing society. Living with their uneducated grandmothers after being orphaned by AIDS, many of these children are responsible for chores that leave them little time for schoolwork. Many have fathers who work for the mines, live far from home, drink irresponsibly, and cannot put food on the table.

Often, teachers become the mothers and fathers to these children who lack responsible, loving, supportive figures in their lives. While I encourage them to praise and support their students, their confused faces remind me that providing for their own families is the real reason they are working, the reason they trudge through those mounds of thick sand. Many of them will not hesitate to tell me that they wish they could go home, and some days, in frustration, I wish they would. But before I lose hope, I must remind myself that the people I work with have lived a history of hearing that they are worthless. They have been handed scraps from the white man’s table, causing a work ethic of “the minimum is enough.” The legacy of apartheid has destroyed the spirits of the people, discouraged them from working to improve their lives because of an ingrown belief that they are unable to do so.

It is 2004, and I am witnessing South Africa as it marks 10 years of democracy.

In 1982, when my friend Isaac was 17 years old, he worked as a gardener in a suburb of Pretoria. After working many hours to create a manicured lawn with vibrant colors — a lawn he knew he would never have — the mistress would call him for lunch, holding out two dirty dishes filled with cold food scraped from the bottom of a pot. She placed one dish in Isaac’s hands and the other on the ground for the eager and drooling guard dog. With his head bent in respect, Isaac was obliged by law to say, Thank you, Madam” in Afrikaans, even though his own language was Setswana.

Once she was satisfied that he had taken his first bite of food, the mistress walked back inside, shutting the wooden door in front of him. Isaac quietly dumped the remains of his food into the hungry dog’s dish and glanced at the sky. The sun indicated that he had two more hours of the workday left, and he picked up his pruning shears. When the sun finally reached the horizon, Isaac closed the gate behind him, and breathed a sigh of relief to be returning to Soshanguve township, to his family. Fellow workers quietly greet on another on the street, falling into their comfortable lilting language and stride, leaving their day of work behind. Occasionally, Isaac speaks of his mistress, and how he wishes that a humble request for a different dish would not get him fired. Most often, beneath their hunger pangs, they proudly discuss their families, their friends, and the best place to spend their daily wages on vegetables for the family dinner.  

In 2004, I went on vacation with my co-worker and friend Salome, spending four days in the township of Mahwelereng in Limpopo Province. Previously, I would have been breaking the law by setting foot in the township, but for 10 years the democratic constitution has granted individuals of all skin colors the right to move freely around the country, to live where they choose, and to vote for the country’s president.

In Mahwelereng, Salome introduces me to her friends, and as one of the first white faces to spend a night in the township, I am greeted with smiles, waves, generosity, and kindness. I spent an evening with her in the local tavern, sitting with friends in a circle of dirty chairs. The run-down building had cracking wall paint, and when the wind blew, a smell of stale urine emanated from its side. In spite of the surroundings, everyone was smiling, with teeth glowing in the dingy lights. One person was dancing to the crackling stereo in a torn Target polo shirt, and others were leaning against the wall telling jokes and holding their stomachs in laughter.

At first, my skin color brought glances of surprise and hesitation, but as I continued to chat in Setswana and reached out to slap the hands of friends, more people began to approach me to shake my hand. As I grasped the soft vaselined hands of the young, and the rough, callused hands of the old, I asked myself, “Why am I greeted with such warmth?”

Even though I am American, and not South African, I share the skin color of the oppressor. Because of a past where skin color alone determined one’s place in society, South Africa’s black citizens have every reason and right to be angry at people like me. Instead, these people accepted me as one of their own. In admiration of their acceptance and their ability to forgive, I asked many of them the same question: “Why?” One man with deep wrinkles at the corner of his eyes grabbed my hands and squeezed them tightly. He held his chin high, as he looked deeply into my eyes and said in Setswana, “Kate, by seeing you here, I think I know what democracy really feels like.”

After that night, I pondered that answer, and that man who lived through many years of apartheid and 10 years of freedom. What should democracy “feel” like? Policy states that Isaac, Salome, and the residents of Mahwelereng deserve to be treated as equals. This equality must mean that Isaac should have just as much right as his former employer to own a manicured garden, to use the same toilet as she does. Isaac’s children have the right to a quality education — equal to that of their white peers — and his family deserves access to running water.

If the people of South Africa live in a democracy, why does Salome live only feet from her neighbor, while lush gated compounds exist right across the street? When she visits a gas station equipped with a porcelain toilet, she is pointed to a fly-infested latrine — the “non-whites only” label peeling conveniently from the rotting wood door. Isaac’s children attend a school where they must share textbooks and climb over each others’ desks as the teacher struggles to locate a stub of chalk. His oldest boy is discouraged from looking for a job, because his family needs him to harness the donkeys to the cart every day in order to fetch water from the village tap.

Policy states that the country is a democracy, freed from the terror of apartheid. In response, the world smiles and congratulates. But when will this democracy begin to offer basic human rights to all of its people?

These citizens of South Africa want to be heard, to feel human in the eyes of their government and fellow citizens. Until their human rights are met, the policies of democracy will only succeed on paper. The children of South Africa must be taught that equality can be achieved. They must be taught critical thinking skills that will give them the ability to overcome a fate that was pre-determined by the color of their skin. In a country with a history of fierce discrimination, the only way to achieve true democracy is to embrace the fact that we are all people, and to recognize that each person deserves basic human rights. In South Africa I was reminded that equality and freedom must never be taken for granted. Our blood is all red, we all laugh in happiness, we all cry in sadness, and we all dream.”

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Interviews

Old traditions die hard

Author Irene Kai talks about her memoir, The Golden Mountain.


Recently, InTheFray Literary Editor Laura Madeline Wiseman spoke with Irene Kai about her recently published memoir, The Golden Mountain. Their conversation — and Kai’s thoughts on the American Dream — follow:

The interviewer: Laura Madeline Wiseman, InTheFray Literary Editor

The interviewee: Irene Kai, author of The Golden Mountain

In The Golden Mountain while visiting your old school in Hong Kong as an adult it seemed like you came to a moment where you decided you were done with being a seven-year-old girl and were ready to be an adult woman. After coming to the realization that you were no longer going to let certain people treat you as a child, what motivated you to begin the journey of writing your memoir?

When I was living in Los Angeles, at the pinnacle of success, I realized that I have achieved the American Dream as I understood it. I was [on] the brink of exhaustion, emotionally and physically. I started to question what my life [was] about, [since I had] spent most of my life [trying] to get to where my family and society claimed would provide respect [from family and the United States] and found out things had never changed. I was still the person who lived under everyone’s thumb. So I went on the journey of deep remembrance, to understand where I came from and where I wanted to go from there with clarity and understanding.

And that motivated you to begin the memoir?

Yes, it took three years, seven hours a day between crying and writing. An extremely healing process.

In The Golden Mountain the sections on your great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother flow smoothly. How were you able to create the cohesiveness apparent in the text? Did you speak to living family members to fill in the gaps during those three years of writing or is The Golden Mountain simply a compilation of all the stories you were told?

I lived with all of these women. Since my great grandmother and I were the outcasts, we spent a lot of time together and she told me many stories. I have been practicing meditation for many years. When I started to write, I would go into deep meditation and the memories came back like a movie and I just recorded them.

You only write in the first person in one section, the section on you. Yet the sections on your great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother are written in third person. Why did you choose to organize the book this way? And did you experiment with other ways to tell this story?

To tell you the truth, I was trained as a visual artist. I came to the [United States] when I was 15, so I missed out on all the lessons on grammar and learning how to speak. I have no training as a writer. Believe it or not, it just fell into place as I wrote. It is pure GRACE.

In the book, there’s a clear sense that women in your family always knew their place and acted in such a way to encourage others to follow that same axiom. What seemed to be the turning point for you to break from that cultural tradition?

For thousands of years, women in China [have] only [been able to] survive through marriage. They are owned by the husband’s family … where would they go if they got kicked out of the family? [I had timing] on my side and location, the United States. I survived by getting a job, building a career, which … in China … was impossible.

Do you think that is still true for women in China today, particularly under the current regime?

China is changing rapidly. For the first time in the history of China, women now have jobs, they don’t have to be married to survive. But the old tradition is hard to [get rid of]. Amazingly only a few months ago, I read in a Chinese newspaper that the government just changed the law claiming that employees no long require their employers’ permission to get married. I couldn’t believe it. They also still have to get the government’s permission to travel and to relocate. The first sentence of my book says it all, “I am sorry, it’s another girl.” In the 1970s China imposed the one child policy. Routinely, family disposed of daughters because it was against the law to have more than one child. Traditionally, the Chinese needed to keep boys to help out the family and when the parents got old, the son and daughter-in-law [would] take care of them. If they only have a daughter, who is going to take care of them when they get old? The daughter belongs to her husband’s family and it is her obligation to take care of her in-laws.

In The Golden Mountain you do a very good job of conveying that telling family secrets is a Chinese taboo, particularly in your family. How has your family reacted to The Golden Mountain?

My sisters didn’t take it too well. Teresa still doesn’t talk to me. I asked their permission before I wrote, but after they read the book, they were disgusted. No one talks about the book. They just pretend it didn’t happen. My children have gone through a lot.
They were caught between their loyalty to me and to their aunts and cousins. Teresa’s daughter wrote me a nasty email and sent it to all the members of my family including my children. She asked if I [know] what love means. Family is all we have, it doesn’t matter who hits who when we should just love each other. Meanwhile, her father is an alcoholic and so is her husband. The chain of abuse just goes on and on. My children stayed out of everyone’s way and kept quiet but I know they are proud of me. Bob, their father really surprised me. After he read the book, he called and said, I was a schmuck.” I nearly fainted.

Are you planning on writing another book and if so, what will be the topic?

I have another book coming [out] in 2006. It is a book of photography. The title is: What Do You See? They are photographs of my hands but [they] look like genitals. It is a challenge for readers to face their assumptions and ask deeper questions about their judgments.

To read Laura Madeline Wiseman’s review of The Golden Mountain, click here.“

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: