Within days of his first entering prison, the 23-year-old Rodney claimed he was the victim of three separate sexual assaults, involving five different inmates.
His account suggests that far from being a paradise, prison for gay men can be a living hell. He described a litany of brutal rapes, assaults, beatings and, eventually, the total abandonment of his male identity as his only means of survival in the hyper-masculine and often homophobic prison environment. One young man named Rodney, imprisoned for fraud and check-forging, sent me a detailed account of his life so far in prison. The reality of life in prison for homosexuals and transgender individuals does not appear to reflect this myth. His death sentence was later overturned (mostly because Burdine's public defender had slept through much of his trial), but the homophobic thinking – that prison is some kind of paradise for gay men – lingers on. After 17 minutes of deliberation, the jury obliged and sentenced Burdine to die. I n 1984, when Calvin Burdine was awaiting sentencing for allegedly stabbing his gay lover to death, the prosecuting attorney encouraged the jury in his closing remarks to award Burdine the death penalty, rather than life in prison, on the grounds that sending a gay man to prison was akin to sending a kid to a candy store.
