Lots of men in prison work hard to maintain the public posture facade of their pre-prison hetero-normative sexuality, in order to keep their children loyal, hold on to their straight friends, and hide from their ignorant hetero spouses the gay or bisexual double-life exploits they indulge in behind bars. I did this for a decade, believing that if anybody from my former life ever found out (or thought) I was gay, I would lose the people I cared about most. Coming from a military family, working construction, and having four children, there were more than a few masculine hallmarks demanding I perform in order to hide in plain sight. I veiled my truth, and masked shame by overcompensating in ways that normalized deception and excused selfishness. I even tried to hide it from my prison peers.
That all changed when I started celling up with openly gay men, which was a big step for me, because it signaled to three thousand people “Eric is gay,” in a way I couldn’t deny. It made walking to the condom dispenser in front of everyone and retrieving rubbers easier. Over time, I cared less about stigma, and more about how to show my love for somebody; yet, I still hid it from my family.
Over the past decade, while serving out my second degree murder sentence of 15 years-to-life, I’ve watched men in prison who slowly tiptoe into their gay or bisexual truth, correlate homosexuality with all sorts of justifications, as if they thought they needed to explain themselves. I’ve sat in rooms with people who “blamed” being gay on: the male-on-male abuse hey endured as children (as if victimization was the culprit that unlocked a latent desire); the bored opportunism resulting from the absence of women and sharing space exclusively with other men (as if proximity shaped their desire); and the availability of condoms (providing a disease-free way to “get away with it”). I can relate.
Watching The Brothers Size play in person, gave me a social courage I’d not felt since Tarell McCraney’s film Moonlight sparked an urge in me to be brave about who I always was. Unfortunately, that movie came a few decades too late for me; perhaps if it had hit the drive-in circuit in the late 80s, I’d have had the necessary courage to live out loud when I needed it most. But the double-dose gift of witnessing André Holland perform the play, and watching him in the film via my DOC-issued tablet device, felt like the universe was daring me to be brave, turning 2025 into a real crucible for me. Seeing gay masculinity presented in context, both through the teenage lens, and the prisoner lens, hit home. I felt a seriousness in my self-examination, and an urgency to declare it.
Everyone in my life knows who I am now, but I did not necessarily owe anyone a public disclosure, nor is this a virtue-signal ploy. That said, this topic is the most important thing that has happened in my personal space, and I wanted to put both hands around it. What I do when my cell door closes, is my business; but I’m okay with you knowing that I’m not who you might have thought I was, or who you may expect (or demand) me to be. For the first time in a long while, what others think or say about me can’t move me from my center of gravity. I’m comfortable in my skin.
Are you?
