Tennessee Trans Woman's Plight Reveals Reality of Rape in Prison
Paula Smith, a 21-year-old transgender woman incarcerated at the Sumner County Jail in Gallatin, Tenn., alleges she was sexually assaulted by her cellmate on August 24, according to The Huffington Post.
But the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says that Smith made a false report of sexual assault to obscure a consensual sex act with her cellmate that a corrections officer discovered before separating the inmates, reports The Tennessean.
Whether Smith’s own testimony or that of prison officers and her cellmate is believed, the grim reality of Smith’s life in prison departs significantly from the popular fantasy represented by out trans actress Laverne Cox’s portrayal of transwomen’s prison inmate Sophia Burset in Orange Is the New Black, the Emmy-winning Netflix comedy-drama series.
Like Smith, most transwomen in the United States are imprisoned in men’s facilities. They endure high rates of physical and sexual assault and daily acts of dehumanization. It begins with misgendering and deadnaming: transwomen are identified as “men” against their wishes and called by the names that they have repudiated.
As Smith’s case demonstrates, members of law enforcement, prison officials, and the media all join in this dehumanization. Statements from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation that consistently refer to Smith by a male name and with male pronouns, in addition to reports by The Tennessean and local TV news make this harsh reality painfully clear.
Smith has served four months of a possible three-year sentence for two counts of violation of probation and failure to appear in court, stemming from an earlier conviction of arson and vandalism. Standing 5’6″ tall, the 120-pound white woman, originally from Georgia, had already begun her clinical transition when she was incarcerated. Smith’s friends report that she was living in Georgia while serving probation for the initial charges, and was financially unable to travel to Tennessee to meet with her probation officer, which prompted the violation that ultimately saw her extradited and incarcerated in Tennessee.
Speaking to HuffPost, Smith’s fiancé described deplorable conditions, in which Smith is allegedly preyed upon by prison officers in addition to her alleged rape.
Smith is now in “protective custody,” a form of solitary confinement where she is only released for an hour each day for exercise, according to HuffPost, and she has been denied access to study programs that would allow her to obtain her GED.
Furthermore, as research by the federal government into the widespread prevalence of prison rape reveals, vulnerable inmates face an uphill battle when trying to prove the nonconsensual nature of sex in prison while simultaneously contending with complex social hierarchies. Inmates who may be LGBT or smaller in physical stature are often coerced into sexual compliance by dominant offenders in order to survive. Just as importantly, studies have shown that fighting back during an assault may lead to severe maiming or even death, prompting some rape survivors to lower their own levels of resistance to persevere during the ordeal.
How Did A Gay, Married Actor End Up In An Anti-Gay TV Show?
When Dallas-based actor Lloyd Guerrero first auditioned for Recently Straight two years ago, he didn’t fully understand what the television pilot was about. He was offered the lead role, a gay character named Kevin, and he accepted. After reading the full script and realizing it was about individuals who had used harmful, ineffective conversion therapy to de-gay themselves, he felt uneasy about it, but he decided to follow through on his commitment.
The pilot was released in full on YouTube earlier this year, and since then, Guerrero has received pushback from LGBT people about his participation in it. He spoke openly about his experience for the first time with ThinkProgress.
“I’m an actor, and this a role I took on,” he explained. “It was a challenge, because I don’t agree with the view of the project whatsoever. I completely disagree with it, but it was something that I took on as an actor and made a professional choice to take on, and so I completed it.” He reasons that there are actors who play child molesters and murderers, but that doesn’t make them supporters of child molestation and murder.
In hindsight, Guerrero says, it was “a ship I probably should not have sailed.” But it was a journey that impacted the actor on a deep level and created opportunities for him to support LGBT youth. He now debunks the tenets of the show through his own life example as an openly gay, married man.
The premise
Brock and Caelan comfort the heartbroken Kevin.
CREDIT: YouTube/Recently Straight
Recently Straight is a project of Ben Spratling, who identifies as ex-gay and serves on the advisory board for the ex-gay advocacy organization Voice of the Voiceless. Describing the pilot to the conservative site OneNewsNow recently, Spratling explained, “The plot revolves around a support group and the different men in the support group and what their lives are like as they’re trying to work out what it means to be Christian and same-sex attracted and how to heal from that.”
The story primarily follows Guerrero’s character Kevin, who is based on Spratling’s own life experience. Kevin, who is gay, is just going about his life when his ex, Josh, returns to town after several years away — telling Kevin that he is now straight. Josh has dedicated his life to helping other men overcome their same-sex attraction like he has, and he makes a project out of his former boyfriend.
Josh keeps making the case to Kevin that same-sex relationships are always doomed to fail, and Kevin happens to experience just that. He proposes to his boyfriend Kendrick, who not only rejects the idea of marriage but then proceeds to cheat on him. Kevin then starts seeing another boyfriend, but a date “ends in disaster,” and he turns to his friends Caelan and Brock for support. When he overhears the committed couple having a fight and then sees them both on a Grindr-like app, he loses all hope of ever finding someone in the gay community who will truly love him, and he contemplates suicide.
Fortunately, Josh arrives in time to talk Kevin off the ledge and invite him to ex-gay group therapy.
What could have been
“Straight guys hug too, Kev. There’s nothing gay about a hug.”
CREDIT: YouTube/Recently Straight
Though Spratling now describes Recently Straight as a film, Guerrero explained that the original intent was a television web series that would have followed Kevin, Josh, and Caelan for a full season. Interest in the pilot faded, however, when networks saw the controversial material and chose not to pick it up. Guerrero also said that he would not continue in the role after he saw how the pilot turned out.
That’s not because he had a particularly bad experience on set. “Everybody on the cast and crew knew that I was gay and they knew that I was dating my husband at the time.” His husband John even visited the set during the production and was welcomed by all. But he was alone in that regard; though most of the characters were gay, Guerrero was the only member of the production who was openly gay.
Filming the suicide scene at the end, however, was particularly intense for Guerrero. “When I was younger, I had attempted, myself, to commit suicide,” he shared with ThinkProgress. He actually related a lot to how Kevin felt; Guerrero describes himself as a “very monogamous person” and he had experienced cheating and heartbreak that really crushed his world. He never contemplated ex-gay therapy, but there were still parallels between his own struggles and the character’s.
“With the whole suicide scene, I didn’t like it at all, for one because it brought up some bad memories of when I had tried it. For two, just because, I don’t want this to be seen by people who might think, ‘This is the way out. Yeah, he’s right; I should do this.’”
Guerrero expressed concerns to the production team about how the scene would turn out. “If somebody sees this, say for example, a youth who is gay, lesbian, transgender, or whatever, you don’t want to send out the wrong message to people. And that’s ultimately why I pulled myself from the series after that initial pilot was shot, and I did tell them that if the pilot was to go any further than that, then they’d have to find somebody else to play the character.”
They kept asking him what would bring him back. He told them it would have to be rewritten in important ways, such as no longer framing ex-gay therapy as the only option. He also suggested it would do better as a comedy, something that wasn’t so extreme in the delivery of the message. “They sent me some drafts of scripts, and it turned out to just not be a character that I any longer wanted to play at that point.”
Laying it on thick
Kevin is a captive audience to Josh’s ex-gay rhetoric.
CREDIT: YouTube/Recently Straight
Writing under the pen name of Jonathan Bogomolov — which is how Guerrero identified him in his interview with ThinkProgress — Spratling inserted his own ideas about ex-gay therapy throughout the plot. On the Recently Straight website, Spratling shares many of these personal beliefs, asserting that the concept of sexual orientation “lacks foundation as an entity in scientific literature” and that “all individuals are inherently heterosexual and that SSA [same-sex attraction] develops as the result of emotional wounds and unmet love needs.”
Josh serves as the surrogate ex-gay counselor in the pilot, spouting ex-gay jargon at Kevin in almost every scene. In one scene, he tells Kevin a story about someone from his Cub Scout troop who often misbehaved and unknowingly hurt other boys. It turned out he had always been deaf and no one knew, but once he and his mom learned sign language and he learned how to read lips, he could “nearly normally participate in life events.” The story, Josh claims, proves that it doesn’t matter if sexuality is biological.
“It’s an example of a biological problem that can be worked around with mental discipline… If it’s biologically caused, that isn’t proof that it’s healthy and that only biological changes can change it. You have to have a theological reason to decide if it’s healthy or good.”
In the following scene, Josh has Kevin trapped as a passenger in the car and delivers an epic monologue about how he disagrees “that there is such a thing as a ‘gay feeling.’” Men have desires for “affirmation and affection” and erotic desires, he explains, and if a boy doesn’t get enough affection from other men as a kid, “he’s at the risk of getting those desires mixed together.”
Josh explains his own problem as such: “It was more about my perception of women as a consequence of my mother’s failure to provide emotional constancy. Instead of seeing women as nurturing, I saw them as wardens with a leash around my neck. Men I felt were nurturing, so I felt safe with them.”
When Kevin (correctly) rejects this all as sounding “more like brainwashing than healing,” Josh checks in over webcam with his real-world ex-gay counselor Jayson Graves, founder of Healing for the Soul ministry. “It seems like all the things that convinced me, they just really don’t matter to him,” he whines.
In the final scene, Kevin is ready to jump off a cliff, telling Josh of his heartbreaks, “You were right about them all. None of them love me.” Josh admits that he almost committed suicide too, but God sent him a message of hope. “Just give Him your broken heart; He will comfort you. He will bring you healing and He will restore all those years that have been lost.” Josh invites Kevin to his ex-gay group meeting, explaining, “When you get to know them, you’ll find out just how similar you really are. These are men who will love you in your sorrow and who will love you out of it.” Kevin accepts, and the pilot ends with a teaser of him knocking on the door to join the meeting.
Leading by example
Josh talks Kevin off the cliff.
Guerrero is torn by his experience working on Recently Straight. “I don’t regret the decision I made; I made a professional decision to play the character,” he told ThinkProgress. “If it was any different, if it was made in the way I think it should’ve been presented, I honestly don’t know if I would’ve went through with it or not. I really have some feelings toward it. I don’t think I should have been a part of it.”
But being part of it has given him the opportunity to support LGBT young people and correct some of the messages of the show. Since the pilot became available on YouTube earlier this year, Guerrero has heard from LGBT youth who have watched it. “I’ve had younger kids tell me that they didn’t know what they should do,” he said. “Some people have been kicked out of their house because their parents found out, some people were thinking of committing suicide because of the fact it just wasn’t going right for them, and at that point I did open up about the time that I attempted to and that’s when I told them, ‘It’s not worth it. Don’t ever think that by committing suicide, that’s the way out. There’s going to be people that are going to not agree with your lifestyle, but there’s also a lot of people there who will accept and embrace who you are without second thought.’”
“There’s no reason to end your life that’s necessary or right. Just embrace who you are, be happy with who you are.”
Guerrero is proud that people can look to his marriage as an example. “At one point, I thought that it wouldn’t be worth going on because of the fact that I didn’t think that that I would find somebody. I hated the way things were going.” But now, he says, “I’m happily married to someone that I love to no end. I would do anything for this man and vice versa.” His friends joke he and John are a “sickening couple,” comparing them to the Brady Bunch because of how well they get along. “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”
He wants to give young people some of that same hope. Whereas Recently Straight communicates that people should give up on being gay because same-sex relationships don’t work out, Guerrero is proving the opposite. “I’m married. I’m happy. I’m a gayman. I fully embrace who I am,” he said. With regards to Recently Straight, “I can’t personally apologize for the way that it came out, because I wasn’t the one who wrote it, but I do apologize for the way that it presented it.”
“It doesn’t matter that a character in a series portrayed this. Don’t let it make you have a second thought. Be happy with you.”
'Cult Model': A Conversation with 'Confessions of a Mormon Boy' Star, Steven Fales
Steven Fales wants to help you quit your cult habit.
Photo credit: David Daniels of dav.d photography
The creative force behind the award-winning Mormon Boy trilogy shares his own “obsessive cult disorder” in his latest solo show, Cult Model. After originally writing the piece in 2003 during a ten-week run of his first play at Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse, the wholesomely handsome Fales (once a candidate for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints poster boy) performed it as a benefit for the Utah AIDS Foundation.
At the time, reaction within the Mormon community was so hostile that Fales feared he would lose visitation rights with his children if he continued to perform the show. With his kids now grown, the actor has revived the show in order to help audiences learn to think and act for themselves.
Recently I had the chance to speak with the former LDS missionary about the New York City premiere of Cult Model, as well as about his philanthropic work creating the Possibility Foundation.
Stroud: Why the interest in cults?
Fales: I was born into Mormonism, which at the time — in the ’70s — had a lot of cult elements still in it. I have this cult scale like the Kinsey scale, so it’s from 0 to 6. If Mormonism was at a 5 when I was born, it’s about a 3 today. It’s lost a lot of cult elements and become more mainstream.
I’m a huge Landmark Forum person. Landmark really helped me right after 9/11. I was in New York. I’d been escorting. I was in victim mode, and the Forum changed my life. It’s really why I started writing Confessions — I just can’t say enough about what Landmark did. But then I did all the courses, and I got everyone to do it. I hit the cult ceiling where I wasn’t getting any more value.
Stroud: How do you define reaching the “cult ceiling”?
Fales: When you first join a cult, it has the answers. Your life expands; your world expands. You have new language; you have new community; you have new purpose and meaning. You’ve found the answer.
When I first joined the “ex-gay” movement, it had all the answers. The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality was so seductive: it would make me straight. And I bought into it. Man, I told my dad that first night that if I had a million dollars I’d give it to NARTH. That’s how wowed I was. So cults promise you the moon, but they underdeliver. You hit that cult ceiling.
Stroud: The Mormon Church, Landmark, the ex-gay movement — what other groups have you been involved with that you would define as “cults”?
Fales: I’m trying to take the stigma out of the word “cult.” It’s a zealous, religious devotion to a leader, idea, or a particular book. I’ve been involved in the recovery movement and that, itself, can have cult elements. Now, no one wants to admit that, but I can turn anything into a cult.
Stroud: How so?
Fales: Dependency. I want someone to think for me. I could turn my psychiatrist into a cult figure. I’m not a psychologist or a sociologist, but I think all cults are quests for our fathers — not parents — but our fathers.
Stroud: Why fathers and not mothers?
Fales: Cults take the place of daddy without us even knowing. They give us structure.
Stroud: I understand you consider the sex industry a type of cult.
Fales: It’s a cult of sex work. I got out of the sex industry 14 years ago. I feel like when we pay for sex we lower the bar in human relationships.
There are porn czars that do not care about these young, vulnerable young men on the streets — homeless, kicked out of their households. They’re picked up, given a few bucks, filmed, and thrown out. I’m very concerned about human trafficking today. We have some sex work secrets that are really stunting us in our relationships.
Stroud: When you say us are you talking about the entire LGBT community, just gay and bisexualmen — or are you talking about everybody?
Fales: I could talk about everybody, absolutely, but we as gaymen in our fabulous sex industry have more in common with a young girl who’s strapped to a bed in South Dakota in a human trafficking ring. We just do it a little more fabulous — and we don’t talk about it.
Now let me just say that I am pro-sex. I believe sex should be for fun and for free. I’m also pro-relationship. It’s very hard to develop true emotional intimacy with somebody when we’re paying for sex. It’s a transaction. Everybody gets hurt. Then it gets to an extreme. You bring the drugs in, you know. We need to clean that up.
Stroud: As a former sex worker, you speak with a lot of authority.
Fales: I’ve written extensively about it. We have a world of “sugar daddy” syndrome and the “trophy boy” thing, not unlike the “trophy wife” thing. We as gaymen need to lead in equality of our relationships, not the quantity of our partners.
Stroud: What’s the Possibility Foundation, and why did you found it?
Fales: When I was transitioning out of the sex industry, I wanted to write this little play, Confessions of a Mormon Boy. I was broke and scared. I left cold turkey out of the industry. I was in New York and called professors. I told them I was writing a play and asked if they could please help me float for a month. They gave me the time to write a solo play that changed my life. I want to give…
Stroud: Were you in school at the time?
Fales: I reached out to my old professors and my dad. So this is what happened: you know you’ve got to stop. Your life is going out of control. You’ve lost your light. You’ve lost your dignity. You’re trying to restore it, no matter how okay they try to make you feel as a hooker: ‘Oh, you’re great, you’re so great!’
When I saw Nicole Kidman in (the movie) Moulin Rouge — she was a high-end courtesan; she had no freedom; she had no beauty; she had none of the bohemian values, and she was dying — I saw myself. I was a courtesan who was going to die if I didn’t stop.
So, we all need help. Every sex worker, I believe, has a dream that they really want to make happen. I would like to provide scholarships for them, whether for a nice camera or a stand-up comedy workshop. I want to facilitate that through the Possibility Foundation. I want to help sex workers, female and male, achieve their next phase of life and get on with their dreams.
CULT MODEL
Confessions of a Mormon Boy star, Steven Fales, brings his latest comedy to NYC
October 23, 2015 at 7 p.m.
New York City’s Laurie Beechman Theatre (407 West 42nd Street)
For advance tickets, go to www.spincyclenyc.com or click here.
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Open Question: Meeting person for the first time?
So when I joined my place of education, being LGBT myself I was told about another LGBT person, a few years above, I have seen them wandering around my place of education and they have seen me. A few months later, out of the blue I tried adding them on a social networking site, they accepted. We spoke online once and arranged a date to meet, Now how do I go up and talk to this person without the awkwardness….?
At NewFest, Movies About Changing Genders and Chasing Love The film festival’s closing-night offering is “Girls Lost,” a tale of two female students who can magically, if temporarily, turn into boys.
In a speech, a senior leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints asserted that public officials, no matter their personal religious beliefs, should not deny same-sexcouples their right to marry. HRC.org
Awful Political Ad Compares LGBTQ People To Dollar Bills Being Flushed Down A Toilet
Conservative lobbyists in Texas have sunk to a new all-time low. They just released what may be one of the most offensive anti-LGBTQ political ads in recent history.
The ad was produced by the antigay group Faith Family Freedom Fund and is in response to Houston’s Proposition 1, a non-discrimination ordinance that would ban employment and housing discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, two criteria not currently covered by federal anti-discrimination laws.
“If Proposition 1 passes, you could be fined up to $5,000 for declining to participate in a same-sex wedding or simply objecting to a man using a woman’s bathroom,” the ad inaccurately declares.
(For the record: The new legislation will exempt religious institutions and organizations.)
The ad continues: “Don’t allow the government to flush your money or religious liberties … No person should be punished by the government because of their beliefs.”
Watch the vomit-inducing political ad below. Or don’t.
Gay Guy Who Tried on Sexy Halloween Costumes for Mom Has A Message for All the Haters: WATCH
Earlier this month, we told you about gay vlogger Jack Merridew’s hilarious and adorable video on sexy gay Halloween costumes. In it, Jack tried on five different sexy Halloween costumes and had his mom judge which one he should wear for Halloween. The video quickly went viral, racking up over 400,000 hits. Now, Merridew is back and responding to the haters and trolls who body-shamed and attacked him because of his video.
Said Merridew, “All the hate on this Halloween costume video came from gaymen, and it was weird…Come on, gaymen. We’re supposed to brothers.” He then quipped, “We’re a big f*cking family. And you can’t choose your family. I’m that brother that you want to get rid of but you know what? You’re f*cking stuck with me.”
Merridew went on to read some of the hateful comments he received and ended his response with a call to action to stop enabling double standards, focusing on the so-called “gay stereotype” and, finally, to be kinder to one another. Said Merridew,
“Please, please, please don’t become the type of gayman who comments crap like this on other people’s video, Facebook, news articles…don’t be the type of gayguy who puts down other people…Love one other, be nice to one another, help each other out. And let’s as a community attack Kim motherf*cking Davis. And not small little twinkie boys who want to dress like sluts for Halloween, okay?
Amen.
For the record, we think you look great, Jack. And we loved the Halloween video. So don’t let the haters stop you from doing your thang.
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