EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is by a grant recipient in a program launched last year byTheG&LR, our Writers and Artists Grant, which was awarded to three recipients in 2023. The purpose of this grant is to assist advanced students engaged in LGBT-related research, and recipients are expected to produce an article for this magazine as part of their project. This is the first such article to appear. R EVOLUTIONARY lesbian activists in the 1980s and ’90s formed political organizations and published abolitionist material against the incarceration state, and were themselves imprisoned for their political actions. One organization dedicated to political prisoners was Out of Control: Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners. While OOC was primarily a lesbian group in solidarity with women political prisoners, they supported freedom for all political prisoners and published several interviews with incarcerated activists through their newsletter Out ofTime. According to Angela Davis, who was herself a formerly incarcerated abolitionist, OOC was “part of a large anti-carceral feminist movement that is still generally unacknowledged.” That being the case, let us shine a light on some of the lesbian activists who participated in this movement and explore how the OOC and two other revolutionary lesbian organizations—Revolting Lesbians and Queers United in Support of Political Prisoners (QUISP)—organized against the carceral state. By raising awareness about lesbian political prisoners in the U.S., these activists sought to redirect the mainstream LGBT movement from assimilationist goals to those of combating imperialism and ending mass incarceration. I BEGAN THIS PROJECT IN2018 after reading through gay and lesbian newspapers that circulated among incarcerated queer people from the 1970s to the 1990s. I kept coming across an activist named Judy Greenspan, who spent decades organizing with incarcerated people, particularly those withHIV/AIDS. While doing research at New York’s LGBT Community Center, an archivist suggested that Greenspan, who was in the process of donating their papers, might be willing to speak with me. Through Greenspan’s connections, I began collecting oral histories with Laura Whitehorn, Linda Evans, and Eve Rosahn—all lesbian revolutionaries and antecedents of the prison abolition movement. Years later, this network of activists remains loosely connected and firmly dedicated to the liberation of all oppressed people. ESSAY Lesbians Against Incarceration CAITPARKER Cait Parker is a doctoral candidate in American Studies with a concentration in Women, Gender, & Sexuality at Purdue University. 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 lowincome 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 poIn 1987, Revolting Lesbians published “PoliticalWomen Prisoners in the U.S.,” a broad primer on women incarcerated for a wide swath of political actions. March–April 2024 27
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