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32 Fed. Probation 23 (1968)
The Social Meaning of Prison Homosexuality

handle is hein.journals/fedpro32 and id is 25 raw text is: THE SOCIAL MEANING OF PRISON HOMOSEXUALITY

wondered a bit whether you would be open to an
invitation to come to the Seminary and give us a
lecture on business ethics.
Another citizen of South Carolina was so filled
with pride in Mr. Threatt's policy of helping the
underdog that he felt compelled to write him a
letter of appreciation. Recognizing that articles
about the Deep South and his native State of
South Carolina do not usually give the section a
favorable national image, he wrote Mr. Threatt,
When I read that Life magazine article I was

proud. I was proud of a man with 'guts,' who made
a business while still helping those who needed it
most; who, rather than bleeding the 'cheap labor,'
gave them opportunity; who proved that the
underdog, with a chance, is productive.
Included in the volume of letters he receives
are requests for advice, money, jobs, and invita-
tions from churches and colleges to accept speak-
ing engagements. But the one he will cherish the
longest is the Man of the Year presentation
from a Boy Scout Troop in Norwalk, Connecticut.

The Social Meaning of Prison Homosexuality
BY JOHN H. GAGNON AND WILLIAM SIMON, PH.D.
Senior Research Sociologists, Institute for Sex Research, Indiana University

HE LAST HALF CENTURY has seen marked, if
uneven, progress in most areas of prison
management and perhaps even more marked
progress in the creation of a new ideology of
prison management. However, despite evidence of
progress, there still remains a major area of be-
havior with which prison systems have been
unable to cope. This is the problem of sexual ad-
justment that occurs in all institutions where one
sex is deprived of social or sexual access to the
other. It -is in the area of sexuality that the prison
is perhaps more limited than it is in other areas of
activity, partially because of its very single-sex
nature and partially because the society rarely
provides clear guidelines for sexual behavior even
outside the penal institution.
In the midst of the confusion about sexual
standards and sexual behavior, the prison exists
as the major single-sex institution in the society
that has (unlike the mental hospital and other
closed institutions) within its walls a population
that is physically and, for the most part, psycho-
logically, intact and is, at the same time, sexually
experienced. The prison administrator is faced
with a fundamental dilemma: He is aware of the
sexual needs of the population that he is charged
with holding and retraining, but he is also aware
that he is not going to get much support or even
a sympathetic hearing from the larger society if
*This article is based on an investigation supported in part by U.S.
Public Health Service grant MHo07742.

he focuses upon the problem of the sexual adjust-
ment of his population.
Some Major Considerations
There are two major areas that require clarifi-
cation before one can proceed to discuss the actual
patterns of sexual adjustment among prison popu-
lations. The first is an unfortunate tendency to
view the sexual adjustment of prisoners as arising
exclusively from the contexts of prison life. It is
frequently assumed that any group of people who
were incarcerated for any period of time would
react sexually in the same way as those who are
presently in prison. This is a major oversimplifi-
cation brought about primarily because of a lack
of information about the prior sexual and non-
sexual lives of those who are imprisoned and the
way in which this prior experience conditions
person's responses not only to sexual deprivation,
but also to a general loss of liberty.
The second element that is important to specify
is the range of sexual responses that are available
to those imprisoned. With the exception of the
small number of prisons that allow conjugal
visits, there are only three forms of sexual be-
havior that are generally available to a prison
population (except for animal contact for those
males on prison lfarms). These are nocturnal sex
dreams, self-masturbation, and sexual contact
with other inmates of the same sex. The meaning,
amount, and the character of these adjustments
will be strongly dependent on the meaning that

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