More hot air from the blue-haired marxist-anarchists …
OSCAR WILDE’S PRISON DOOR:
LGBTQIA+, LAWS AND IMPRISONMENT
About the panel
Liv Wynter (they/them) is one of the founders of the trans activist mob known as Sisters Uncut and is active in other prison abolitionist groups. She also works with vulnerable youths who have mental health difficulties. Liv Wynter, ladies and gentleman.
Neil Bartlett is a prolific theatre director and novelist. I’ve read one of his novels, Skin Lane – fucking amazing. They say never meet your heroes.
Finally, two women from the Bent Bars Project were on the panel, Polly and Sarah Lamble. Lamble lectures at Birkbeck in criminology and queer theory. Bent Bars, despite being a project which is supposed to serve the whole LGBTQ+ community, has a focus on the rights of male prisoners who identify as female. They organise penpals for prisoners and produce advice, policy and reports, especially for trans-identified prisoners.
Wynter sets the scene
Wynter began by telling us that the whole conversation was going to be held around the ideology of abolition. This basically means one is anti-prison, anti-state and pro-anarchy. Much prettier words were used obviously, but this is the bones of it. Wynter believes in The Revolution and that post-revolution black-, trans- and working class people would finally be centred. Needless to say Wynter herself is white, trans – only in the sense that anyone is -, and massively massively middle class, even if she did try her very best to drop her aitches. The door to Oscar Wilde’s cell at Reading Gaol was on display in the museum, supposedly a timely reminder of today’s ‘totalitarian government disguised as a liberal one’ (you know, the one who just paid us all during the pandemic to sit around doing fuck all for months on end, that government). There was also the ‘rising threat of terf ideology’ to contend with.
When introducing Neil Bartlett I had to suppress a snigger when she needed help pronouncing the word ‘gaol’. Seriously, how does a long time prison abolitionist get through the hard work of abolition without knowing the meaning nor the pronunciation of ‘gaol’? Especially in the context of Reading Gaol, where Wilde spent out his prison sentence, the main topic of conversation. Ignorance, laziness and a profound lack of interest in her pet project are my guesses.
Wynter confidently told the room that us ‘queer people’ had only recently been liberated from criminalisation. But is that true? Famously there has never been a specific law against female homosexuality in the UK, but who cares about facts?
How does your work speak to the liberation of queer people against the state and its powers?
Sarah Lamble of Bent Bars said that she didn’t think that queer and trans people should be in prison, but also felt that no one should be in prison. Prisons were a failed response to harm and violence and ultimately the practice of incarceration needed to be ended full stop. We were seeing a pushback against trans people and trans rights. Currently trans people were being stigmatised and a disproportionate number of queer and trans people were being funnelled into the prison system. The incidence of self-harm in prison broke down to 6 incidents every hour. This was just the recorded number but she didn’t say who had compiled that statistic or how self-harm was defined. There was one suicide every 4-5 days (this did pan out with the figures I looked at). Bent Bars worked to help people on the inside by providing friendship and support.
How does your work speak to the liberation of queer people?
Neil Barlett was born in 1954 and claimed to have a weird relationship with the State because he was ‘very illegal for a very long time’. Homosexuality was mostly decriminalised in 1964, with the minimum aged of consent being 21, meaning that he was ‘illegal’ for precisely five years in relation to his heterosexual peers. He also never served in the armed forces, so his reference was quite perplexing, but he never explained it, only repeated it.
Bartlett had done a reading of Oscar Wilde’s work at HMP Reading, the letter that he wrote to his lover whilst incarcerated there. Reading Gaol had been a silent prison and Wilde wasn’t allowed to speak for two years. Bartlett was overwhelmed with emotion relaying this fact, but my reflection was: There were thousands of men who experienced exactly the same and didn’t have the outlets for expression Wilde did. Most probably couldn’t read or write. ‘I am allowed to send my letters,’ Bartlett burbled, holding back tears.
Bartlett also claimed that during the period of time that Section 28 existed his work was actively censored and that he had to formally negotiate with universities and schools if they wanted to employ him. He claimed he had to agree in writing that he wouldn’t disclose he was gay, an agreement he had ‘no intention of keeping’ since he was so ‘self-evidently a homosexual’. Given his enormously busy theatre directing career (his CV is on his website), it seems unlikely that he had much time to visit local authority run state schools, and universities are, as far as I’m aware, independent institutions and would not have been subject to the Clause.
Bartlett urged us to meditate at Wilde’s prison door.
People often say to Kevin Spacey, for instance, “Why did you stay so long in the closet?” Well, that’s the door to the closet. The door is locked against us on the outside, we must never forget that.
Neil Bartlett on Oscar Wilde’s prison door/ excusing Spacey’s alleged vile behaviour
But also, Bartlett argued, stigma was something you did to yourself. Confusing. He also claimed that Wilde wasn’t sent to prison for anything he did, but for what he was, failing to mention the controversy over Wilde’s predation on teen boys.
A moment of religiosity
Wynter repeated her desire to close down all places of incarceration because of their ‘inherent violence’ and that ‘violence does not benefit anyone’ (except when it comes to punching terfs, which she cheers on). She wanted to know how the panel arrived at abolition. Hers was being at the Anarchist Book Fair and listening to a talk given by a feminist collective.
Polly from Bent Bars’s moment of epiphany came when she was stood up on a date. She was a ‘baby gay’ and had really wanted to meet this girl but the girl cancelled, so she decided to go and hear Sarah Lamble speak at SOAS instead (so a gender studies university student, I guess). Turns out the girl had stood her up to attend the talk too. Wah-wah-wah. Lamble was such an amazing speaker, Polly was immediately primed to join the abolitionist movement. Polly’s parents work in the justice system. The abolition movement was a very gentle place to learn your politics as people were open to talking through things.
When Bartlett was eighteen he got to spend a day in prison with Jimmy Boyle, an ex-con who went straight and gained fame as a sculptor. Boyle pioneered the use of art therapy in prison, according to Bartlett (it seems more likely that he was a beneficiary of it). He spent the day meeting prisoners and found them to be ‘incredibly alive and positive people’, which, frankly, makes it sound like it never happened, or if it did, what’s the problem with prisons then?
A year later he spent the night in the cell at Bow Street Station. This was another point of connection between himself and Wilde. He claimed that Wilde was held there for a minor misdemeanour, joking ‘no violence involved, no sex either sadly’ (online sources all suggest it marked the beginning of his incarceration for gross indecency). Curiously, just like Wilde was ridiculed as he arrived at Bow Street, Bartlett was subject to homophobic abuse by police officers. He was with three friends and they put him in a cell on his own because they thought his friends wouldn’t want to be ‘locked up with a bender’. Bow Street was functional as a police station until its closure in 1992. It seems unlikely in the early 70s that they would have had the will or capacity to accommodate tourists, unless Bartlett was there being held after arrest, but he didn’t make it sound like that.
Bartlett claimed that the last person to occupy Oscar Wilde’s cell at HMP Reading (it closed in 2014) was a 17 year old boy being held in solitary confinement. This made him want to vomit. Would an under 18 would be held in an adult prison in 2014 in solitary confinement, I hear you ask? And who would document such a bizarre fact?
The way Lamble came to abolition was ‘actually really important’; she came to it through anti-violence work. Hold on to your hats my loves as we follow the cognitive dissonance. At 16 she started volunteering at a rape crisis centre as a response to sexual violence in her community. So she joined the prison abolitionist movement because the police were failing to keep women safe from sexual violence. In other words, she wanted to make it that bit unsafer for victims of rape and couldn’t give a shit about them. She also had her own experience of incarceration as she was once arrested after a political protest and strip searched. This meant she knew the brunt of state force, evoking an image of herself shaking and shivering on a cold cell floor, calling out for a blanket.
Lamble gamely told us that later she was going to address the issue of ‘difficult people’ (i.e. mad axe murderers), which she predictably never did.
Sisters Uncut is an abolitionist group which knows that putting people in prison ‘doesn’t do anything to prevent that violence,’ said Wynter. She runs a club/performance night called How to Catch a Pig (the pig being a policeman, I think, it’s all very grown up). Regulars come and make friends, often ending up in a direct action group (aka getting dead drunk and swapping numbers). Abolition required an element of creative thinking.
How do you think creative methods can serve us to keep these fights alive?
Bartlett went all Wizard of Oz and said you could remind people that they have courage but you couldn’t give it to them.
Polly talked about the creative process of letter writing and that the Project encourages people to handwrite letters, as opposed to email or type. It meant that the responses had to be more considered, especially since post in prison often takes a long time to go through. Challenging ideas or responses had to be dealt with at a much slower pace and the slow pace allowed the person to take more time to respond.
Reflecting on Oscar Wilde’s cell door
Bartlett was asked by Wynter to reflect on the prison door again. Bartlett said you could put Oscar Wilde’s name on anything and be assured that tickets would sell. The door hadn’t shut Wilde up and queer people continued to exist and be heard. The State had failed, despite its flagellation of Wilde.
Lamble talked about Wandsworth and Pentonville, which Wilde had also been held in. Lamble described them as ‘horrific prisons’. She claimed that the current government wanted to go a ‘prison building spree’ (I wonder how she might think prisons can be improved if they can’t be rebuilt?).
Lamble said that these new prisons definitely wouldn’t be more fit for purpose. She wanted a halt to the building programme and to instead focus on stopping violence in the community. As per usual for abolitionists, no concrete examples of how this could be done were given.
Wynter had worked at an LGBTIQ+ domestic violence refuge, The Outside Project, and she saw how much ‘criminalisation’ happened to survivors. She also claimed that prison was ‘wall to wall’ with people who couldn’t pay their bills, not rapists and murderers, but people who had got targeted for ‘absolutely fuck all’ who were subject to ‘torture’ by the State before being abandoned on exit, ‘if they get to exit’. Silly risible claims.
Standing with Sarah Jane Baker
This week a trans woman, who at Trans Pride, flippantly encouraged people to punch a terf, an action that I back, experienced a politician going above the law to coerce her probation officer into having her recalled to prison, even though her probation officer said that didn’t need to happen. The politician waded in and illegally used their powers to have this trans woman recalled to a men’s prison.
Liv Wynter, avowed abolitionist and pacifist
Was there a reason Wynter didn’t want to name violent ex-con and torturer Sarah Jane Baker? I think there was, as was her reticence to name the politician, since this was Suella Braverman. What a shock a serving Home Secretary might comment on a criminal breaking his life licence, eh?
How can we build a queer solidarity which will cross prison walls and borders?
Lamble asserted that it was always the most marginalised people in society who ended up in prison (rather than, say, ones who commit crimes). This included queer, trans, disabled and black people. This wasn’t an accident, it was inbuilt into the justice system. Though Lamble admitted that some of those people did do harm. There was the binary in the minds of the public of the ‘deserving and undeserving’ and Baker’s case had bought the latter to the forefront of people’s minds, tacitly admitting that Baker’s behaviour had not played well to the public gallery.
Furthermore, Lamble felt that it was strategically a bad position for abolitionists to take because ‘it feeds into their hands’. She couldn’t just outright condemn a violent call to violence from a violent man, who forced his victim to suck his penis at gunpoint and left him to die in an airing cupboard trussed up by electrical wiring. Lamble giggled to indicate that unofficially she didn’t really condemn the call to violence against ‘terfs’.
I think absolutely she should not be in prison for that and I absolutely think we should be supporting her and we shouldn’t be playing into the deserving and undeserving.
Sarah Lamble on Sarah Jane Baker’s call to violence
Bartlett agreed that the moment we divided the world into ‘us and them’ it was game over. Except this is all they had been doing for the last hour of conversation. We needed to call out stigmatisation every time we saw it, he said, even though earlier he had argued that stigma was what you do to yourself. Now he argued it was external and argued if you took any rant about trans people and replace that word with ‘brown’, ‘disabled’ or ‘striking health workers’, etc, you would see how obscene it was, but failed to suggest ‘rapist’ or ‘paedophile’.
Why is it a bad idea to scrub out murals in a child detention centre? Why is that a bad idea? Because I know what it was like to grow up where I saw images of myself being defaced by other people’s laughter.
Neil Bartlett waxing lyrical
Q&A with audience
What would society look like without the prison system?
Instead of answering the damn question, Lamble dissembled by explaining that ‘abolition’ actually meant improving support services, i.e. increasing the reach of the State, which they hate so much. Lamble claimed she didn’t know any abolitionist who wanted to fling open all the doors of prison right now (bet she does).
There will always be people who do harm to others, there are people who are gonna do violent stuff. Our understanding of those people is skewed by the media which wants to us to obsess that and think that people who do harm are like monstrous evil other people.
Sarah Lamble
Lamble spoke instead to minimise violence, saying that most violence is domestic and that violence is normally committed between known people.
So, just like Sarah Jane Baker and his stepmother’s brother, then? Or Ian Huntley and the two girls who went to the school he was a caretaker of in Soham? That’s the kind of violence we apparently aren’t already worried about.
Instead we should support people to stop the violence, said Lamble. Punishment didn’t work. That didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be some cases where some people needed some level of containment for temporary periods of time but it wouldn’t look anything like prison. (Butlin’s Holiday Camp, then?)
‘What about the rapists?’ asked Wynter rhetorically. Well, we don’t need to worry about that, she told us, because less than 2 percent of rape allegations even make it to court, and the few which do are rarely successfully prosecuted. Wynter pointed out these rapists are already just hanging out in the local community anyway. Wynter claimed this was a failure but what she really meant was abolition is already being practised and she was absolutely fine with it.
The ideology, Wynter continued, was that if someone did something to harm you in the community, you could be held and looked after and the assailant could be moved away from doing that harm again. Exiling them (to prison) leaves them without a safety net to change their behaviour. Yet again concrete details of how these men might be reformed were not given. Not even the suggestion of pottery classes or therapy.
How can I help?
An Australia on holiday in London wanted to know how to help Bent Bars. They suggested that she contact abolitionist groups locally and for her to contact them via email. Abolition was an international movement. Join Abolitionist Futures which has a reading group.
Question from man from a ‘working class community’ heavily affected by the prison system. However, there was a lot of queerphobia. How could he educate his friends and family?
Lamble suggested the tactic used by activists campaigning for same sex marriage in Ireland; tell your granny you love her.
Wynter in her role as a youth worker had supported a young man who identified as an incel. He was extremely violent and extremely misogynistic but also interested in the idea of being perceived as an intellectual. So she would text him and he would text back. She said that he was ‘a little less scary now’ admitting that previously she had been terrified. She also claimed to have supported young people who ‘identified as terfs’ and explained that, just like incels, these were just young people who had been isolated in the pandemic isolated from their communities, ruthlessly manipulated by extremists online.
How do you push back against the propaganda of the State, when it says that prisons are places of reform?
Bent Bars had direct knowledge of what was going on in prison through the letters of prisoners. Their Trans Prisoner survey the year before was sent to all the prisoners they knew who were trans or gender non-conforming. The answer came back that prisons were very violent spaces. There was physical violence but then there was also the violence of ‘not having access to healthcare’ (i.e. cross sex hormones).
Lamble isn’t keen on people who admit that prison reformed them. They didn’t have to go to prison to get housing and education. They could have got that on the outside.
Bartlett thought the statistic that Lamble had quoted at the beginning, e.g. 6 acts of self-harm every hour in prison, was a great take home for us ‘kids’. Use it to stop people in their tracks.
Wynter recommended that people read The Sun if they happen to come across one, as it was interesting to know what people think about queer communities and the ‘trans people we fucking love and adore’ (i.e. the Misters Uncut of Sisters Uncut). The media in the UK was very powerful and the left didn’t have much to go up against them. Though she was firmly on the left she found Novara Media ‘too academic’ (snort), whereas The Sun was very welcoming (i.e. uses language even she can understand). That was what they were fighting against.
What was the rate of self-harm outside of prisons, by comparison?
No one knew but Lamble was prepared to stick her neck out and say that it was unlikely to be even close to similar. I quite agree but the real question should be what was the rate of self-harm by those same people prior to incarceration, and I think we might find some levelling off. It underlined for me that they were incapable of having a nuanced conversation and that their policies are based on biased research and that’s without even getting into the mad propaganda.
Conclusion
It’s incredible that a discussion could be held in Oscar Wilde’s name with so few details about Wilde’s life, the crime he was convicted of, nor give any context in how those crimes and his subsequent punishment fitted in with punishments for other crimes at the time. After all transportation and execution for theft and rape had only ended fifty years earlier. But perhaps that’s why Bartlett made the comment that he did about using Wilde’s name to get people in through the door?
On the subject of Oscar Wilde, although there is no doubt he was a brilliant wit and writer, the truth is that into middle age he often sought out very young boys, as an article from The Federalist details. Particularly reprehensible is the case of taking advantage of (if we were to be generous enough not to call it rape) a 16 year old servant boy.
Grainger was a 16-year-old servant in the house where Wilde stayed during his visits to Oxford. During Wilde’s trial, Grainger testified that Wilde “placed his penis between my legs and satisfied himself.” Grainger went on to testify that while he was sleeping one night, Wilde woke him and “worked me up with his hand and made me spend into his mouth.” Wilde then told Grainger he would be in “very serious trouble” if anyone found out about their private liaisons.
From the article in the Federalist – It’s Time for the Left to stop Idolizing Oscar Wilde
According to this online article, the 1895 Gross Indecency law under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted was primarily intended to protect young girls trafficked into prostitution, but was expanded to include young boys, and many of the early prosecutions of male to male contacts involved boys aged 9 to 16, so it was not an anti-gay law as such but did have the consequence of covering adult homosexual activity, regardless of consent.
The Labouchere Amendment extended the act to include what it termed “gross indecency” between one male and another male. In practice, this was mainly used to protect young boys under the age of 16, but because there was no “age of consent” for homosexual acts, it also covered consenting adults. It therefore had the effect of covering all homosexual activity regardless of consent or age or acts in private.
From Rictor Norton – here
This was the kind of detail you might expect to hear in a museum space, but instead all we got was the hot air of blue-haired marxist-anarchists.
Queer Britain’s purpose, as set out in the Charities Commission (curiously no mission statement is apparent on their website), is below. Purpose 1 is interesting for a museum space:
The purpose is to establish and operate a museum, for the benefit of the public and primarily focused on the education of LGBTQI issues including: (1) The advancement of human rights, conflict resolution or reconciliation of religious or racial harmony or equality and diversity; (2) The advancement of the arts, culture, heritage or science; and (3) The advancement of education.
From the Charities Commission website
Personages on the advisory group include the current Stonewall UK chair Iain Anderson, Lord Michael Cashman and long time trans activist Christine Burns. One their Trustees is heterosexual trans-identified male Antonia Belcher. They also aren’t short of corporate sponsors, like Diageo, all of whom I suspect are members of the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index.
I would say it was a sad waste of an opportunity to educate but how can I when it was simply a propaganda session?
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The Lies They Tell 
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