I wasn’t surprised, then, by a recent study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence that revealed gay guys are much more afraid of prison rape than straight ones. I’d first seen it in college, shortly after agonizingly (and sloppily) losing my anal virginity, thereby swearing off my bottoming career for what’s going on two decades now. More than anything, though, my terror of being raped by a carousel of violent convicts stems from the Shawshank Redemption. Family Guy loves prison rape jokes, as do Get Hard, Let’s Go to Prison, Half Baked, Dave Chappelle, John Oliver and SpongeBob Squarepants. I credit my irrational, yet very real, fear of being raped in prison to a combination of things. In other words, I’m the guy they’ll rape first. He adds that someone like me would be better off in the warden’s office as a “trustee,” which means wearing all white and sycophantically shadowing prison guards so that they’ll protect you. “I just can’t see you being successful doing that,” Mark says, rightly, when I reach back out to him last week. Gangs are based on race, so as a Whiffenpoof ( third from left), my options were probably the Nazi Lowriders or the Aryan Brotherhood, both aligned with the hardcore Sureños Latino gang.
That’s why Mark advised me to promptly join a gang if I had ultimately been sentenced to prison (luckily, I was not).
