Lesbians Against Incarceration
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            As I conducted oral histories with Greenspan, Whitehorn, Evans, and Rosahn, I learned that they did not describe themselves as prison abolitionists in the 1980s and early ’90s. The language of the prison abolition movement developed later, in the late-’90s. All four women developed their political consciousness in the ’60s and ’70s, which is when, according to Angela Davis, “the connection between political prisoners and the prison as a state apparatus of repression emerged.” When I asked Linda Evans when she began to identify as an abolitionist, she directed me to a pamphlet she wrote with her partner, Eve Goldberg, titled “The Prison-Industrial Complex and the Global Economy,” which was included in the 1998 Critical Resistance conference.

            A year before, in 1997, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated activists, working with academics such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, formed a group called Critical Resistance, one of the first explicitly abolitionist organizations. Davis claims that while Critical Resistance helped expand “the use of the key phrases ‘prison industrial complex’ and ‘prison abolition,’” there is also a long history of revolutionary lesbian activists, such as OOC, who helped pave the way for a contemporary abolitionist movement. Similar to the military-industrial complex, the term “prison industrial complex” (PIC) describes the “interweaving of private business and government interests” that generates corporate profits through state and federal government contracts. According to Davis, by the 1980s, the criminal punishment system disproportionately targeted low-income communities of color.

            Abolitionists recognize the historical and contemporary impact of state violence on marginalized communities, seek solutions to violence outside a punishment-focused carceral system, and do not view prison reform as a viable option. Ruth Wilson Gilmore asserts that the prison abolition movement is “both a long-term goal and a practical policy program, calling for government investment in jobs, education, housing, health care—all the elements that are required for a productive and violence-free life. Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack.”

            Abolitionists’ long-term goal would be a future society without prisons, which—whatever the moral arguments against them—are seen as ineffective at addressing crime or preventing violence. Activist Mariame Kaba builds upon Gilmore’s work, admitting that “changing everything might sound daunting, but it also means there are many places to start, infinite opportunities to collaborate.”

            For revolutionary activists seeking to transform the criminal punishment system, a strong movement in solidarity with political prisoners was regarded as more effective than working within the established political parties. Even so, as Judy Greenspan told me, the cause was never widely adopted: “I think what really hurt the political prisoner movement, and continues to hurt it, is the lack of a mass movement. The prisoner movement, apart from political prisoners, has always been impacted by what was going on outside of prison—by what was going on in the streets.” By the 1980s and ’90s, outside of anti-imperialist and anti-racist groups, organized activism for incarcerated people remained on the fringes.

            In what would become known as the Resistance Conspiracy Case (RCC), a group of seven anti-imperialist activists—Susan Rosenberg, Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, Marilyn Buck, Alan Berkman, Tim Blunk, and Betty Ann Duke—were all charged with conspiracy. Groups they were associated with carried out bombings of government and military sites across the U.S. from 1983 to ’85 in protest against deadly U.S. intervention in Central America. While the bombings destroyed government property, no one was harmed during these incidents. Along with their comrades, lesbian revolutionaries Rosenberg, Evans, and Whitehorn had histories in several clandestine groups, such as the Weather Underground, Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, and the May 19th Communist Organization. Despite these charges and subsequent lengthy sentencing, the U.S. government would later reveal “there was no direct proof that the individual activists were involved in the bombings.”

            In the late-1980s, Greenspan worked as the HIV Information Coordinator of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Washington, D.C., when they learned that “a group of political prisoners had been brought to the D.C. jail and charged with this outrageous conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government by force or violence.” Greenspan, familiar with several defendants from past political organizing, visited the D.C. jail and decided they could offer support from the outside, stating: “I could play a role in terms of … orchestrating the case to the political movement on the outside. Because there were a lot of misconceptions.” Greenspan explains: “There was a lot of resentment and a lot of fear … nobody wanted to touch them, and so my job was not to convince people that bombing buildings was the right approach necessarily, but that this attack is an attack on the entire movement and we needed to respond and that you could respond even if you did not approve of their tactics.” Soon after this visit, Greenspan organized the first activist response to defend those indicted in the RCC.

            Since Rosenberg, Evans, Whitehorn, Buck, Berkman, Blunk, and Duke had histories with other activist groups, there was a small but determined network of revolutionaries, many of them lesbians on the margins of the mainstream LGBT movement due to their anti-racist and anti-imperialist commitments. Stated Greenspan in a speech: “The mainstream LGBT movement was not concerned about these issues and was certainly not even concerned about prisoners, much less political prisoners in their own ranks.”

            An unwavering prison abolitionist, bo brown traced her political consciousness to a group of Black women with whom she was incarcerated during the early 1970s. After the murder of George Jackson, brown witnessed this group of women organize a work stoppage, one that continued through the prison uprising in Attica, New York, and the subsequent murder of the prison resisters there. After her release from jail, brown joined the George Jackson Brigade (GJB) and began robbing banks to support the group financially. Termed a “gentlemen bank robber,” a phrase capturing both “her butch style of dress” and “polite way of demanding funds,” brown was arrested again in 1978. Upon her second release, brown immediately began organizing with the activist group Revolting Lesbians, which brown described as “the leftist lesbian arm of the San Francisco Coalition, which participated in the politics of the 1980s.” By 1987, with bo’s help, Revolting Lesbians published the first edition of its booklet “Political Women Prisoners in the United States,” which served as a broad primer on women incarcerated for a wide swath of political actions, including information about activists from organizations such as MOVE, the Ohio Seven, Puerto Rican prisoners of war, and women incarcerated for retaliating against physical and sexual abuse.

            Revolting Lesbians intended for the publication to serve as a bridge to a broader LGBT movement by illuminating the stories of women political prisoners. Recording the experiences of incarcerated lesbians, the publication revealed that there were “countless imprisoned lesbians” who “struggled to improve the conditions of other women prisoners.” However, the article explains how “very few [of these]struggles have been recorded,” a truth that applied even more to “poor and working-class lesbians and dykes of color.” It argued that prisons were “totalizing institutions” where racism, classism, and sexism were amplified and that seeking carceral solutions to violence, particularly gendered violence, through the state was not a viable solution: “Do we go ask ‘the enemy’—the state, the police—to save us from a problem that they have in effect created, through the terrible oppressions people experience? If not, what do we do to keep ourselves safe?”

Revolting Lesbians made incarcerated and formerly incarcerated lesbians visible at a time when being openly LGBT while incarcerated was not permitted by the institution or blatantly denied. Speaking to the overall number of incarcerated lesbians, the publication stated: “We could not find any statistics about the numbers or treatment of lesbians in prison.” The organization highlighted how lesbian invisibility on the outside, “a denial of our very existence … extends to incarceration.” While many of the lesbian political prisoners featured were white, the publication also highlighted the work of a few lesbians of color. One of the incarcerated lesbians whose story was featured was Carol Crooks, described as “a Black dyke imprisoned at Bedford Hills, New York,” whose “resistance is legendary,” after she filed a lawsuit alongside Black Muslim women to prevent strip searches by male guards, a not uncommon practice. Another paragraph mentions Sherron McMorris, an indigenous (Blackfoot), working-class lesbian, artist, and survivor who helped found Remembering Our Sisters Inside (ROSI), a group that showcased artwork by incarcerated women.

            The Committee to Shut Down the Lexington Control Unit (LCU) was formed with the purpose of abolishing the High Security Unit, an underground security unit located in the Alderson Federal Prison for Women in Alderson, West Virginia. Susan Rosenberg of the RCC and fellow political prisoners Silvia Baraldini and Alejandrina Torres were sentenced to the LCU, which was known for isolation and “intensive surveillance and sensory deprivation.” Rosenberg and Torres described the unit as “a tomb” and a “white sepulcher.” With help from the Committee to Shut Down the LCU, national attention formed around the brutal conditions of the control unit, resulting in an ACLU lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The LCU was abolished “eighteen months after it opened.”

            After this successful campaign, OOC was formed by several activists who wanted to continue organizing with and for women political prisoners. Former OOC members Blue Murov and Julie Starobin explained that “part of our work was to fight against lesbian invisibility—not only for ourselves, but also for our sisters inside.” OOC created the newsletter Out of Time to reach a broader audience. Like the Revolting Lesbians publication, Murov and Starobin described this newsletter as “the perfect vehicle” to introduce “political prisoners to LGBT communities and to bring lesbian liberation to other movements and communities.” Out of Time closely followed the RCC defendants, particularly staying in touch with out lesbians Evans, Rosenberg, and Whitehorn.

            Another group of revolutionaries, Queers United in Support of Political Prisoners (quisp), organized to amplify their stories to a larger audience; however, the mainstream LGBT movement never rallied behind the RCC defendants. Eve Rosahn, a former political prisoner and member of quisp, explained that quisp was founded in the early 1990s by “people who had come out of May 19th and the anti-imperialist [movement]who were organizing in New York City.” While quisp was primarily comprised of LGBT activists, the group organized “to support the legal and political defense” of all political prisoners; “supported activist campaigns by queers of color; participated in coalitions working against police violence and distributed literature and audiovisual materials.”

            In my interview with them, Evans, Rosenberg, and Whitehorn explained that many activists were unaware of political prisoners but championed abolitionist values of solidarity. The quisp interviewer begins with the question: “I’m an activist. How come I’ve never heard of you before?” Although no longer underground, the three described how the isolation of incarceration, combined with their status as political prisoners, contributed to this erasure. Evans explains: “our own political movement, too, has ignored the existence of political prisoners. I think this has largely been a product of racism—most U.S. political prisoners/POWs are Black and Puerto Rican comrades who have been locked up for over a decade.” When asked how they imagined a queer movement that “encompasses other struggles,” Whitehorn responded with a reflection on solidarity, recognizing how white anti-imperialist activists “incorporated strategic concepts developed (at a high cost!) by the Black Liberation struggle.”

            Whitehorn’s words emphasize the urgency of our contemporary moment. With increasing attacks on the trans community, police brutality against communities of color, and the suppression of queer history, revolutionary histories must not be lost. Political prisoners still exist, some of the most well-known being Mumia Abul-Jamal and Leonard Peltier; we must organize with incarcerated people and seek solutions to violence outside the state.