by Jerry Curtis

Created on: February 25, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

Societal attitude towards lesbians in general and lesbian relationships among incarcerated women have had interesting histories. Early studies equated prison lesbianism with race; i.e., aggressive black lesbians sought to corrupt "innocent white inmates." During the 1950's, politicians also began to relate homosexual behavior with the "Communist menace," and female lesbians were regarded as sinister, aggressive criminals.

Today's prisons still provide a ready environment for homosexual behavior. Women prisoners, deprived of nurturing family relationships and intimacy join "families" (which may or may not include sexual relations) and may even participate in a "marriage" ceremony, often complete with veil, flowers and a "minister." It is clear that women in prison gravitate towards relationships that commonly include a sexual component and that women's prisons are places where lesbianism is commonplace.

The image of prison lesbians has evolved both in contemporary research and in the way the public views them. This article will provide both a historical overview of female homosexuality behind bars, from its beginnings with the strong racial component, through its association with the "Red Menace" of the McCarthy era, up to recently where even now our criminal justice system tends to treat lesbians as stereotypical "aggressive criminal types."

I will make an alternative argument on behalf lesbians behind bars: in its zeal to punish wrongdoing, our criminal justice system has often chosen to deprive prisoners of contact with the opposite sex; therefore, many women in prison respond to the loneliness and emptiness in their lives by constructing prison "families" and forming temporary homosexual liaisons, only to return to heterosexual behavior upon leaving prison.

Estelle Freedman (1996) provides an interesting and comprehensive chronicle of how the inmate-lesbian stereotype developed in the early 20th century. Up to the early years of this century, according to Freedman, "only prostitutes were considered as female sex criminals (p.397)." Freedman notes that even though there was widespread evidence of lesbian activity within women's reformatories, there were very few studies written on the subject. Whenever authors did mention homosexuality, "they usually identified Black women as lesbian aggressors and white women as temporary partners (p. 397)."

Jean Harris (1988), an author-inmate of Bedford Hills Prison in New York, cites the controversy that resulted in 1915,

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