Kareem is off this week. Please enjoy this post submitted by TNG reader, Alexander Vizzi.

What does a queer identity-based politics look like? Advocating for gay marriage doesn’t really rally me to arms. What urgency can I give to marriage when compared to other ills in the world? One issue that has consumed me is the penal system and our country’s criminalization of people and treatment of said criminals¹. But how can this possibly relate to my love of men?

Besides the cliché porn movie plot of being caged up with horny straight, gay, and bi men, a lot of prison resistance activism, particularly queer groups that do this, stress the importance of writing letters to prisoners². The websites for groups that advocate for queer political prisoners or queer-identified groups that generally speak out against prisons have links to prison pen-pal programs or run them. They list names, cell addresses, and maybe a short self-description from the inmate. One guy writes about the masks that prisoners wear, portraying themselves to others as impenetrable and tough, and the intolerability of emotional expression in prison. Writing letters is a way to combat the isolation and loneliness of the prison system, and it’s seemingly simple.

So there you go: the meeting point between politics and sexuality, between the outside of my head and the inside, between the world that needs little and big actions to alter the status quo and the inside of my head that obsesses over, questions, and complicates sexual desires.

But it’s not so simple. Last night, I spent hours reading advice on how to approach such a venture. This isn’t a protest where you can try a hand at “activism” and go home if you’re not feeling too active. It’s not a person handing you a sign and guiding you around a Nike store leading you and others in anti-sweatshop chants (actually happened to me). You are in contact with a person, you affect their life somehow—maybe minimally, maybe significantly—and your commitment or lack of it may cause someone emotional hurt. If prison is as lonely as people say it is, your presence can be substantial, your words heavy, your friendship influential. That’s the scary part. You are not dealing with abstract ideas, depersonalized corporations, distant peoples in foreign countries, or signs and songs. You are dealing with people, exposing yourself to others who are in the situation you wish to fight, forging relationships that you cannot shake off once you become bored or tired or even once the person is released. To back out is to be insensitive, unsympathetic, inhuman.

That aside, meeting the aspect of my (dare I say “our”) identity with politics—that is, my subjectivity with the objective world—is problematic. If I merge the two worlds, politics will have to be subjected to the same standards and expectations of sexy, which rule over the queer part of my life. I realized this while going through profiles for prisoner pen-pals on writeaprisoner.com. Many included pictures, and who do I look at first but the ones with shirtless muscle pics? Prisoner pen-paling, my resistance to a seriously flawed criminal justice system, had become a dating website. Many profiles even advertised “looking for that special someone.” This wasn’t reaching out anymore, not solidarity, not activism—it was sex and sexual attraction. Now I’m not sure if it’s “wrong” to be led by sexual desire when doing something out of my desire to connect and unify and bond over interweaving struggles—whatever struggles I go through in Baltimore, whatever my compatriot is dealing with in jail, common queer themes, and so on. But it confused me. I went back and read almost every profile so I would not be misled by the standards of sexual attraction that often lead me astray in my romantic life.

My political undertaking had become much more personal than felt comfortable. I don’t date much and stumble around gay and queer men in my everyday life, struggling with loneliness myself. Is my entrance into this activism just a way to mitigate my own loneliness? In a way, yes, because just as I do anything to fill up my time and distract myself from thinking about personal issues, life questions, philosophies, values, and so on, writing to an imprisoned pen-pal seemed like another worthy endeavor to take up my time. That said, though, I do not want this to become a dating service. I want to learn and grow, have insight into prison life, meet people, and share experiences—mine and theirs—but not pursue sex, not love.

Finally, there is another major setback that may reveal certain prejudices and assumptions on my part, but seem inescapable in this type of endeavor. The crimes: Burglary. Robbery. Car theft. Indecency with a child. Rape. Murder. I honestly could care less about the first three. One profile I had read, however, was sweet and included a handsome photo. He spoke of loving family, of hobbies, of his education. He even mentioned his crime being something he’s open about and willing to discuss the complications involved and what happened. I seriously considered contacting him. At the bottom of his profile the site included a table of information, like “Has poetry?” “Wants donations?” and “In since…”. He had been in for a long time and had a decade to go. I clicked the link next to “Crime;” it was the first time I had investigated someone’s crime on the website. “Murder.”

Before this point I don’t think I considered the possibility that these gay and bi men had killed or raped, but as I looked on, I found that a number of them had been convicted of these crimes, despite the self-descriptions as sweet, loving to cuddle, and extremely honest and open. It scared me. As much as I trust fate and things above, that no one is an evil soul, that every bad is explicable and behind every wrong action is pain and a fucked up history, I am afraid of being duped by some murderer, and myself killed because of my naïveté. Maybe I’ve watched too much Law and Order: SVU, but it’s scary to enter into such a world I know nothing of, especially under the danger of becoming smitten and sexually interested. That’s when I get most irrational and vulnerable to poor decision-making.

At the end of this confusing investigation, the question remains: Who will be the biggest dummy? Me for trusting this “solidarity work” and getting took, the guy in jail for thinking that someone will pay attention for more than a few seconds, or both of us for letting “the system” get a one-up on us and effectively squash our attempt to remain human.

¹ The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world as well as the greatest number of prisoners, compared with other countries.

² The two that I stumbled upon were the Prisoner Correspondence Project and blackandpink.org.

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