joel hall - growing up black and gay

When I was about twelve I ran away from home to live with an older man.
My father put out a “missing person” on me, and eventually they caught me.
When I went to court, the judge asked my father, “Are you aware that your son is a homosexual?”
And my father said, “Yes.”
We had never talked about it before and that was the first time I had ever heard him refer to me as a homosexual.
He was very hurt having to do it in that way.
And I felt his pain; it was really a blow to him to have someone come out and ask him, “Are you aware that your son is a homosexual?” with his son standing right there.
My father is a very honest man, so he just said, “Yeah.”
And the judge said, “Well, we’re going to send him to Galesburg Mental Institution to try to correct his homosexuality.”

I couldn’t understand anything that was happening.
I had sort of an idea that I would be going to the Youth Commission, but never really accepted the fact that they’d send me to the Youth Commission for something so stupid.
But they did.

The first place I was sent was to the Reception Center in Joliet.
Then I was sent to St. Charles.
I stayed there for about six months and got into a fight with my cottage mother.
I stole some cigarettes out of her room.
They gave homosexuals jobs like cleaning up.
So once I took advantage of cleaning up her room and stole some cigarettes.
She came down to the basement and grabbed my arm and told me not to be stealing cigarettes from her.
My immediate response was to hit her; I turned around and slapped her in the face.
That same night they came and handcuffed me and took me to Sheridan, because that was outrageous, you know, to slap a cottage parent.

Sheridan was a maximum security institution, with two fences with dogs between and guard towers with guns.
I stayed there for three months and when I got out I went to high school where I got into more fights and was sent back to Sheridan.
I was always fighting.
Whenever a prisoner called me a faggot or a punk I would try to knock his brains out.
They thought they knew so much about psychology and about homosexuality that they could just put us in any type of situation and we would just play along with the rules.
But we really fucked up a lot of things there.
We were so outlandish, you know, that we practically ran the institution.
Whatever happened, we knew about it, we had something to do with it.

I was in Sheridan the second time for a year, and I was in the hole ten months out of that year.
The hole was a small cell with just a light box and a slot underneath where your food came in.
And I was let out once every other day for a shower.
I’d get a milk pill and a vitamin pill for breakfast, a full lunch, and then a milk pill and a vitamin pill again for dinner.
The hole is where they put murderers and rapists, people they feel they can’t handle.
I was apparently a murderer and a rapist all combined, with my homosexuality, so they put me in the hole.

An awful lot of gay people were committing suicide, hanging themselves.
They eventually gave us a building, C-8, and they put us on the fourth gallery, way up at the top.
We had all the cells on the top, and even there, people would slice their wrists and refuse to do any work.

One guard was giving an awful lot of trouble.
His name was Ivy, Big Ivy, and he used to really give us a lot of hell, you know, beat us up—and this was a grown-ass man, and we were fourteen, fifteen years old.
So we planned to get him.
First we tried getting him fired by telling lies and saying he was forcing us into homosexual behavior with him.
But we couldn’t get him fired because he had been there so long that everybody just wouldn’t believe it.

So this very good friend of mine—we used to call him Didi—tied a sheet around his neck, and tied it up to the barred windows, and stood on top of his bed.
I walked up to the door and started screaming, “Guard, come here! Somebody’s trying to hang himself!”
Ivy ran up to the door and when he opened it I pushed him in and about seven or eight gay people ran in and threw a blanket over his head and almost beat him to death and left him there.

One straight brother who was very close to a lot of us—he always defended us and stuff like this—was taken to the hole; they broke both his arms and both his legs before they got him there.

My first day in Sheridan I was in the cafeteria.
When you first get there, you come into this big mess hall where everybody eats.
All the people eat in this big mess hall.
The intake people, the new people, eat at one table.
I came with two other gay brothers.
And we were sitting at the table and like my name was known throughout the institution before I got there for all the shit that I’d been doing.

This fellow reached over and grabbed my ass.
I turned around and said, “Don’t touch me. Don’t put your hands on me, ’cause you don’t know me.”
And we went through this big argument.
I jumped up and took my tray and threw it in his face.
It was just the thing to do.
We had to defend ourselves and we had these reputations to hold.
Otherwise we really would have been fucked over.

So I threw the tray in his face.
They shot tear gas into the mess hall.
The first person they ran to grab while the tear gas was settling, the first person they’re carrying out to the hole, my first day there, was me.
They just lifted me up and drug me out and threw me in the hole.

It’s true that in jail straight men force people into homosexuality, but most of the gay people who were overt about it were all put into the same area together, or on the same tier, so we didn’t have as much of that.

Anyone wanting to attack one gay person would have to fight thirty or forty others first.
But on the other tiers, one boy was gang-raped thirteen times, and nobody in the institution knew about it other than the inmates—he wouldn’t tell the officials because he would really have been in trouble then.
Finally we got him to admit his homosexuality and come over to our tier so that he wouldn’t be gang-raped.

There’s a lot of that; I think institutions encourage things like gang rapes by keeping the tension between homosexuals and straight people there.
I don’t feel we should be segregated from straight men.
If men are straight they won’t relate to me sexually anyway, so I won’t have any problems with them, right?

So I think that they encourage it by keeping us separate, and then keeping all straight men together to do their thing and calling it mass homosexual uprising and shit like that.

Every once in a while you’d hear someone was raped over on another tier.
But as far as our tier was concerned, they put about forty homosexuals and about as many supposedly liberal heterosexuals, men, you know, with the role of men, and homosexuals with the role of women, on the tier together.

Nobody would even utter faggot, even the guards were very careful about what they said.
I was playing a role, a passive, feminine role.

Had I not played a passive role and gone into the institution and been put on a straight tier, and had a homosexual relationship with one person on that tier, the whole tier would have known about it, and I would have had to have homosexual relationships with everyone on that tier because I was an overt outlet, so to speak.

I think that’s how a lot of the gang rapes are caused, by homosexuals going in with these superman attitudes about how butch they are and they get up there and have a relationship with one person, only it’s not with one person, so it ends up where someone else will come up to him and proposition him or something, and he’ll refuse it, and that’s when he’s gang-raped.

I would not advise any homosexual to go in there with a superman attitude, because some of the biggest, most muscular, most macho masculine-identified men go into prison.
I don’t care how big you are, or how tough you are, it just happens that you’ll get raped if you don’t go along with the program.
That’s all.

At that time, I didn’t identify those people on our tier who played the roles of men as homosexuals.
I was into a role thing, where I was a homosexual and he was a straight man, and I related to him that way.
My consciousness is entirely different now.
I think that having to play those roles was extremely oppressive for many of us.
In fact, that’s why so many of us kept returning to the institution.
Sometimes you’d see someone who left two days earlier walking right back in there.
He’d go out and start prostituting, or ripping somebody off.
A lot of them had intentions of being caught and going back to jail because of relationships there.

I finally graduated from grammar school in St. Charles.
I took a test and somehow I passed it, and they handed me a diploma.
When I got out on independent parole I went to a General Equivalency Diploma test office, and passed that too.
I got a high enough score to get a scholarship to college.

College was another whole trip.
What school did for me was put me in the same type of oppressive situation, but in a more bourgeois sense, so I’d be able to get a half-assed job after I graduated, supporting the system.
But in fact I wouldn’t be able to get a job, because the record I had was tremendous.
I was so oppressed I couldn’t even see that I’d never be able to teach, I’d never be able to go through school and teach high school students or children or adults or anybody because of my criminal record.
But all I was concerned with at the time was getting that diploma because that made me a part of the system, could make me some money.

I met lots of gay people in college.
Most gay people in college that I know just stay in their closets and don’t let anybody know.
That’s true for the people I knew in school, until Gay Liberation and Third World Gay Revolution came along.
Those people in school were very closeted people.

Basically, I’ve always thought of myself as a revolutionary.
When I was in jail I was a revolutionary, because I was rejecting the system.
Only I was rejecting the system in a negative sense, in that I was not using my rejection constructively to turn it against the system.
I’ve always had ideas of offing repression.
As early as I can remember people have been fucking over my head, and I’ve always had a desire to stop people from fucking over my head.

There was quite a movement in jail between black people around Malcolm X.
I was in jail when I first heard about the Black Panther party, and related to it very positively, but out of a black sense, not out of a gay sense, because they were offing gay people, verbally offing gay people, saying things like “this white man who is fucking you over is a faggot,” and that was getting to me, because I was a faggot and I wasn’t no white man!

Finally their consciousness has changed somehow, and they’ve begun to relate to homosexuals as people, as a part of the people.

That’s when I really became a revolutionary, began to live my whole life as a revolutionary.
And I could never ever consider another… now that I’m conscious of my oppression I could not consider any other.

If there was a movement to restore capitalism in this country and they offed every revolutionary, they’d have to off me too.
If they restore black capitalism in this country they’d have to off me too.
That’s going to be oppressing me as a black, gay person.

I’m really struggling right now with developing my own gay consciousness.
I think that most of the people in Third World Gay Revolution and in Gay Liberation are developing their own consciousness, and trying to relate to other consciousness-raising issues.
I think that more and more third world and also white people are coming into the movement because they know they’ll have a fighting chance somewhere to be gay people, whether they’re third world or white, so they’re going to get in there and struggle for it.

I think the people I still have the most difficulty understanding are white people.
I still feel a lot of negative things about white people because of their basic racism and the extreme racism which they bring down on the black community and on black people.
I really feel that straight white people bring about this whole shit.

I think the thing that I’m able to see better is the gay white person’s point of view, and I’m able to identify—I have something to identify with in a white gay person, in a revolutionary sense, because I’m able to see that they’re oppressed as gay people also.

I definitely feel that I still don’t understand straight white people.
I hope I will, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand straight white people.

I feel that they’ve created all this shit—straight white MEN in particular.
Since the women’s liberation movement, I’ve begun to relate more closely to white women, and understand their oppression, because it sort of parallels gay oppression in many ways, and I’m sort of able to understand straight white women because they’re sort of able to understand gay black men, to understand their gayness.

I still feel that a lot of straight white women don’t understand gay black men as far as their blackness is concerned; women’s liberation still has an awful lot of racism to deal with.
And gay black men and gay white men have an awful lot of consciousness-raising to do before they can understand women’s oppression.

We have to really deal with sexism.

That’s really a strange thing to think about—that you’re oppressed in a sexist way, and that you have to raise your own consciousness on sexism.

But I can see it, because black people are consistently raising their own consciousness about their blackness, and so that’s how I relate to it.