“I ’ll tell you what, we were
some tough faggots.”

-Ed Mead

untorelli press

Q

UEER FIRE
the george jackson brigade
men against sexism and
gay struggle against prison

Front Cover: Men Against Sexism members Ed Mead and Danny Atteberry walk
the tier of Big Red, the Intensive Security Unit at Walla Walla State Penitentiary.
Back Cover: Big Red in the aftermath of struggle.

QUEER ANTI-PRISON
STRUGGLE

q

Published by Untorelli Press
Bloomington, 2014

Bent Bars Project (uk)
http://www.bentbarsproject.org/
Black & Pink
http://www.blackandpink.org/
Free Niara
http://freeniara.wordpress.com/
Gender Anarky
http://www.genderanarky.wordpress.com/
Indiana Queer Prisoner Solidarity
http://indianaqps.noblogs.org/
Prisoner Correspondence Project (canada)
http://www.prisonercorrespondenceproject.com/
Prison Rebels Against Gender Violence
http://pragv.noblogs.org/
Tranzmission Prison Project
https://www.facebook.com/tranzmissionprisonproject

UNTORELLI PRESS

untorelli@riseup.net

untorelli.noblogs.org

RESOURCES

q
Concrete Mama: Prison Profiles from Walla Walla
- Ethan Hoffman, John McCoy
Creating a Movement with Teeth: A Documentary History of the
George Jackson Brigade - Danial Burton-Rose (editor)
Earful of Queer interview with Ed Mead
http://earfulofqueer.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/ed-mead-and-men-against-sexism/
Ed Mead interview on the Prison Industrial System
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doE9LMUdU3E
The Gentleman Bank Robber: The Life Story of Rita Bo Brown
http://gentlemanbankrobber.tumblr.com/
George Jackson Brigade Information Project
http://www.gjbip.org/
Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist
Underground of the 1970s - Daniel Burton-Rose
Metropolis: The George Jackson Brigade
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxZQQ4KuY24?

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
3
A BRIEF HISTORY OF
THE GEORGE JACKSON BRIGADE
from tides of flame

6

A SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by bo brown

14

SENTENCING STATEMENT
by bo brown

16

A SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by ed mead

20

IMPRISONED AND SEGREGATED
by ed mead

22

MEN AGAINST SEXISM

The New Abolitionists: (Neo)slave Narratives and Contemporary
Prison Writings - Joy James (editor)

by ed mead

That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (editor)

QUEERING THE UNDERGROUND
an interview with bo brown & ed mead
52

60

40

RESOURCES
60

59

oppose it; out of that came Out of Control. The lesbians who wanted to continue
doing prison work became Out of Control.
At the time no one was doing women’s prison work except for Legal
Services for Prisoners with Children. We decided that, because there were so
many of them, we had to focus on political women prisoners; information on the
conditions of women in prison would flow from them. We continue to produce a
newsletter, Out of Time; we do events in the lesbian and gay community; we send
in commissary money to political prisoners. There was no other newsletter on the
West Coast which covered women prisoners until California Coalition for Women
Prisoners started The Fire Inside in the late 1990s.
Amnesty International just produced Stonewalled: Police Abuse and
Misconduct Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People in the U.S. It
documents how the police beat us up and fuck us over continually. Things haven’t
changed in that arena and they’re not gonna change until we make them. We have to
pay attention to the prison-industrial complex because it impacts our community.
Ed Mead: The struggle for gay liberation can never take a backseat to anything,
but always at the forefront must be the class struggle. If power were all of a sudden
handed to a gay ruling class in America, the exploitative relationships would
continue. There would still be racism, class oppression, women’s oppression...the
only thing that would change is there would be less homophobia.

58

INTRODUCTION

q

I

t may seem strange for anarchists who approach struggle from an insurrectional
direction to be compiling writings by and about The George Jackson
Brigade. If we understand that power is diffuse, that guerrilla warfare is a
strategy of desperation and a dead-end, and that our goal is the generalization of
uncontrollability, then the urban guerrillas of the 1970s appear somewhat distant,
somewhat foreign. Sometimes admirable in their context. Sometimes horrifying and
authoritarian to their core. It seems, with most anarchists, there are two dominant
ways of viewing these groups: uncritical valorization and outright condemnation.
Both of these attitudes reek of ideological thought, and both stifle the intelligence
and creativity of revolt.
To make martyrs out of the urban guerrillas is to be filled with the spirit of
Christianity. Rather than understand the complexities of groups like The Weather
Underground, The Red Army Faction, The Red Brigades, etc, the fetishist only sees
the explosion, the shell casing, the youthful lips spitting fire at the bourgeoisie; in
short: struggle as spectacle. By this logic, extremity, economic damage, and militant
language trump strategy or the ability of the act to generalize. It does not matter
that many of these groups were authoritarian in their organization, practices, and
goals: the smoke and fire obscure the state-form lying in wait.
It is also easy to romanticize these revolutionary figures, separated as we
are by time. It is tempting, when revolt has taken a turn toward diffuse informality,
to look to these past groups as more coherent expressions of attack. Revolt now whether it is due to our strategy or our cowardice - generally takes more subtle forms
in the US. When we constantly come up against the problem of how exactly we are
to spread revolt, the fury of dynamite can seem appealing (and, let us not forget,
sometimes that fury is the best way to spread revolt). But these groups, in their
specialism, could not dynamite the separation between themselves and others. If we
look at where so many of these “heroes” of the guerrilla struggle ended up - college
professors, professionals, windbags who condemn any act of property destruction our romantic feelings take on a sick pallor.
3

These points - the critique of specialization, the condemnation of
authoritarian structure, the refusal of martyrdom - should not be confused with
the pretentious scoffing of the ideologue. Insurrectionary anarchists, despite their
retreat from fixed ideology, sometimes harbor their own moralities. In the minds
of many insurrectionists, the guerrilla, rather than being a hero, is a fool. No matter
their goals, their ways of organizing, the content of their writings. One need only
look at the hatred spewed by some anarchists for the diffuse guerrillas of the FAI
or CCF. In their self-righteousness, these anarchists have replaced critique of the
guerrilla form - a valid and necessary critique - with a flattening of reality, a dualism
of insurrectionist and guerrilla that, in its bitterness, cannot see its stupidity.
If we avoid the traps set by both the fetishists and the opponents of guerrilla
struggle, and if we study the histories of those struggles, we may equip ourselves
with more tools - both material and analytical - for our own, insurrectional, break
with the existent.
qqq
While certainly the new diffuse anarchist guerrilla differs from groups such as
the RAF or Weather Underground, one does find certain similarities with it and
the ELF, Canada’s Direct Action, UK’s Angry Brigade, and, to some extent, The
George Jackson Brigade. The anarchist elements in these latter groups were simply
not present in the vanguardism, Marxist-Leninist politics, and authoritarian
organizational forms of the former.
The George Jackson Brigade is an interesting case, as it contains a sort of
dual spirit. The group was made up of both Marxist-Leninist and anarchist members.
The Brigade’s major political statement - The Power of the People is the Force of Life
- even contains a written dialogue between the two groupings, exploring their
disagreements on revolutionary strategy.
The Brigade’s diversity extended beyond the political as well. The group
consisted of black and white members; gay, straight, and bisexual members; college
graduates and ex-cons. Where groups such as the Weather Underground were, by
and large, coming from the upper-middle class, Brigade members’ experiences gave
the group a more nuanced view of struggle. The struggle against prison was, from
the beginning, central to the Brigade’s activities, influenced, in no small part, by the
fact that members of the Brigade had been in and out of prison their entire lives.
The Brigade’s diversity, I would postulate, also contributed to its differences in tone
and content from other US guerrilla groups of the time. The ability to self-reflect (as
happened after the Brigade’s botched bombing of a Safeway store) can often take a
back seat to the revolutionary chest-thumping that one reads about in memoirs and
histories of groups like the Weather Underground.
Gender politics, too, played an integral role in the Brigade’s political and
4

personnel to go around and talk to the people who worked in banks and show them
pictures.
I left the shopping center and went down to the beach with my dog. I
came back up the hill through the parking lot to observe the traffic. I came up the
driveway by a hamburger joint which these guys were sitting in. They were on me
immediately. I looked in my rear view mirror and saw four guys crammed into a
black Ford Fairline, and I knew right away who they were. I started making turns,
going around blocks, and they did everything I did. I was trying to work my way
back to Highway 99 so I could go north. I was just going to drive to Canada, because
we were living very close to where I was, and I wanted to steer them away from the
others. I cut through a parking lot which turned out to have been blocked off since
I’d been through it last. I had to make a U-turn: I was trying to come out as they
were coming in. They threw down on me.
Daniel Burton-Rose: Ed, you’ve mentioned the organizing you did for gay rights in
prison. Bo, can you discuss your experiences as a lesbian political prisoner?
Bo Brown: I was a very different person than the people in general population. Part
of it had to do with age and experience; part of it with being principled. I was very
verbal about what I wouldn’t do, how I wouldn’t treat people. I didn’t use people
up; I hardly made any enemies. And I helped focus the local struggles.
Daniel Burton-Rose: You’ve remained active doing prison work. Please discuss
some of the projects you’ve been involved in since you were released from prison.
Bo Brown: Revolting Lesbians was the first group I became involved with after I got
out of prison. They were the leftist lesbian arm of the San Francisco Coalition, which
participated in the politics of the 1980s. In all the coalition meetings Revolting
Lesbians took the Revolutionary Communist Party to task for their homophobic
policies. The RCP stopped working in the coalition and wasn’t seen again until they
jumped on the Free Mumia bandwagon.
In the year I was involved, we did an educational on women in prison at
the Women’s Building. We produced a play I’d written called “The Bing,” which was
attended by a broad portion of the women’s community.
Daniel Burton-Rose: What are the origins of Out of Control Lesbian Committee
to Support Political Prisoners?
Bo Brown: In 1986, less than a year after I had gotten out of prison, the federal
Bureau of Prisons opened up the High Security Unit in Lexington, Kentucky. The
Unit was designed for three women political prisoners. We started a committee to
57

named Po from another group was killed while planting a bomb at that Safeway.
We had all participated in a Safeway boycott in support of the United Farm
Workers - the grape boycott. We had all written articles about Safeway adulterated
foods at inflated prices and about their control of the food chain, from the field to
the outlet; so Safeway was always a target. Once Po died we felt it was necessary to
finish the job. “Let’s finish what Po started.” It wasn’t our choice; he chose it as a
target. We felt compelled to make the lesson clear that when one fails, another will
come behind.
We put this operation together quite hurriedly. In the course of this, Bill
and Emily Harris and Patricia Hearst - all that was left of the Symbionese Liberation
Army - were busted in San Francisco. From that point, emotion drove us more than
reason or political consciousness. That was a big mistake.
We planted the bomb inside the store, rather than around the machinery
outside, which Po was trying to do. When we called Safeway to evacuate the store
the person who picked up the phone thought it was a joke and didn’t communicate
the fact that there was a bomb there. I called the police but it was too late. We were
very lucky not to have killed anybody. We did pelt some people with dog food - the
bomb was planted in a bag of it - so there were some injuries.
We criticized ourselves both in writing and in practice. That action was the
worst thing that we did.

organizational orientation. Feminist analysis of gender roles and affective labor and
queer analysis of heterosexuality contributed to the group’s commitment to gay and
women’s liberation. While this may seem a minor point to anarchists today, one
must look at its context to understand its importance. The other guerrilla groups
of the time pushed troubling political lines around gender: Andreas Baader’s
poisonous misogyny, Mark Rudd’s flagrant sexism, the Weather Underground’s use
of “sexual liberation” to both pressure both women and gay men into heterosexual
sex...the examples are endless.
So, though one may critique the Brigade’s strategic or organization choices,
to outright condemn them would mean losing a valuable historical reference point
in our own struggle against this world. In the Brigade, we find an open dialogue
about revolutionary strategy, an ethic of active and antagonistic women’s and gay
revolt, and a deep commitment to warfare against prison.
History cannot be abandoned to the cannibalistic “radicals” of the
universities, who see past revolt as a career opportunity. As with all things, history
can be a whetstone with which we sharpen our daggers for our present war
against the civilized order. I hope this publication can contribute in some way to
revolt against prison society, and to queer antagonist struggle. The weapons are
everywhere; the secret, as always, is to really begin.

Bo Brown: My two favorites were the one with Walla Walla and the Rainier banks,
because of all the connections it made and the way it got those guys out of the
hole, and the freeing of John Sherman. After the escape we issued our “International
Women’s Day” communiqué, which was printed in the daily paper.
It was hard to find targets that were understandable to a lot of people. It
was easy to find targets but not easy to find ones which make your point.
Daniel Burton-Rose: How did each of you get arrested?
Ed Mead: I was arrested in the course of an unsuccessful Brigade bank expropriation.
Bo Brown: I was arrested over a year and a half after Ed. We were scouting out a
bank, and I wanted to go inside the bank and have a look around because I was the
one who had to go in there. We were getting ready to take this whole damn bank,
instead of just one teller, so we didn’t have to spend all of our time trying to get
fucking money. We were going to try to get out of town - to fall back - because it
was getting kind of hot.
I went in the bank with a hundred dollar bill to make change. We didn’t
know that the FBI had begun a super-special GJB unit. We knew they’d doubled
the size of them, but we didn’t know that they’d quadrupled it, giving them the
56

5

A BRIEF HISTORY OF
THE GEORGE
JACKSON BRIGADE

q

T

he George Jackson Brigade (GJB) was an urban guerrilla group that operated
in Seattle from 1975 to 1978. The group was named after George Jackson,
an imprisoned Black Panther who had been killed at San Quentin Prison,
California, in 1971. The Brigade was composed of unemployed ex-convicts, exstudents, and working class communists and anarchists. Over half of the members
were women and half of the women in the group were lesbians. The group had no
leader and all decisions were made together.
The group’s first actions in the spring 1975 centered around a labor
struggle in Seattle. A local contractor had refused to hire black people, triggering a
popular campaign against the contractor. There were many pickets and blockades of
the contractor’s work-sites during which many people were arrested.
The media also extensively covered this popular struggle.
Finding it opportune to intervene in the struggle, the Brigade placed a
bomb at the contractor’s headquarters in the middle of the night, harming no one
while completely destroying the building. They also circulated a leaflet in the crowds
of demonstrators that criticized the struggle for making it center around race rather
than general unemployment. Later, the Brigade sabotaged construction equipment,
burned a truck, and damaged a CAT that belonged to the same racist contractor.
Due to the bombing, the contractor refused to testify against the protestors who
had been arrested during the pickets. The Brigade did not claim these actions, not
wanting to detract from the struggle or have their actions be labeled terrorism.
In June, Brigade members bombed the Department of Corrections
building in Olympia, expressing their solidarity with all of the prisoners in Walla
Walla State Prison. This was the first time that the Brigade claimed an action by
issuing a communiqué to the media and the public. In August, they then bombed
the FBI office in Tacoma and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Everett on the
same day. This was done in retaliation for the suppression of the American Indian
Movement by the FBI and BIA. These bombings went unclaimed.
By the end of the summer, after three successful actions, Brigade members
6

of the night and did $125,000 of damage to the building. We issued a communiqué
the next day demanding that the brutalization of the segregated prisoners in Walla
Walla be stopped. By drawing attention to what was happening in that isolated area
of the prison we effectively put an end to it. The correctional administration didn’t
want that kind of focus on their behavior. We would not have been able to affect
that change in the time that it needed to get done in any other way.
A second example also comes from the Washington State Penitentiary, and
that is the longest prisoner strike in Washington state history. It was a forty-seven
day strike. It was a major story in the newspapers, on the radio, and on television.
Everyone was covering this strike, but not once was a prisoner or a former prisoner
interviewed, or was there even any suggestion made that the prisoners might have a
valid justification for their behavior.
After more than forty days of the strike, the Brigade planted bombs in two
Rainier National Banks and issued a communiqué pointing out the interlocking
directorate between the banks and the Seattle Times. The communiqué went on
to say that, in the course of this major news story, not once had a prisoner been
interviewed, not once had the media made a pretense of even-handedness in their
coverage of the story. The Brigade said: “We’re going to keep bombing your banks
until you make some show of even-handedness.” The reporters didn’t want to
appear to be the one-sided hacks that they are so they interviewed a prisoner - one
in minimum security, I believe - but even that was enough to get the nature of what
was happening out.
Within a few days the strike was over. The Director of the Department
of Corrections was fired, the Superintendent of the prison was ousted, and the
Associate Superintendent of Custody was transferred. And we who called ourselves
“The Walla Walla Brothers” - I myself was in prison at this time, not with the Brigade
- were released from the segregation unit. We went on to create the Prisoners’ Justice
Committee and from that: Men Against Sexism.
Thirdly, when the FBI agents were killed at the Pine Ridge Reservation
in South Dakota, there was a massive invasion by U.S. Marshals and FBI agents
into both Pine Ridge and the Rosebud Reservations. A lot of brutality took place.
The Seattle Left protested this. One of the protests was a march from Seattle to
Portland. During the course of that march, in an effort to draw heat off of Pine
Ridge and Rosebud and onto ourselves, we bombed the FBI office in the federal
courthouse in Tacoma and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Everett.
There are a number of other actions that I’m particularly pleased with.
Another would be the bombing of an electrical transformer in the rich neighborhood
of Laurelhurst in support of striking City Light [Seattle’s public utility] workers,
which was an important struggle going on at that time.
The biggest mistake we made was the Capitol Hill Safeway bombing.
We had not planned to bomb the Capitol Hill Safeway store at all. Then someone
55

of the Attica Brothers1 was in town, we had a party for him. I - being the big, bad,
butchy thing that I am - got to go in a room with him and the other big bad guys
and have a very intense conversation. While I was in that room talkin’ about heavy
shit, the mother fuckin’ movement lawyer was hitting on my girlfriend at the party!
He wouldn’t listen to her tell him: “Back off !”
We started using the basement of the Metropolitan Community Church
to have lesbian dances, we were seeing more and more of us. A hundred people
would come to these dances: That’s a lot!
Daniel Burton-Rose: The Weather Underground had a period when they dictated
homosexuality to their members, but the Brigade was unique in the underground
in being constituted primarily of gay and bisexual people. How did that element of
the Brigade affect your practice?
Bo Brown: The rumors which we heard about other groups active at the time was
that everybody had to fuck everybody, on demand. These poor guys, you know, just
couldn’t survive without getting their rocks off, so they could call up on anybody.
We said: “Fuck you, that ain’t happenin’!” If you want our support you have to get
your own fucking rocks off. [laughs]
Ed Mead: Women’s liberation was seen by a lot of men in that period as free sex.
Another common expression of sexism in the movement were organizations in
which the big male leaders transmitted the dogma line to the woman sitting at the
typewriter. The Brigade wasn’t like that.
Daniel Burton-Rose: What are the Brigade actions you are most proud of and the
ones which you consider the most problematic?
Ed Mead: Three acts were especially good. The first one was when the administration
at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla ended the prisoner selfgovernment experiment, prisoners responded by taking over sections of the prison
and taking hostages. That rebellion was forcibly repressed, and the leaders were
placed in segregation. While in the segregation unit they were brutalized. The type
of brutalization was similar to that which occurred several years later, when guards
used lead-lined gloves to beat prisoners, when they pulled one prisoner out of his
cell and shoved a riot baton up his ass, creating a 5/8” tear.
In response, the Brigade broke into the headquarters of the Washington
Department of Corrections and planted a pipebomb there. It went off in the middle
1

“The Attica Brothers” refer to the men who survived the largest prison rebellion
in United States history: Lasting from September 9-13, 1971, the revolt in upstate New
York was put down in a massacre that left 34 people dead. The Attica Brothers who visited
Seattle in the early 1970s were John Hill and Frank “Big Black” Smith.

54

were joyous and hopeful. All of their actions had been carefully planned and
executed, harming no one and resonating with the public. With the Brigade, Seattle
had joined the armed international struggle against capitalism. It seemed as if the
summer of 1975 was to mark the beginning of a new offensive.
But life is chaotic, filled with traps, and always eager to test the bold. One
evening in September, a young man not affiliated with the Brigade attempted to
arm a bomb at the Capitol Hill Safeway. At the time, Safeway was far more corrupt
and exploitative of immigrant farm workers than it is today and had become a
target for protests, pickets, and arson across the US. That night, the young man
blew himself up while arming the bomb. Hearing the news of his death, the Brigade
immediately planned their revenge. Unlike their previous actions, their plans were
rushed. A timed bomb was placed in a bag of dog food at the Capitol Hill Safeway,
and members quickly telephoned in to the police and told them to evacuate the
store. Hoping to make the GJB out to be monsters, the police did not call Safeway
and have them evacuate the store. The bomb went off, causing minor injuries to
several customers.
This disaster plagued the hearts of the Brigade members. The rest of the
fall and winter of 1975 was spent locked in self-criticism. What was meant to reflect
the general distrust and anger felt by the neighborhood towards the Safeway had
instead harmed poor people from the same neighborhood. Their hasty planning
was one factor that caused these injuries. It would not be until New Year’s Day of
1976 that the Brigade would act again.
In attempting the practice self-criticism with their actions, they bombed
the Safeway regional headquarters in Bellevue, harming no one. On the same night,
the Brigade bombed a City Light substation that supplied power to the wealthy
Laurelhurst neighborhood, completely destroying it. At the time, City Light
workers were on strike against the company, and they staged a picket around the
ruins, fighting off the scab workers who City Light had paid to repair it. After the
failure of the Capitol Hill bombing, the Brigade found its actions supported and
appreciated by working class people. The group had struck two exploiters in one
night and the reasons why could not be any clearer.
Unfortunately, one of the Brigade members was to be murdered by the
police three weeks later during a bank robbery in Tukwila. Two others members
of the group were captured during the robbery, while the rest of the Brigade had to
shoot their way out of the ambush. In March, while one of the prisoners was being
taken to a doctor’s appointment, the group attacked his police guards and freed
him. In the process, a guard was shot and wounded. After the prisoner liberation,
the group retreated into rural Oregon to regroup after their defeat. It would not be
until 1977 that the group would rise again. But that is a different story.
On March 10, 1976, members of the George Jackson Brigade liberated
their comrade John Sherman from police custody. Sherman had been arrested along
7

with Ed Mead during a bank robbery in Tukwila several weeks earlier. The police
had attacked the Brigade as they left the bank, shooting John Sherman in the jaw
and ultimately killing Bruce Siedel. As the police put their captured comrades in
the police cars, the Brigade continued to fire on the police until finally making their
escape.
The Brigade had nearly made off with 43,000 dollars, money that was
desperately needed in order to continue to operate clandestinely. At that time, bank
robberies were a common method used by guerrilla groups internationally to fund
their activities.
John Sherman was being taken from the King County Jail to Harbourview
Medical Center for a doctor’s appointment when he was liberated by the Brigade.
During the liberation, the Brigade shot the cop guarding Sherman and escaped. To
claim this action, the Brigade mailed a bullet from the same gun used at the bank
robbery to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on International Women’s Day. They also
sent the wiring from John Sherman’s wounded mouth to a local radio station. After
this, the Brigade disappeared into rural Oregon, taking time to heal, mourn, and
critically analyze their actions.
The Brigade had just lost two of its members. Ed Mead was in Walla Walla
State Prison and Bruce Siedel was dead. Both of these men had been lovers of other
Brigade members and had lived intensely and intimately with them for months.
The wound that was in all of their hearts was deep as they settled into a slow, banal
existence in the towns of rural Oregon. Many people in these towns helped them,
some knowingly, others unknowingly. Liberating their friend had drained all
of their meager resources and the Brigade was forced to learn a new level of selfreliance.
While they were in hiding, a Grand Jury was convened and many leftists
and militants in Seattle were called in to testify about what they knew of the George
Jackson Brigade. While still in hiding, the group mailed a handwriting sample to
the media in order to clear the name of a woman whom the authorities said had
signed one of the Brigades communiqués. Some leftists cooperated with the Grand
Jury, others refused and were jailed, and the entire Seattle left was put under intense
repression for months.
In the midst of the repression, the FBI framed and imprisoned an antiprison activist by paying a junky to say that the activist had participated in Brigade
action. The FBI later gave the junky a new identity. During this time period, Ed
Mead was sentenced to multiple life sentences for his involvement with the Brigade.
Despite the repression, the Grand Jury was eventually defeated, having come up
with nothing and being legally required to dissolve.
Knowing that they had to continue taking action, Brigade members began
to assemble tools and equipment. Soon they launched a new robbery campaign
to raise funds for their next offensive. After coming up with 25,000 dollars, while
8

I started reading a variety of political material. There was a Gay Community
Center. It seemed like there were thousands of dykes living on Capitol Hill. There
was a circle which developed out of the Capitol Hill lesbian community which
participated in the mass politics of the time.
Daniel Burton-Rose: What about you, Ed?
Ed Mead: I’d had a few homosexual experiences in the course of my life, but I always
identified as heterosexual. I wobbled back and forth over the spectrum between
homosexual and heterosexual. Bo’s the one who turned me out. [laughs] On a trip
down to Oregon together we had a long talk. I got the idea from her that men in
the Brigade - and men in the movement in general - needed to be looking to each
other to meet their emotional and sexual needs. Only then would we stop draining
women’s energies so that women could develop their own strengths and abilities.
We started implementing those changes within the Brigade, but where it
really came to fruition was at the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla in
the development of Men Against Sexism, which confronted prisoner-on-prisoner
rape, the buying and selling of prisoners by other prisoners. I identified myself as
a political faggot: someone who had sexual relationships with men, not necessarily
because I lusted after them, but because it was the correct thing to do. At that
time, I considered this something which would help my development and help the
development of other people in the group. In essence, the idea was that, as a male,
you couldn’t call yourself anti-sexist unless you had sucked a dick.
I threw myself into the gay community. I wrote articles for Gay Community
News out of Boston, got my ears pierced and wore lavender star earrings inside the
Penitentiary, grew my hair long and didn’t take no shit. I was a pistol-packin’ faggot.
It was a whole new idea of what it meant on the inside to be a faggot. We can be
tough. You think you can push us around? We’ll put an immediate stop to that.
Daniel Burton-Rose: To what extent had you two encountered homophobia on
the Left before the advent of the Brigade?
Bo Brown: The Seattle Liberation Coalition, an umbrella group of Left-oriented
organizations in the city which had come out of the anti-war movement, couldn’t
say the word “lesbian.” They could not say the word “lesbian,” in anything that they
said, and any position they took. They could barely say “women.”
We were part of the political community, but we were always being
disrespected and ignored. We were doing the prison work, we were doing the
community work. There was a big housing and welfare rights struggle which
lesbians were involved in in Cascade - where a group of them lived because it was
cheap. But they never got any respect, they never got acknowledgement. When one
53

QUEERING THE
UNDERGROUND

an interview with bo brown

q

& ed mead

Daniel Burton-Rose: When did you first encounter the idea of gay liberation?
Bo Brown: In a bar! Where else? [laughs] After Stonewall, people from the Gay
Liberation Front came to the West Coast. They put up fliers in the bars; they
wanted to talk to everybody. Me and some other people I hung out with in the bars
were curious so we went over to where they were speaking. We didn’t understand
a goddamned thing they were saying. They were speaking a foreign language,
essentially; they used a lot of political language that isn’t spoken by people every
day. What they were saying didn’t catch on. Then they took it to colleges where it
was a little more popular.
Daniel Burton-Rose: When did you first start to understand gay oppression as an
integral part of capitalism?
Bo Brown: Over time. After I paroled from federal prison in 1971, I enrolled in
Seattle Central Community College. In a printing class I met a dyke who said,
“women ain’t chicks” and started explaining sexism and homophobia to me. I went
to an International Women’s Day event at the University of Washington. There was
a workshop about women prisoners. The presenters were so social workery that I
got pissed off and said: “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!” Instead
of being irritated, they drew me out, they got me talkin’, then they asked: “Do you
want to do this workshop?” I said: “Yeah!” So I did.
At the University of Washington there was a school release program where
prisoners from the state penitentiary in Walla Walla lived in a dorm on campus while
on parole. The prisoners - all men - had a little speakers’ bureau. They visited all the
colleges in the area and talked about prison issues. I started going around with them;
I became the only woman that they had. Out of that I met all these other women. A
prison group developed at the community college, then the women split from the guy
who was running it and started our own group which went to the women’s prison.
52

also using false checks to purchase food and other necessities, the group left rural
Oregon and returned to the Seattle area. Once there, they settled into a clandestine
routine and began to plan for their next attack against the global capitalist system.
On May 12, 1977, the Brigade placed two bombs in two Rainier National
Bank branches in Bellevue. This action was done to support the prison strike that
had recently taken place inside Walla Walla State Prison.
The strike had arisen in response to the lengthy sentences in isolation holes
and the psychiatric behavior modification programs that were in practice at the
prison. At the time, it was the longest prison strike in Washington State.
When the strike had ended, there had been assurances from the
Department of Corrections that the barbaric practices at the prison would stop.
Over time, many people saw that the assurances had been empty, with very little
changing in the prison. The Brigade bombed the Bellevue bank branches because
of the bank’s financial ties to the Seattle Times newspaper. The paper had been
printing articles that condemned and demonized the prisoner strike.
This is how the second offensive of the George Jackson Brigade began in
the summer of 1977. With the memories of their fallen and captured comrades still
in their hearts, the group pressed on in their efforts.
After their bombing of two Rainier National Bank branches, the next
action of the Brigade was to acquire more money. Obviously, living a clandestine
life did not permit them to earn money slowly, and large sums were necessary to
rent houses, build bombs, drive cars, and buy food. On May 21st, 1977, the Brigade
robbed the Newport Hills state liquor store near Bellevue. During the robbery, the
Brigade was forced to take the manager’s wallet because it was in the same bag as the
1,300 dollars they had stolen. The next day, the Brigade mailed the wallet back to
the manager with all of her personal money (about 45 dollars) still inside.
On June 20th, 1977, the brigade robbed a Rainier National Bank near
Bellevue, continuing in their pattern of stealing from where the richest people lived.
They fled the bank with 4,200 dollars. In a communiqué issued after the robbery,
the Brigade took credit for their actions and reminded the reader that Rainier
National Bank was specifically targeted because of its financial ties to the Seattle
Times. The paper had been printing misinformation about the prison struggle
taking place at the Walla Walla State Penitentiary, the place where Brigade member
Ed Mead was locked up. In the same communiqué, the Brigade told the reader that
all of the money would be used to carry out further actions. True to their statement,
the Brigade acted in less than two weeks.
Unfortunately, chaos got the best of the Brigade during the action. On
July 3rd, the night before the nationalist orgy of Independence Day, the Brigade
drove down to Olympia where they placed a triple pipe bomb near an electrical
transformer adjacent to the Capitol Building. They called in a warning, instructing
the authorities to clear the area in half an hour. When half an hour passed and there
9

had been no explosion, the police searched for the bomb, found it, and eventually
diffused it. In a communiqué explaining the intention of the planned attack, the
Brigade said their bombing attempt had been for the prisoners in Walla Walla who
were still being thrown into long periods of isolation. By August of that summer, the
warden had been replaced and the prisoners taken out of solitary confinement.
Fall was approaching when Rita Brown, dressed as a man, walked into an
Old National Bank, handed the teller a note indicating she had a gun, and walked
out with 1,100 dollars. Eleven days later, on September 19th, again dressed in
drag, she handed a note to a teller at a People’s National Bank on 76th Avenue.
The note read simply: THIS IS A HOLD UP. I HAVE A GUN. THE GEORGE
JACKSON BRIGADE. She walked out of the bank with 8,200 dollars, more
money than the Brigade had ever stolen. With nearly 10,000 dollars, the Brigade
planned its next campaign.
Machinists from various auto workers unions were on strike and picketing
car dealerships. Brigade members joined the picket lines, had conversations, and
decided that the rank and file unionists wouldn’t disapprove of an attack on the
dealerships. Their first bomb didn’t go off, but on October 12th, they successfully
detonated a bomb at the S.L. Savidge car dealership. The Brigade made sure to
clearly state in a communiqué that they were in no way connected with the unions
and were acting independently. Three days later, the group bombed two vehicles at
a Dodge dealership. Three days after this, over 80 cars at a Ford Dealership had their
tires slashed by anonymous individuals, causing over 5,000 dollars in damages. The
Brigade was not responsible for this last action, so it is clear that the Brigade was
correct in assuming that rank and file unionists supported clandestine sabotage.
Meanwhile, in Germany, another urban guerrilla group called the Red
Army Faction (RAF) caused an international scandal. In April of 1977, three
members of the RAF were found guilty of murder and imprisoned. That September,
elements of the RAF kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer, the president of the
Employers’ Association of the Federal Republic. Schleyer had been a member of the
Nazi Party and the SS during WWII. As a respected businessman in post-war West
Germany, Schleyer represented the hypocrisy, blindness, and unbroken fascism of
German democracy. The RAF stated that they would not release Schleyer unless
their comrades were freed from prison.
The German government did not respond to these demands, and so on
October 16th, a commando of Palestinian comrades hijacked a Lufthansa plane,
saying they would only release their hostages in exchange for the RAF prisoners.
The plane eventually landed in Somalia to refuel where it was raided by German
Special Forces. Three of the hijackers were killed and all of the hostages were freed.
The next morning, the RAF prisoners were found dead their cells. The authorities
claimed that they had killed themselves, but it was commonly understood that
the prisoners had been executed. Seeking revenge, the RAF drove Hanns Martin
10

H

FREE Al l.
L PRISONERS
ICA
POLIT

Ed Mead in Walla Walla’s “Big Red” security unit. From Concrete Mama:
Prison Profiles from Walla Walla by Ethan Hoffman & John McCoy

51

vested interest in the status quo; their candy scam and other schemes were needed
to support their growing heroin addiction. Their narrow self-interests led them
to a consistent pattern of opportunism and collaboration with the pigs. Their old
pattern of having love-hate relationships with their captors continued from their
seg days.
During this time period there was an incident in which the Chicano
Club made a move on one of the joint’s most attractive gays, a feminine appearing
homosexual I’ll call Sally. Sally was not a member of MAS and was one of the few
gays who had not contributed anything toward the building of the group. The
leadership of the Chicanos, who were allied with the Lifer’s, said Sally had to leave
the man she was living with by choice and move into one of their cells. They would
not see reason. I called an emergency MAS meeting. With members assembled in
our office, I explained the situation, saying we were going to fight and probably
kill people, but did not of course tell them we had a revolver, eighty rounds of
ammunition, and three homemade hand grenades. They probably thought we had
knives.
Mark, Danny, and I were going to walk into the Chicano Club and start
killing people. We had the gun and bombs with us. The members would march
to the Chicano Club with us and wait outside while we took care of business on
the inside. The membership did not know the true extent of the violence we were
about to wage. We did not talk long. As we were getting ready to march, Blue said
he wanted to give the Chicanos one more chance. We told him to be quick. He was.
Upon his return he told us the situation was resolved. We packed up our weapons
and went home. I never asked Blue what he told them. I didn’t care. There was a
near certainty in my mind that we would kill several people that afternoon. I saw it
as necessary to deliver the message that rape and slavery would not be tolerate. I was
fully prepared to write that message in the blood of my fellow prisoners. We escaped
committing mass murder on that particular day, but there was always tomorrow.
During this event it was necessary to make bombs and to gather materials to
make more. We briefly stored some empty pipe casings in Sally’s cell. We would later
learn that she reported this fact to the pigs. We were prepared to kill and perhaps die for
her right not to be forced into sexual slavery, and she rewarded us by turning us in to the
administration. This kind of thing happened more than once. Those were the ups and
downs of organizing Men Against Sexism. I was subsequently transferred out-of-state
for about five years, then served my last ten years at a prison complex outside Monroe,
Washington. During that ten-year period there was not a single prisoner-on-prisoner
rape at Monroe, nor did I hear of any happening at other facilities within the state.
And I kept an ear pretty close to the ground for that sort of thing. I’m sure some rapes
happened, but if so it was nothing like the brutality and volume that existed within the
state prior to Men Against Sexism.
50

Schleyer into the woods, shot him in the head, and told the media where they could
find the dead Nazi.
To express their international solidarity with the RAF, the Brigade
bombed a Phil Smart Mercedes Benz dealership in Bellevue on November 1st. The
dealership was chosen because Schleyer was formerly president of Daimler Benz,
the manufacturer of Mercedes Benz cars. Two days after this action, the Brigade
released its 40 page political statement, The Power of the People Is the Force of Life,
a text that details all of their exploits in their own words. Inspired by the actions of
the RAF, the Brigade’s next plan was to kidnap the director of the Department of
Social and Health Services, the person who oversaw all Washington prisons. Their
plans were underway when the unthinkable happened. Rita Brown was captured,
the group fled Seattle, and fear began to dominate the group’s minds.
Those who truly rebel, who fight with all their hearts, always risk the most.
They risk their lives, their loves, their liberty. And so it was that the small group of
rebels was reduced down to three.
Janine Bertram, John Sherman, and Therese Coupez listened to a police
scanner as the authorities captured their comrade Rita Brown on November 4th,
1977. They immediately fled their safe house in North Seattle and found their way
to a new house on a hill overlooking Tacoma. In a communiqué issued after their
comrade’s capture, the Brigade wrote, “We learn a thousand times more from defeat
than we do from a victory. This is true, but only to the extent that we make it true
in our practice. And we will make it true because we love you, and we love freedom,
and because we are part of the masses of people and a handful of sleazy capitalists
and their lackeys are not a match for us. So take care of yourself and hold on. Victory
is certain.”
Rita’s lover, Janine, was devastated by the capture. In their new safe house,
Janine wrote to her lost love in her diary. John and Therese, a straight couple, offered
her little emotional support. “When I say I want you, I’m told I’m sniveling. Fuck,
don’t need that support,” she wrote. The group tried to keep itself disciplined but
instead began to devour itself. After a bank robbery, John mysteriously lost a large
sum of their stolen funds. “Wonder which of them it is that disposed of $150.” John
had a gambling problem and constantly lied about what he did with the group’s
money.
After their robbery, the group did little but read, go to the movies, and
abuse drugs to mask the pain of their loss. “It is hard to keep a clear view of the
necessity of this work when I am completely isolated. Snivel...not a friend in the
world,” Janine wrote. Eventually the money dried up, some of it spent on rent and
food, some of it squandered on gambling and drugs. The group decided to rob
another bank on December 8th, 1977. “Am scared shitless. I don’t think I’ll lose my
shit,” Janine wrote before the robbery. Luckily, the group was able to get away with
$3,966 from a Tacoma bank. A few days later, some trusted comrades came from
11

Seattle with gifts, comfort, and encouragement from the above-ground movement.
John continued to gamble money, coming back to the safehouse one night
missing $800 dollars. Janine and Therese confronted him, but Janine was passive
and could only listen as Therese and John yelled at each other. When Janine began
to express criticism of John to Therese, she angrily defended her male lover. This
only increased Janine’s isolation, but luckily a group of women from Seattle came
to visit her. “Many women are sending you white light,” she wrote in her diary to
Rita. Indeed, the women’s community in Seattle was supporting Rita. In addition
to this, the visiting women helped Janine attempt to learn meditation techniques
that would allow her to contact Rita psychically. In her diary, Janine described her
psychic connections growing more powerful.
On December 23rd, the group planted a bomb at a Puget Sound Power &
Light substation in Tukwila. They called in a warning and twenty minutes later the
bomb exploded, harming no one. In their communiqué, the group said the action
was intended to “protest the criminal and inhuman conditions at the King County
Jail.” Their captured comrade Mark Cook had been kept in isolation at the County
Jail for twenty one months and the communiqué encouraged everyone to do what
they could to end this type of treatment.
The next day, a woman called KOMO TV and told the operator that a
bomb would go off at a truck company in fifteen minutes. The bomb exploded,
destroying one car. In a communiqué issued after the bombing, the Brigade said
the action was in solidarity with auto workers who were still on strike. The local
machinists’ union representative disowned the attacks, but the Brigade maintained
its faith in the rank and file workers.
John continued to waste away money and the two women forbid him
from going out. He didn’t listen to them, and Janine began to dream of her and Rita
beating the crap out of him. With her group falling apart, Janine began to doubt
the armed struggle, herself, and her dreams. After a random bank robber began
shooting at police during a botched escape, was shot in leg, and yet continued to
fire until he was captured, Janine wrote “that takes courage or insanity.” On January
10th, the Brigade robbed another bank, making off with $2,518.
On January 11th, Rita Brown pleaded guilty to her charges. This made
Janine sad and confused. “It’s good you said yer glad you did it, but people associate
guilty with wrong.” The group continued to disintegrate, unable even to play a
board game without fighting. On January 20th a group of above-ground comrades
visited and brought Rita’s full statement to the court. It refreshed and rejuvenated
Janine to see that her lover was still defiant and strong.
One month later, Rita Brown was sentenced to twenty five years.
After robbing a bank in University Place for $1,899, the Brigade received
a communiqué from a group called the “Coven.” This was an above-ground group
and in their text they applauded some actions of the Brigade and criticized others.
12

three months. Now we were official. We were given a meeting space, which just
happened to be the air-conditioned offices of some counselors who’d moved to
another area of the prison. We thought we were in fat city. MAS was the first openly
gay prisoner’s organization to be officially recognized by the prison administration.
As far as I know, no such group has been so recognized since then. Our organized
existence was the result of our determination as a group, the pre-AIDS era in
which we existed, the strength of our community support, the good work we’d
done on the inside, and, of course, the existence of the then relatively liberal prison
administration. What official sanctioning meant to us, in addition to having a nice
office to work from, was that we could once again invite our outside guests back
into the prison. And bring them in we did. We’d have good meetings in our new
office, with lots of singing together, hugs, and general closeness. One thing we did
not do, however, is have sex in the office. There was always pressure from the social
gays to exploit what we’d gained, using guests to smuggle drugs for us, or to turn
tricks for the population in the club’s office. We always had to guard against these
opportunistic tendencies.
Prison is always a terrible place to be. But within the context, the degree
of terribleness can vary considerably from day to day. On some days, particularly
when MAS was doing well, the relative level of pain was not too great. At times we
were almost happy. At other times the fear and tension were so heavy in the air that
we never knew from one hour to the next if we’d continue to live. There would be
senseless killings, racial conflicts, and other forms of violence. It was during one of
these oppressive periods that Andy raped a young kid in the Lifer’s office. Rape had
all but stopped taking place, and now here it was again, being rubbed in our faces
by our old Lifer foes. I began to wonder if the sickness of this place would ever be
changed. We took the rape victim into our cell, as Mark’s bunk was still empty.
Joe, Danny, and I all tried to help heal him. I had a talk with Andy, who I found
lounging about in front of the Lifer’s Club. When I confronted him over the rape,
he lied to me, saying the incident did not happen. Now what? I’d talked to the
kid and knew all the intimate details surrounding the rape; I’d seen the youngster’s
bruises. He had no motivation to lie. I was still inadequately armed for a showdown
with Andy and the growing gang of killer dope fiends who ran the Lifer’s.
When tension built up in seg [segregation unit], I would try to aim or
direct prisoner anger against their captors and to educate them about the nature of
their real enemies. Our cell tried to do the same thing with the whole population.
The drug dealing and murders were getting out of hand. MAS would escort older
prisoners to and from the inmate store to keep them from being robbed by these
narcotic users, but others were victimized. It was going to take more than a finger
in the dike to slow this flood of predatory behavior. We organized a prisoner work
strike, putting all our effort into making it a success, only to discover that Kevin
and Andy had become the administration’s first line of defense. They threw a
49

matters, like rearming ourselves and getting out of prison. We also started to do
some serious work on a new escape plan.
There was always a high level of tension at the Walls. People were
unceremoniously tossed out of their cells, for one reason or another, and no other
cells were willing to take them in. There were frequent fights; stabbings took place
often; and occasionally these would lead to a death. Often the death could have
been avoided had it not been for the incompetence of the prison’s medical staff.
I’ll give you a brief example. On May 23, 1978, a black prisoner named Robert
Redwine was stabbed in the side by one or more of his fellows. The stabbing was
over nothing of consequence – another senseless act of violence. The victim went
to the prison hospital where he was given a cursory examination by a doctor who
diagnosed the wounds as “superficial.” The treatment did not include the standard
practice of x-rays or probing the depths of the wounds. Redwine was sewn up and
then locked in a hospital isolation room and left alone. After a while, the victim
started to protest by banging on the solid door at the front of his room and yelling
for help from the hospital staff. His demands attracted the attention of one of the
hospital porters, an inmate who inquired about the problem. Redwine told the
porter that he was in pain and needed to see someone on the medical staff. When
the porter delivered this information to the chief nurse, Eva Nelson, he was told to
ignore the victim’s cries, as he was only “playing for drugs.” The victim’s cries went
unanswered until hours later he lay dead. He died alone and ignored, from internal
bleeding.
Anyway, our collective response to the ongoing prisoner-on-prisoner
violence was to re-arm ourselves. Although largely unspoken, there was a clear sense
of agreement that if our enemies attacked any one of us, the survivors would launch
an immediate counterattack on the aggressors. We still had potentially deadly
problems with the new leadership of the Lifer’s Club. While we were physically
out of the Lifer’s, few believed our contradiction between Kevin, Andy, and their
henchmen, on the one hand, and us on the other, was even close to being resolved.
The gap between us was not measured by the mere yardstick of their tossing us out
of the club or the pulling of knives on Mark and Danny, but by the resurgence of
rapes, heroin use, murder, drug dealing, and gangsterism that characterized their
stewardship of the Lifer’s. Not only did they loot the club’s treasury, use the place
for a heroin shooting gallery, and mercilessly exploit and terrorize the membership,
they ultimately left the beautiful Lifer’s Park paved over. Thanks to their later escape
attempt and getting caught concealing weapons in the park, the administration
destroyed the only island of tranquility in the whole sea of violent turmoil.
After many long months of work, including the submission of numerous
proposals, revisions of those proposals, pressure from outside supporters, the dogged
persistence of MAS workers, and the passage of time, the prison administration
finally sanctioned our organization. We’d been on the breezeway for about two or
48

They encouraged more dialogue between the underground and the above-ground,
citing a lack of it in the group’s actions. Both aspects of the struggle were necessary,
but there needed to be more communication. The Brigade did not answer this
communiqué immediately, but eventually invited some comrades to the house
to begin to formulate a new strategy. Soon after this, the group was destroyed.
Surrounded in their car, parked next to a burger joint, the three were captured by
the FBI just as they were to rob a bank on March 21st, 1978. The group was only as
strong as much as its members loved and trusted each other. Love broke comrades
out of jail and propelled the group down the freeway after a bank robbery. Trust
kept the group happy, motivated, and courageous. As soon as the group began to
turn on itself, its days were numbered.

13

A SHORT
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by bo brown

q

I

turned 30 on October 14th and have discovered my first grey hairs in recent
weeks. I grew up in Klamath Falls, a redneck Weyerhauser town in rural
Oregon; my parents fled the poverty of the South a couple of years before I
was born. I have one sibling who lives in that same town, raises a family and works
for that same mill. My mom was a passive, nagging, battered wife and my dad an
uneducated, insecure alcoholic most of my life. They have both made huge changes
in their lives in more recent years. I started working outside the home about age 14;
my first encounter with the police was age 16 about a stolen car. Luckily, the owner
dropped the charges - his daughter (my lover) was also joy riding. As far as I knew
we were the only queers in the world and I had never heard of a clitoris. My parents
took out a small loan and sent me to a small local business college. They did this
because I was good in school and it was all they could do. I transferred to the Salem
branch where I graduated with accounting and IBM skills. Almost got kicked out of
the dorm for a hot romance with a wonderful womyn; we never made it to bed and
she had to stay there so I called them a bunch of liars and squeaked by.
I moved to Seattle in ’68 where a lifetime/school/neighborhood male
friend lived. He helped me learn the city and eat - no strings attached and certainly
no sex. Got a job in a bank balancing the savings department to a computer, that
lasted nine months and then I got hired by the Post Office. I discovered the gay bars
and went through changes with my bi-sexual lover (the same one from high school)
until she finally split, then I became a working class bar butch dyke. I drank a lot, got
even tougher and went to work every day for over a year.
Eventually there was another lover; we lived closer to the hippie-dopers
and tripped out frequently, I “came out” verbally at the job. There were other queers
there and we were pretty strong and took care of one another even though we never
organized as such. All through this period I had several more encounters with the
police mostly around traffic violations and once for shoplifting. I’d always hear
stories in the bars and see bruises on the people who’d been in various police hassles
- mostly because they were queer. The police were still kicking in and tearing up
14

The lifers were being agitated by two dope fiends, who I will continue to
call Kevin and Andy, both of whom were in Curtis’s rape pack in segregation, and
who later stabbed that wanna-be boss rapist. Kevin and Andy agitated for the need
to take the club back from the ‘niggers and faggots’ (my inside lover and many of
my friends and MAS members were black). Kevin was going to run for the office
of Lifer president, and with Andy helping to stir things up, it did not take me long
to see that the Lifer population was going to vote for Kevin. And it was also clear
that once elected he would kick MAS out of the Lifer’s Club. On the surface all
was civil and polite, but beneath the surface the struggle was waging. The day-today pressure of this polite-to-your-face-stab-you-in-the-back became too much for
Tommy. One night he and his two sidekicks went to the pigs and offered to hand
over our shotguns and shells in exchange for a transfer to what was then a kids’ joint
at Shelton. The administration agreed. They were gone the next morning, as were
our guns and ammunition. So there was MAS, weaponless and, by default, the only
ones left in the Lifer’s Club.
There’s an old Kenny Rogers song about gambling that has a line saying
“you got to know when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em…” It was time for MAS to
fold ‘em, to pack our bags, and to move from the flesh comfort of the Lifer’s Club
and back to the harsh realities of existence on the breezeway. Nearly all the thirty or
so MAS members came with me. Danny, Blue, and Mark, most of the leadership,
stayed behind. They were not going to run in the face of danger. They were not
concerned with whether it was right or wrong for us to be there or whether it was
politically right for us to take a step back before advancing again. Mark and Danny
were soon driven out of the Lifer’s Park at knifepoint, with the loss of much face in
the process. Blue quit MAS and became a part of the new Lifer’s clique, or at least
he was tolerated by them.
MAS went back to seeking sanctioning and its own meeting space. I gave
up the position of MAS president, turning the job over to a more “respectable”
person, a guy more likely to win the recognition than my friends and I would have
been. Buying and selling of weaker prisoners had been stopped, and rape had gone
from a traditional test of manhood to an occasional incident. An unarmed MAS
would do fine, and most of us would continue to be active in the group’s meetings
and activities. What was permitted to develop was little more than a social club for
gays. MAS started working on inoffensive projects like collecting newspapers for
recycling, doing sewing and mending jobs for the population, and generally putting
forward a harmless face.
Some thought we should have fought Kevin and Andy over control of
the Lifer’s Club, but most of MAS’s membership consisted of nonlifers who didn’t
belong there anyway. Besides, I did not want to hurt anyone else. And the bottom
line was that we were unarmed and without allies. After the Lifer’s experience, the
old MAS leadership, Danny, Mark, and I, quietly turned our attention to other
47

come to that. Still, like any leader, he could always use additional strength. Tommy
liked having sex with men and wanted more political and military strength. MAS
consisted mostly of people who liked doing sex with men; it had some strength,
and it needed a home. An implicit agreement was reached. The Lifer’s Club soon
became the new MAS headquarters.
MAS’s eventual takeover of the Lifer’s was not a sudden one, nor was it
deliberate. We slowly started spending less time on the breezeway and more time
in Lifer’s Park. Tommy made us feel welcomed. At a subsequent Lifer’s meeting it
was proposed that MAS, who had been orphaned by the mean ol’ PJC, be loaned
just a tiny corner of the big Lifer’s meeting room, and this only for as long as it
took MAS to be recognized by the administration and given a space of its own.
With MAS present and Tommy and his goons ramrodding the motion through,
the membership was somewhat agreed. We set up an office and from under the
protective wing of legitimacy offered by the Lifer’s, started inviting our outside
guests back into the prison to see us.
Lifer’s and MAS members were also able to have sex with outsiders in a
specially prepared downstairs room. It was a soundproof room that prisoners once
used for reading books for the blind on cassette tapes. But at that point it was empty
and unused, with only a mattress tossed on the floor. The members of the Lifer’s
would take their women friends into the little room; MAS would take their men
friends. I was with one guy on the inside, and Robert on the outside.
As officers of the Lifer’s were attritioned by release, transfer, or dismissal,
they would most often be replaced by MAS members. This was not because of some
grand conspiracy or master plan, but simply because we were hard workers who did
have the interests of the Lifer’s Club at heart. Gradually, the line between the Lifer’s
and MAS blurred, in our minds as well as in the thinking of the other officers of the
Lifer’s Club. I was the chairperson of MAS, and Danny Atteberry, Mark La Rue,
and Carl Harp were my officers. I was also the treasurer of the Lifer’s, and Danny,
Mark, and Carl were all on the Lifer’s executive board as well. While I had all but
lost sight of the distinction between the two groups, others – those on the outside of
our gate – had not. MAS had contributed a lot to the Lifer’s Club. We implemented
a candy sales program in which all prisoners could trade prison script money for
our specialized candies. The candy business was highly successful. The Lifer’s Club
was making money for the first time in a long time. We bought a pool table for the
members and made many other improvements to the club. I put an end to Tommy’s
looting of the club’s treasury and made regular and accurate financial reports to the
membership. Decisions on what to spend the profits on were democratically arrived
at. The Lifer’s Club was doing better than at any time in recent history. MAS was
doing well too. We’d obtained lots of support from Seattle’s gay community and
were in the process of pressuring the administration, both directly and indirectly, to
recognize MAS and to provide us with a space of our own.
46

gay bars on a fairly regular basis. In ’71 I got busted for stealing from my boss who
was still the U.S.P.O. Did 7 months of a one year and one day sentence in Terminal
Island Federal Penitentiary, Calif. Learned a whole lot about racism, queer hating,
mean police, junkies and other such facts of life; I learned a lot from sisters there,
like that self hate, disgust and feelings of helplessness experienced throughout
my youth could have easily led me (if I’d been raised in a city where it was readily
available) to dope and getting strung out. George Jackson was murdered - shot in
the back - and the Attica massacre happened while I was locked up.
Came back to Seattle to find no lover, no home, only a couple of friends
and no job. So I went through a couple of government programs and a few lovers
and finally learned from another dyke that womyn are not chicks. The first womyn’s
event I went to was at the U of W - an IWS conference - there was a prison workshop
going on, run by some social workers who had all their experience on the outside
of the bars. Well I told them they didn’t know what they were talking about and I
became a public speaker and the token ex-con that very day.
Shortly after this, I was at SCCC where they paid (work study jobs) people
to do prison work. After a bullshit trip with an egomaniacal man there, a womyn’s
prison project was formed with a fine strong sister/lover. I was part of the politico
lesbian community. I worked on lots of different projects with children, womyn,
men and Third World peoples but prison work was always the most important
in my life. In a couple of years, I heard a lot of folks in a lot of places talk about
the revolution, but nobody did anything except talk. The BLA and Assata were
working their asses off but nobody in Seattle did a thing. Then the SLA stormed
over the ruling class’s toes and met a fiery death; still nobody did anything. Then the
GJB started happening right under our very noses - it made sense to me that you just
can’t talk Rockefeller et al. into giving up what they have stolen from the people. I
knew it was time for me to put my words into action.

15

SENTENCING
STATEMENT
by bo brown

q

I

stand before this mockery of justice court to be condemned as its enemy - and
I am its enemy! I am a member of the George Jackson Brigade and I know the
answer to Bertolt Brecht’s question: “Which is the biggest crime, to rob a bank
or to found one?”
It is to my sisters and brothers of the working class that I am accountable
– NOT to this court that harasses and searches my peers before they can enter
what is supposed to be their courtroom. NOT to this or any court whose hidden
purpose is to punish the poor and non-white in the name of the U.S. government.
A government which perpetuates the crimes of war and repression has NO right
to prescribe punishment for those who resist the continuation of worldwide death
and misery. This government didn’t ask its citizens what we thought about CIA
intervention in Chile or current U.S. big business holdings in South Africa.
I am a native fighting on her homeground! I was born and raised right
here. All my life has been spent in Oregon and Washington. My parents are working
people. My father a mill worker for 32 years, my mother an unskilled laborer at the
county nursing home. We always had to count every penny and do without some
thing or another to make it from payday to payday. I have pumped gas, been a clerk,
a mechanic, and a printer and a variety of other things. That makes me a common
working person as is most of the population of this world. We have nothing to
survive by except labor - our sweat. We are slaves! Forced to give our labor and
our lives to maintain an economic system designed to serve only the rich - almost
always white male corporate owners. This ruling class has no respect for human life.
Its only concerns are private property and personal power. They manipulate us as
puppets on their stage of greed.
Right here in Oregon there are mountains of proof about how big business,
protected by the state and federal governments, rip us off daily. How much profit
did Weyerhauser make last year? How much taxes did the company pay on those
profits, if any? How come those who slave their lives away for George Weyerhauser
get none of those profits? How come Weyerhauser can continue to pay small
16

right. Blacks must be their own liberators, just as gays must free themselves. We
cannot rely on anyone else to do our fighting for us. But at the time we did not see it
that way; we were outraged that our parent organization would cut us loose to fend
for ourselves in the violent seas that surround us. MAS thereupon quit the PJC. The
breakup was a rather acrimonious one. The PJC’s demise was almost immediate;
within a month they were completely dead. MAS was reduced to a more or less
underground group. Our outside support network and inside membership were
intact; we merely needed to relocate and reorganize.
The “breezeway” was a term I’d not heard of before my arrival at the Walls.
There were a number of these roofed walkways at the penitentiary, only these,
unlike those on the streets, had chain-link fencing from top to bottom on each side.
Walking from block to the mess hall, for example, required one to traverse one of
these open tunnels both ways. It was on these breezeways that much of the violence
took place. In fact, there were so many stabbings in one area of the breezeway that
it became known as “Blood Alley” by prisoners and guards alike. Because of the
overpopulation there were far more men than there were jobs, and even those who
did the work were paid just pennies an hour. The breezeway was the place of choice
for these unemployed or underpaid hustlers to hang out. They would sell used street
clothing, drugs, and even pimp their punks from these areas. The breezeway was, in
short, a commercial and social hangout for much of the joint’s riffraff. And MAS
was no exception. In the absence of an office, we met with each other and conducted
the group’s day-to-day business from the breezeway.
The entire prison was not dirty and ugly; there was a lovely island of
beauty in the form of the Lifer’s Park. Set on two sides by huge cellblocks, Seven
Wing on one side and Eight Wing on the other, and a breezeway fence in front
and the Lifer’s clubhouse in the rear, the park was an exclusive island of manicured
grass and carefully cultivated flowers. There was always an inmate guard at the
gate leading to the park; no one got in unless they were a member or the escorted
guest of a member. At the other end of their rectangular park was a large, twostory brick building. This was the Lifer’s clubhouse. The Lifer’s Club was run by a
large black man named Tommy and his two white lieutenants, both of whom were
young and tough. Tommy was a well-built ex-boxer who liked having sex with men.
He pitched as well as he caught, meaning he would suck or be sucked, fuck or be
fucked, although the public image he presented was one of “pitching” only. In the
prison culture it is not considered to be homosexual behavior for one to stick his
prick into another man’s orifice; only the stickee was stigmatized with such labels.
Tommy fancied himself a progressive, on occasion going so far as to let
it slip that he considered himself to be another George Jackson. While I knew
better than that, I nonetheless tended to overestimate Tommy’s level of political
development. Tommy had ongoing problems with other elements of the population,
like the Chicanos, but these were nothing he could not handle himself, should it ever
45

freedom. And I exercised that right myself by personally attending each and every
MCC service that was conducted at Walla Walla. Generally speaking, whether it
is workers striking for a fairer wage or peasants struggling for land, you will always
find communists defending the rights of the poor and working people. We will be
on the side of working-class justice, and exploitation in any form, be it racial, sexual,
or economic.
Men Against Sexism continued to build in size and grow in strength. We
found safe-cells for exploited people to move into and, while continuing with all
of our regular political activities, moved more and more in the direction of what
we called crisis intervention. A young pedophile had recently arrived at the prison
and was promptly snatched up by the predators. When they were done “using”
him, he was sold into a different cell for three hundred dollars. Where before our
intervention tended to come after the rape or related incident and would take the
form of hand-holding types of support, now we were moving into the area of direct
meddling with the behavior of the prison’s tougheoisie (tough-wah-zee). With a
combination of bluff and bluster, moral persuasion and dumb luck, we extracted
the pedophile from his state of sexual bondage and moved him into one of our
safe cells. There was much outrage over this in certain circles. How, they wanted to
know, could we possibly justify standing against real convicts over a stinking child
molester? We stood on our principles and in the end managed to hold firm against
the shifting tides of prisoner opinion. We’d won another round.
But the fight was an ongoing one. For every situation we were able to deal
with, there seemed to be two others that were beyond our strength to resolve. There
are two types of contradictions in the world, antagonistic and nonantagonistic.
Antagonistic contradictions are like the one between us as poor and working people,
on the one hand, and the ruling class and its government on the other. This is an
antagonistic contradiction that must ultimately be resolved through the process of
class struggle and revolution. Nonantagonistic contradictions, on the other hand,
are those among the people themselves, and are resolved through nonviolent means
such as persuasion and criticism. At least that’s the theory. In practice it did not
always happen that way. Our work had, over a period of time, developed to the
point of confrontation with some predatory rapists; we were going to have to fight
or back off – that narrow set of choices was pretty clear to everyone.
At the next Prison Justice Committee meeting, when MAS gave its weekly
progress report, I asked for PJC support in a conflict that MAS was about to have
with a group of obstinate prisoners over the rape issue. Some other prisoners had
captured and enslaved some kid for sexual purposes. We’d talked and manipulated
until we were blue in the face, without any success at all. Violence was the next
option. It was my feeling that the more of us who confronted them, the less likely
it would be that physical conflict would occur. The PJC would not back our play,
saying it was a matter for us to resolve on our own. In retrospect they were probably
44

pollution fines and isn’t made to install anti-pollution systems? The answers to
these kinds of questions will teach us just who George Weyerhauser is and what he
really cares about. Those cute commercials we see on TV are a snow job to keep us
from seeing the truth.
There are a few people in this state who know that the Wah Chang plant,
just north of Albany - right there on the freeway - is killing the pure air and water
and even the earth, so highly valued by Oregonians. For years we thought it was a
smelly pulp mill but that was a lie! It is, in fact, the manufacturer of zirconium, a
metal vital to the government’s plan to pursue nuclear energy and warfare without
properly considering the potential death and destruction in case of the slightest
accident. Wah Chang dumps radioactive poison into our lives every day! Their fines
are minimal, they are not seriously made to clean up and say that they shouldn’t
have to. The workers are in very real danger of serious illness or injury and even
death.
The university of Oregon has $3 million invested in stock in 28 South
African companies. The State Board of Education has passed the buck to the
Attorney General who has passed the buck to the State Treasurer. The State of
Oregon finances the most racist and genocidal government in the world. The
mountains of proof are everywhere.
Prisons are big business too. Nationally, the annual profits reach $2
billion. Prisons promote “terrorism” by making the denial of human and democratic
rights a respectable and common thing. Look at who is in prison and why - 75% of
all adults in amerikkan prisons are Third World people. This is clear and simple
proof of systematic racism. Right now in Oregon there are three cruel and unusual
punishment suits - one at Oregon Correctional Institution, one at Oregon State
Penitentiary, and one at McClaren Juvenile prison. Every person in this state should
investigate these suits in their own interest. We all know it’s the powerless working
and poor people who go to jail. The real criminals - the rich - are pardoned by other
rich criminals or go to country club estates to do short time. (Or, they can get
“daddy” to put up $1.2 million for bail after conviction.)
I am a woman who is greatly concerned that the biggest areas of neglect in
the so called justice system are rape, wife battering, and child abuse. The womyn of
today suffers every day from the oppression of sexism. Everywhere she looks she sees
sexist stereotypes that scream: you are a sex object - you can’t control your own body
- men need to beat you sometimes - there is no such thing as rape, you must have
asked for it. And if she can’t cope with this insanity the male-dominated medical
profession pronounces her crazy. 90% of patients in mental hospitals are wimmin.
I am a lesbian - a womyn who totally loves wimmin. A womyn who loves
herself and her sisters. A womyn who is proud to say that loving wimmin is a very
beautiful and positive aspect of my life. When any womyn or man decides to be
openly gay - to “come out” - we risk social disapproval, police harassment, and the
17

very real possibility of being beaten in the streets. We are denied jobs, thrown out of
public places, refused housing, our children can be stolen from us, and most shrinks
still think we suffer from some incurable sexual illness. This blatant discrimination is
the systematic denial of our democratic and human rights. It should never be a crime
for any person to love and care about another person. The freedom to be what we
are is what we all fight for! Wimmin loving wimmin and men loving men is nothing
new. Since the beginning of humanity we have loved, free and proud. Our culture,
though sparsely documented due to the great efforts to suppress our herstory/
history, does exist. During the time of Sappho and Isle of Lesbos, our sexuality was
open and accepted. Then the self-appointed rulers - the profiteers - marched across
the earth and for boots they wore suppression. Suppression to crush all those who
wouldn’t conform to their ideas or recognize their right to destroy our various ways
of life. We have been mighty warriors in many wars - Amazons and Romans. Not
even Hitler, who killed us in one of his first experiments in annihilation, could
destroy us. Joe McCarthy hunted us too. Today, the fear of homosexuality promoted
by the “masters of unreason” encourages Anita Bryant-types of fascist campaigns
based on hysteria and ignorance. This kind of institutionalized fear is repeatedly
used to keep us from building strong resistance. It will work less and less as we learn
to understand the tactics of psychological warfare used by the rich to keep all of us
in our places. But, we must remain alert to the very real threat of fascism and destroy
it before we find ourselves surrounded.
I love children. To me children are the most beautiful, honest, sincere, and
creative of human beings. It is for their future as well as my own that I fight. My
heart full of love for all people. My heart full of rage at the capitalist/imperialist
system that traps and destroys us from birth. I am the anger of the people like the
thunder that comes before the rain that will heal the earth.
It is necessary to define “armed struggle” and “terrorism” since these terms
are often and incorrectly used interchangeable. This error is continually made by
the straight media who often just take orders from the FBI and other government
gestapos. The press forgets its real job is to report the facts to the people - not to
use sensationalism merely to sell a particular channel or newspaper, and not to
participate in news blackouts which keep the facts from the people. “Terrorism”
is armed action which deliberately and callously ignores the welfare of the people.
It is the institutionalized sick violence of the ruling class and its police forces: the
senseless bombings of Viet Nam; the Attica massacre; the Kent State massacre; the
Jackson State massacre; the individual murders of Clifford Glover, Karen Silkwood,
and George Jackson; the continuing murders and sterilizations of Native Americans
and Puerto Ricans; the inhumane method of confinement suffered by Assata Shakur.
“Armed struggle” is the use of controlled violence such as armed occupations,
kidnappings, prisoner escapes, armed robberies, bombings, etc. A primary factor is
that concern for the welfare of innocent people is always a vital part of the planning
18

merely had to pay for the postage and insurance costs. Getting a room and projector
was never a problem, as we’d use the PJC name on our authorization memos.
A typical MAS action during this period would be calculated to strengthen
gay unity while at the same time working to isolate and expose those powerful
elements within the population who believed it was their god-given right to rob,
rape, and otherwise pillage their peers. The process was a slow one. If we stuck our
collective neck out too far someone would chop it off. Here is an example of the
type of action we’d do back then. There was a nationwide religious organization
that primarily ministered to the spiritual needs of gays called the Metropolitan
Community Church (MCC). Over a period of time we had managed to obtain
authorization from the administration for the MCC to come inside the prison and
to hold regular services in the prison’s chapel. The Catholic priest had no problem
with this, although the Protestant chaplain, who happened to be a right-wing, bornagain fundamentalist preacher, stooped to petty acts of sabotage against the MCC
minister and his congregation. One Sunday morning a prisoner came running up
to me and said, chaplain so-and-so (I forget his name) is going to do a sermon this
morning on the evils of homosexuality, specifically targeting the MCC services. I
immediately sent runners out to spread the alarm to gays in every cell block; my
message was that all MAS members were to attend Protestant services being held
later that morning.
We were a pretty sight as about twenty of us quietly sat in the conservative
church that morning, waiting for services to begin. I wore shoulder-length blond
hair, with lavender stars for earrings. Others wore facial makeup or were in full
drag, including colorful dresses. Our quickly-arrived-at consensus, that our mere
presence would be enough to restrain the preacher’s bigotry, proved to be wrong.
He started in on the MCC, and homosexuals in general, preaching what a travesty
it was that queers would defile the house of the lord with their so-called religion.
That was enough for me. He no more than got a good start when I interrupted his
Nazi diatribe with a speech on the value of religious freedom and tolerance. The
other MAS members chimed in with their support for what I was saying, while
his congregation of protective custody candidates and would-be child molesters
remained prudently silent, no doubt intimidated by the sight of so many angry
faggots. When the issue was put in a rights context, rather than a religious or
moral one, I managed to make the preacher at least pretend to see that his efforts
to prevent our chaplain from coming in and conducting services was a denial of
our religious freedoms. I made it clear that we would fight hard for that freedom.
That confrontation seemed to take much of the wind from his sails, as we had no
significant problems with him from then on. After that incident gays seemed to talk
around with their heads held a little higher, with a bit more pride than usual.
As a communist, I am of course an atheist. But being a godless commie
did not prevent me from defending the rights of MAS members to religious
43

an officially sponsored group; the PJC was an offspring of the RGC and therefore
enjoyed some measure of respectability in the eyes of our captors. Similarly, MAS,
because of its relationship to the PJC, while certainly not respectable, did possess a
degree of legitimacy sufficient to keep the pigs’ boot off our necks for long enough
for us to stand on our own two feet. I don’t think MAS would have survived that
initial phase of development had it not been for the protective wing of the Prison
Justice Committee.
The PJC did its work well and continued to grow; before too long the
group was able to cut all of its ties with the RGC. Now formally sanctioned by
the prison administration, and with the AFSC as its primary source of outside
support, the PJC became an independent organization. The PJC held its weekly
meetings in a room on the second floor of the admissions building. This is where
our outside guests would come into the prison and regularly meet with us. At these
joint gatherings each subdirector would have to give a report on the status of the
work the subcommittee was doing. The subcommittee on visitation, for example,
would report on the progress being made in that area, such as problems with the
visiting room staff, expanding the visiting area, the conjugal visitation proposal,
and so on. I think there were about six different subcommittees, each dealing with
issues ranging from racism to legislative action. The MAS subcommittee started
out like all the others, but then seemed to quickly develop a life all of its own. MAS
membership soon grew to be half the size of the PJC, then grew some more until
we slightly outnumbered our parent organization. The difference in growth did not
at first create any problems, since we were all marching in more or less the same
direction.
MAS started having its own separate meetings in the PJC’s office (in
addition to the weekly PJC gatherings), and at these smaller meetings we invited
people from Seattle’s gay community inside to talk with us. Before too long, firm
friendships had been struck between the inside and out. At the same time we were
busily conducting MAS types of activities, which in large part centered around
building a sense of pride and community within the walls. This was accomplished
through deeds.
While an occasionally published underground paper at the penitentiary
called The Bomb usually printed only when someone in the population thought it
necessary to make a sort of call-to-arms, we started a monthly newsletter and called
it The Lady Finger (a very small firecracker). In addition to addressing general issues
of sexism and containing news of interest to gays and the more or less advanced
social prisoners, the newsletter was a broadside against the scum-bags who were
involved in the ongoing rape and the buying and selling of prisoners. I also wrote
to and obtained progressive film catalogues through which I was able to obtain
documentaries with titles like “Men and Masculinity” and subjects of sexism and
anti-Vietnam War themes. The film companies would loan us the films for free; we
42

and execution of these actions. Freedom fighters around the world have consistently
made the distinction between revolutionary “armed struggle” against the ruling
class and the “terrorism” of random violence used by the state against the people.
I am an anti-authoritarian lesbian feminist anarcho-communist! I am
an urban guerrilla committed to give my white life if necessary! As our comrade
brother George Jackson said - and it’s just as true today as it was almost 10 years ago
when he said it - “We must come together, understand the reality of our situation,
understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be
saved, that generations will die or live butchered half-lives if we fail to act.”
Love and Rage - Fire and Smoke,
		
Rita
2/21/78

19

A SHORT
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by ed mead

q

I

was one of six children raised by a single mother who was homesteaded near
Fairbanks, Alaska. When I was twelve during the mid-‘50s, me and my sisters
chopped a crude road into unsurveyed land they were about to homestead. We
subsequently built a log cabin, drilled a well, and endured a whole lot of poverty.
During the next ten years I pretty much ran wild, without the social or moral
restraints imposed on most young men by parents, peers, church, school, and other
means of public information and conditioning. I was first incarcerated at the age
of thirteen, at the State Industrial School for Boys in Ogden, Utah (Alaska did not
have a juvenile institution at the time so I was subjected to out-of-state banishment
at a very young age), for burning down a large structure on school grounds. By
the time I was eighteen, I was serving a three-year sentence in the Federal Prison
at Lompoc, California, for burglarizing a gas station (Alaska did not have a state
prison at the time).
I was subsequently released on parole, violated the conditions of my
supervision and was sent back to federal prison. At this point my life became
a cliché of recidivism. I was in and out several times, mostly in, doing life on the
installment plan. Then during the late ‘60s, while serving a ten-year attempted
escape sentence at the federal prison at McNeil Island, Washington, I came into
possession of some radical literature. Until then I supported the war in Vietnam.
Not because I believed in the justice of the U.S. cause, but because I had heard some
older men say something to the effect of: “We ought to bomb that place into the
Stone Age and then pave it over and make a parking lot out of it.” In the absence
of an opinion of my own, I would have parroted something to that effect. But the
anarchist and Marxist literature I was reading enabled me to intelligently choose
sides.
Those who supported the war also advocated for longer sentences, the
elimination of parole, and favored the death penalty. Those who opposed the war
demanded an end to prison construction, freedom for prisoners, and the leftists
opposed the death penalty. When McNeil Island prisoners went on a work strike,
20

and thus was able to devote the bulk of my time to prison politics; talking to
fellow convicts and trying to learn more about local concerns. I was also trying to
adjust to this very different reality. Rape was clearly an issue. Prisoners were being
routinely bought and sold by each other; the young and vulnerable ones were raped
and then subjected to forced prostitution. While there was general agreement that
this was wrong, there was no support within the population for a group like Men
Against Sexism. Straight prisoners were not going to put their prison status and
personal safety on the line for gays, and for the most part the gay population was
too demoralized or defeated to stand up for itself.
While our decisions were not as conscious and straightforward as I might
tend to make them sound, those of us in the cell did manage to slowly develop an
agenda of sorts. We were going to work with the existing Resident Government
Council (RGC) toward forming an RGC-sponsored subgroup called the Prison
Justice Committee (PC). The Seattle branch of the American Friends Services
Committee (AFSC), an offshoot of the Quaker Church with a long and progressive
tradition of involvement in prison issues, agreed to support our organizing efforts.
Building the Prison Justice Committee was not a very difficult task. We
were to some extent leaders of the recently victorious forty-seven-day strike. If we
believed that an arm of the RGC should be formed that called itself the Prison
Justice Committee, then influential members of the population would be more
than happy to support the proposal. Most prisoners agreed that it was important
to build upon and to consolidate the gains and promises achieved as a result of
the strike, and that’s what the PJC was trying to do. The PJC was led by a former
segregation graduate named Eddwynn Jordan. He and his brothers were wellrespected members of the black prison population, with long histories of struggle. I
was the group’s vice chairperson. So the PJC was organized and schedule of meetings
established. From the very start, attendance at PJC meetings exceeded that of its
parent organization, the RGC. Within a month the PJC was the prisoners’ group
at Walls [Walla Walla]. One of the first things we did was to break ourselves down
into much smaller subcommittees, each of which was assigned the responsibility
for monitoring specified aspects of the prison experience. On top of that, we had
outside guests coming in to the prison each week to hold joint meetings with us to
work with us around various prison-related issues.
Just as prisoners in general became increasingly involved in the activities of
the PJC, so too did gay prisoners and some of the other more vulnerable prisoners.
They did not become PJC supporters out of a need for protection, but rather
because the group took a firm stand not only against racism, but also against all
forms of sexism and homophobia. It was an organization that related to the special
needs of gay prisoners. It provided hope for constructive change. Before too long
the PJC formed yet another subcommittee, with me as its chairperson, which I
called Men Against Sexism (MAS). The Resident Government Council (RGC) was
41

MEN AGAINST
SEXISM
by ed mead

q

I

t was the summer of 1977, and I’d just been released from the hole and was
entering the population for the first time. I moved from the segregation unit into
cell B-6 of Eight Wing, a four-man cell located on the flats that was “owned” by
a comrade named Danny. Yes, cells were owned by individual prisoners and bought
and sold much like real estate on the streets. One had to be approved by the owner in
order to move into a cell. If the administration moved a fish [a new inmate, among
those most vulnerable to sexual assault] into a cell, he would generally be permitted
to stay for two or three days while he looked for another place to live. Beyond that
his stuff would be thrown out on their tier and he’d have to fend for himself. In any
case, I was fortunate enough to be moving into a cell already owned by a friend. I
did not have to play the musical cage game so many other prisoners were subjected
to. A guy I will call Joe was already in the cell when I moved in. He was the first of
us released from the hole, and shortly after I was turned loose, Danny and his friend
Mark followed. The cell itself was designed for two men but contained four beds,
two bunk beds along each of the dingy cobalt blue walls.
Joe was the cell’s sound man. The noise outside the cell was a cacophony
of loud radios and blaring televisions, all playing on different stations and channels.
On top of that, prisoners added to the general sense of pandemonium by yelling at
each other between tiers; trading coffee, insults, and gossip in loud voices. What Joe
would do is set his portable tape deck near the bars at the front of the cell, with the
speakers aimed inward, and then he’d crank up the volume until there was a virtual
wall of sound that drowned out all other external noise. The effect of Joe’s artistry
in this regard was awesome. The tape deck was not playing uncomfortably loud, yet
there was not another sound beyond its sensitively balanced speakers. Of course
Joe’s choice of music was such that there were few silences, either between notes or
between songs – not unlike the heavy metal of today. And while Aerosmith and the
absence of any silence was stressful, it was far better than the noise it replaced.
There were sixteen or seventeen hundred prisoners in the population at
Walla Walla and only enough jobs for a portion of them. I did not have to work
40

the singer Pete Seeger and actress Jane Fonda were on the docks with six hundred
people demonstrating in support of the striking prisoners. The Weathermen busted
Timothy Leary out of prison, and they were bombing the government. Choosing
sides was easy, and, having done it, I’ve never looked back.
Released by a federal court order in 1972, I left Alaska and moved to Seattle
to “join the revolution.” I was active in Seattle’s progressive political community for
several years, until I was arrested in 1975 during an unsuccessful bank expropriation
by the George Jackson Brigade. The Brigade had been conducting acts of armed
propaganda such as bombings and financed itself through bank robberies.
Convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms by the state of Washington
on two counts of first-degree assault against police officers (because of a shootout
at the bank), I was sent to the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla. It was
there that I organized Men Against Sexism.
After serving eighteen years, I was released in 1993. For nearly a decade I
have worked as a network administrator for a nonprofit in San Francisco.

21

IMPRISONED AND
SEGREGATED
by ed mead

q

much sense. The bottom line is that after nine months in the hole my friends and
I were released to the general population. We’d survived one hell and were on the
threshold of another. We now had a freshly appointed Secretary of the Department
of Corrections in Olympia, a more liberal warden, and a new associate warden of
custody. We also had a collective measure of respect from most prisoners because of
the successful seg struggle. But for me and some of my friends, nothing had really
changed. Just as coming from the streets to prison had merely been a change in
fronts on which to fight, so too in our eyes was the move from seg to the population.
There was still much work to be done.

I

t was a dark and ominous day when the prison’s bus pulled up to transfer me
and twenty other prisoners to the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla
Walla? Actually, I do remember what the weather was like that day, though it
was twenty years ago and the weather was one of the last things on my mind. As it
happens, it was a beautiful summer day in early August 1976, when we left Shelton’s
Reception Units. The Penitentiary was located in the opposite corner of the state,
as far away from Seattle as possible. Low rolling thunder clouds hovered over the
whole area as our bus drew nearer and nearer to the prison; the wind blew in earthy
smelling gusts. I experienced the feeling one gets just before an electrical storm,
sensing the yet-to-be-discharged static electricity as it filled the hot afternoon air,
as if looking for some channel though which to discharge its pent up energy. The
atmosphere added a sense of dread to an already muggy day. A storm was certainly
looming.
The relatively short amount of time I had to spend at the Shelton
Corrections Center’s Reception Units was delightfully uneventful. Shelton is
where new inmates coming into the state’s prison system are initially housed and
processed. The short timers are weeded out and scheduled for transfer to minimum
or medium custody facilities, while those serving long terms are sent to “The Walls,”
as the Penitentiary at Walla Walla is called. The Walls was considered to be the
roughest, toughest, highest security prison in the state; the government’s ultimate
revenge, the end of the line, and the last stop for many men. I knew it might be
that for me, not only because of my long prior record, but also because I had a new
sentence of two consecutive life terms.
I had just finished eight months of difficult confinement in Seattle’s King
County jail. During that time I went through both the state and federal trials and
the respective sentencing procedures. The barbarity of the jail experience would
prove to be just a warm up for what was to come.
While in the jail I was locked up in what they then called the Annex, which
was a section of the jail used as the segregation unit. I did not start out in the hole,
22

39

looked down upon in prison. Woman-like behavior or mannerisms were considered
to be a sign of weakness, and those who displayed it were fair game for victimization.
The very worst insult one could call someone was to equate them with a woman’s
sexuality; a bitch, cunt, etc. Women were never referred to in any complementary
way. It was a case of the totally powerless seeking some way through which they
could obtain some semblance of control by oppressing others perceived as being less
strong than themselves. About the best most prisoners could muster would be to
refer to a woman they knew as a “girl.” Gays were objects of derision. In the prison’s
hierarchy of status, homosexuals were just a step above child molesters.
My coming out was not the result of some driving sexual desire for men, or
any individual man, it was more the product of a rational intellectual and political
decision that slowly formulated itself in my consciousness. I had just returned to
prison with a double life sentence and a relatively high consciousness of women’s
issues. I decided that women did not need yet another man to drain their energy
— that if my emotional and sexual needs were going to be met, they would be met
by men. I’d occasionally had sex with men in the past while living on the outside,
so the notion of sex with men wasn’t at all abhorrent to me. At this same time, the
idea of organizing Men Against Sexism was germinating in my head. I don’t know if
that sounds opportunist or not — adjusting my sexual attitudes to fit the group of
people I most wanted to reach — but I wanted to stop sexual slavery in the prison.
And I would do it as a member of the victim group rather than as an outsider.
Furthermore, I genuinely loved people like Danny Atteberry, Mark LaRue, Carl
Harp, and Joe Green. I loved them as intensely as I feared so many other people on
the tier.
One of the things that fed my fear was that in most situations you could
deal with violence, there would be a set of rules (even if irrational), so one could
nonetheless learn to live with the threat. But the violence at Walla Walla didn’t
follow any rules; it was random, senseless, and over stupid things not worth a second
word. So I feared that it would strike me, and I didn’t feel confident enough that I
could effectively deal with the confrontations that even at the best of times seemed
to loom just near the edge of my awareness. In a word, I was insecure. I didn’t know
what else to do but to throw myself and all the strength I could gather up against
the administration. If I was to go down it would be at the hands of my real enemies,
the government and the tiny class that controls it, not the confused products of
their system. When I had doubts as to whether I’d survive the next day, when the
hatred, bitterness and tension on the tier became too oppressive, I’d do what I could
to intensify the struggle against our captors. My thinking was that if somebody was
going to knife me in the back, it would at least be clear that their having done so was
an act of open collaboration with the pigs.
I’ve been trying to convey a sense of what it was like to live on the tier
during those days, and it is a hard task because a of lot things don’t make all that
38

but a fellow prisoner, Mark LaRue, who was certainly well meaning but nonetheless
a bit of a bumbler, decided to send me a note outlining a plot to riot and escape. I
was in the jail’s mess hall having a meal and minding my own business. Mark walked
by the table I was eating at, and as he passed he dropped the incriminating note on
the floor, the one outlining his grand scheme to riot, take hostages, escape, etc. The
only problem was that the guards became aware of the note before I did, and they
snatched it up before I could get to it. That was the end of my stay in the jail’s main
population. It was the death knell to any escape plans I may have been visualizing in
my own mind.
In the Annex, where I was to spend the remainder of my time in the
King County Jail, the walls and ceilings of the cells were made of metal, and if an
inmate beat on them just right, they would reverberate with a resonance that would
shake much of the building. We did not put this knowledge into practice until
our treatment in the Annex became so bad that we that we were forced to initiate
a series of protests. First we did do some serious banging on the walls. The noise
soon became so bad that the judges in the courtrooms located below the jail started
complaining to the guards, demanding that they do something about it. And they
did — by running in on us with pressurized gallon sized jugs of mace, a chemical
agent that burns the eyes and lungs, which was supposedly designed to be used only
in open areas to disrupt street riots and what not.
They must have pumped gallons of mace in on us, in an area with no air
circulation except what little came in through the Annex’s solid steel door, which
was usually open. After the macing, though, the door was closed and we were left
to cook in the foul gaseous air for nearly twenty-four hours. They pumped the stuff
in through the vents at the back of our cells. As they squirted the irritating agent
through the top vent of my cell, I would jump up on my bunk and try to cover
the opening with a towel, to prevent it from entering the cell, then they would
shoot the stuff in through the bottom vent. When I dropped down to cover that
one, they would squirt the mace in to my cell from the top vent again. And while
one guard was doing that to my cell, faceless others were in the plumbing walkway
behind the cells doing the same thing to all of the other men on the tier. When they
finally left us alone the floors and walls of our cells were dripping with mace, and
our mattresses and bedding was soaked with the stuff. We were left to cook in the
unventilated summer heat of the Annex until nearly noon of the following day.
I had witnessed the beating of prisoners and many other less dramatic
crimes against prisoners at the King County Jail, conditions which apparently
became even worse later. As always seems to happen, when the beating of prisoners
fails to cause the desired behavior, guards take to killing them. After I left the jail,
I read that guards used the infamous choke hold to kill some black prisoners. The
guards, like their police counterparts on the streets, were routinely found using
“justified” force in the murder of unarmed captives. This form legalized murder
23

has an effect more immediate than the simple killing of a recalcitrant prisoner, in
that it works to communicate to other captives the high cost of being insufficiently
submissive.
I was in the jail with two life sentences given to me by the state. The term
would probably have been half that except for my big mouth. My trial attorney,
David Allen, talked to the judge before I was sentenced and was told that he, the
judge, was going to impose a single life sentence. Armed with that knowledge and
angry with the severity of even that much time, at sentencing the next day, when
the court asked me if I had anything to say, I told him: “I have been framed and
railroaded — like all poor people who appear before this court.” The judge then
turned a livid red. He was clearly flustered as he stammered through the imposition
of two consecutive life terms. The way I saw it was that one of the life sentences
was for the assaults, and the other was for the crime of having a smart mouth. In a
country espousing free speech, no one deserves a life sentence for something they
have merely said. Especially since what I said was true. I never did have a police
officer in my gun sights, I was not trying to kill or even wound anyone. I was trapped
in the bank with no means of escape. It would have been stupid of me to try and
shoot someone at that point. My gunfire was merely a means to secure a negotiated
surrender; to let the murderous police know that this was not going to be a slaughter.
The prosecutor’s version of events was substantially different, of course.
He said that “[o]n January 23, 1976, the defendant[s] ... attempted to rob the
Tukwila branch of the Pacific National Bank of Washington. They were armed with
a 9mm automatic, a .38 caliber revolver, and a sawed-off shotgun. The purpose of
the robbery was to take money to purchase automatic weapons and explosives to
further the activities of the ‘George Jackson Brigade.’ Detective Joseph Mathews
of the Tukwila Police Department arrived in front of the bank and the defendant
and Seidel began to shoot him. Detective Mathews returned the fire and hit Seidel.
Simultaneously a forth robber, waiting across the street, began to fire at Detective
Mathews. Detective Mathews returned two rounds in this direction, and the other
person left. At this time Officer Robert Abbott arrived and Seidel fired one round
at him, knocking out a light on the patrol car. Abbott then returned fire with one
round which struck Seidel in the chest and killed him.” It has been this official
version of the incident that I’ve had to live with during the subsequent course of my
incarceration.
The sentences handed down in those days were really capricious. For
example, there was a guy in the jail with me who had a long history of killing and
raping women. They convicted him for doing that to several women in this state.
He received a single five to life term. Whereas I, who had never harmed anyone,
or had never before been so much as arrested for a crime of violence, was stuck
with two 20-to-life beefs running wild. Hell, Cuban exile Virgilio Paz Romero,
who was convicted and sentenced in federal court for the 1976 planting of a car
24

when I felt they were after me. This fear was strong enough to cause me to keep
a home-made knife, and to have something like a big book near the door that I
could use to prevent it from sliding open. The memory of the attempted rape of
my neighbor was always fresh in my mind. The general atmosphere of violence in
that place was totally alien and foreign to anything I had ever experienced before.
My fear of this particular group came from the way they suddenly stopped talking
as they came by my cell; the manner in which they would furtively glance into my
cell, as if stalking me; on the intricacies of power politics as practiced on the tier; on
who’s on what side; who wants to kill whom; and on who had already killed whom
in the past.
The small group of us calling ourselves the Walla Walla Brothers did
everything we could to communicate a sense of struggle to other people on the
tier. One day Danny took ketchup and, using it as paint, wrote “We Will Win!”
in big letters on the burn-scarred back wall of the tier (this lettering can be seen on
page 147 of Hoffman & McCoy’s book Concrete Mama). We put up posters, I did
my newsletter, we all talked to people one-on-one, and on occasion I even tried
to get guys on the tier to sing politically inspirational songs. Yet with all this and
much more, there were long periods in which it seemed that nobody was listening
to us, that nothing we were doing would have an impact on reality. Not only was
the prison administration not giving an inch, they instead intensified their efforts
to take away from us what little we had left. At the same time some of the prisoners
would continue to prey on each other, in all sorts of ways.
When this would change, when people were at their best, was when our
material conditions were at their worst. Being stripped of everything but your
undershorts, enduring fires on the tier, the stench of urine on the walls mixed with
the smoke from the fires, and the beatings inflicted by the guards. The bottom line
was often reduced to one of total resistance; nothing between “them” and “us”
except a near perfect hatred. I would feel good when we were together like that,
and when the situation was one of clear and undisputable injustice. I still vividly
remember being in the third or fourth day of a hunger strike, or all of us rattling the
bars of our cages together and hollering as a single voice. At those times it was clear
who the enemy was and we would feel powerful, in spite of our stark conditions of
existence.
So life for me in Big Red during those days vacillated between fear and
despair on the one hand, versus exhilaration and hope on the other. And of course
there were both the dull and the exciting times in between the two extremes of this
duality. It was within this context that I started exploring the feminine aspect of
my nature, coming out to myself and the people around me as a homosexual, and
learning to accept that in myself. Some of these men I disliked, others of them I
loved. I wanted the capacity and freedom to deepen these latter feelings by giving
them a sexual expression. However homosexuals and anything feminine were really
37

events, and rightly so. But the joy was quickly replaced with a dogged determination
to win what was now a major political struggle. We had to redouble our efforts on
all fronts, limited as they might be. Our energy was quickly devoted to cranking
out more articles and supporting, in the small ways we could, our brothers in the
population who were on strike.
The strike lasted for 47 days — the longest in state history. We would
probably have needed to go on even longer had we not gotten some valuable armed
support from the George Jackson Brigade. On day 43 the Brigade exploded a bomb
at night in the safety deposit box of a branch of the Rainier bank in Seattle. The
resulting blast got the attention of the powers that be; the G.J.B.’s accompanying
communiqué to Seattle’s radio stations gave them the message. The document
pointed out how there was an interlocking directorship between the Rainier
bank and the publisher of the state’s leading newspaper, the Seattle Times. The
communiqué pointed out that on nearly every one of the 43 days the prisoners at
Walla Walls had been on strike, the news media carried completely one-sided stories
about the event, including interviews with prison officials, guards, and various other
forms of anti-prisoner propaganda. But never once during the unfolding course of
this significant news event was the prisoners’ side of the story ever told — not once
was a single word of a prisoner quoted. The communiqué promised to continue
bombing Rainier banks until Seattle Times adopted a more even handed approach
to their coverage of this story.
Well, you wouldn’t believe the sudden turn around in the mood of the
state’s population. Whereas on day 42 of the strike and on all of those before it,
there was never so much as a hint that the prisoners might have a legitimate set
of gripes. But on day 44 a prisoner was finally interviewed. I don’t even think he
was a part of the inside population, but one of the farm workers outside the walls.
In any case, his few words were enough to start a statewide debate and to unleash
what would soon be a flood of facts regarding the outrageous conditions of our
existence. How legitimate were our complaints? Solid enough for public opinion to
get behind us to the point that the Secretary of the Department of Corrections in
the state capitol was fired, as was warden B.J. Rhay at the Penitentiary. The associate
warden of custody, the man in charge of Big Red, was transferred to work at the kid’s
joint at Shelton, and we were all released from the hole (although not all at once).
When I tell this story it sounds like we had brave prisoners marching in
unity and brotherhood toward the greater goals of goodness and decency. I don’t
want to idealize this period. Of course there were elements of unity in struggle,
sharing our common boredom, the occasional rush of success, and the frequent
setbacks. There were also the underlying contradictions among prisoners on the tier
that manifested themselves through acts of violence, both real and threatened.
There was a small but vocal group of prisoners who appeared to dislike
me, and who out of mere boredom were looking to kill someone. There were times
36

bomb that killed former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his assistant,
Lonnie Moffit, in Washington, D.C. Romero received a twelve year term for these
two murders. With a third deducted for good time, the very most he would have
to serve would be eight years. According to the U.S. government’s Bureau of Justice
Statistics, more than half the convicted murderers released from state prisons in
1983 were back on the streets after spending less than seven years behind bars. I
am not saying these people are serving too little time, as murderers have the lowest
recidivism rate of any other offender. What I am saying is that my state sentence was
too harsh.
So from the jail I went to Shelton. I don’t remember much about life there
other than being locked up in a cell much of the time. They did call me in one day to
take a psychological test, the MMPI, which is based on the outlook of some white
middle-class farmers in Minnesota. If you don’t answer these questions like the
white farmers would, then you are considered abnormal. And not being “normal”
or “average” in America is nearly a crime. So there we were, a whole room full of
newly arrived prisoners and a couple of non-uniformed cops (no doubt counselors
of some sort). They passed out a copy of the test to each us, and told us to complete
all the questions.
I immediately refused to take the test, telling the guy that doing so would
be a violation of my rights to privacy. One of the cops then told me I must take it.
I again declined. He then became even more verbally insistent. I told him that if
he wants me to take the test, he is going to have to physically pick up my hand and
make it mark on the answer sheet, as I won’t do it on my own. He saw that I was
serious and ordered me out of the room. I had entertained a hope that some of the
other prisoners would follow suit, but none did so. Like obedient sheep they all
submitted to the invasion of their most private thoughts by the state. Guess it was
their training in school that conditioned them in this regard.
Some years later, in connection with pending litigation, I was able to
obtain copies of documents setting out what the testers had to say about me. They
said: “Psychological tests were refused. He claims that tests are irrelavant (sic),
inaccurate, outdated and an invasion of his personal privacy. His attitude was
adamant refusal without compromise. He was released from testing.”
Actually, refusing to subject myself to the testing was a smart move on my
part. But I followed it up with something stupid. I was called in for a psychological
interview by Shelton’s psychologist Felix E. Massaia and psychiatrist P.B. Smith. I
don’t know why I agreed to talk to them; perhaps because I had been ambushed,
rather than given the time to think about whether or not I wanted to talk to them.
They did a three page report on me that was not all that negative, but that would
later be misused by the state’s parole board. What the report said, in essence, is that
I saw myself as a revolutionary. That should not come as any surprise to people.
They said I came across “as a relaxed, affable, and articulate individual. Mr. Mead
25

presented himself as a revolutionary who was imprisoned by his ‘captors’ as he
perceived himself as being ‘at war’ with society’s institutions and systems.”
The part of this July 26, 1976, psychological report that really hurt me
was when the interviewers said: “Mr. Mead presented himself much as he did in
court where he viewed his actions in his ‘war’ as being justified, thus his robbing of a
bank being ‘an appropriate expropriation,’ and his setting of bombs which destroyed
the Laurelhurst Power Substation as well as the offices of the Division of Adult
Corrections in the Capitol Center Building in Olympia as an acceptable ‘tactic’
in his fight. Mr. Mead acknowledged by intimation that his group in this area was
linked with the groups that have identified themselves as being part of the George
Jackson Brigade in other areas such as California where they were involved in a
bombing in San Francisco, and banks in Santa Barbara.”
No group in any other part of the country, Santa Barbara or elsewhere,
ever claimed to be a part of the GJB. Moreover, the Brigade never conducted
any bombing actions outside of Washington State. But the parole board would
subsequently use this bogus information against me, claiming that the quoted
material constituted a confession to all those crimes. That it was patently false on its
face and would carry no weight at all.
The psychological report concluded by saying that “he does not primarily
fit into any particular category of the D&SM (a diagnostics manual used by
psychologists) as he is difficult to ‘pigeon hole,’ as he has a great deal of insight
and is very much aware of the internal dynamics operant in his personality
configuration, and thus definitely not a person who could be categorized as being
‘psychiatrically ill.’” The good lying doctors went on to finish their report with the
following recommendation: “It is anticipated that Mr. Mead will make a satisfactory
adjustment to confinement as long as he does not perceive himself as being singled
out for discriminatory negative attention and [is] allowed to live as any other
resident.” Prison officials at the penitentiary would have been well advised to pay
special heed to the wisdom of that recommendation. But of course they would not.
Anyway, I was shipped out to the State Penitentiary at Walla Walla,
traveling in an old prisoner transport vehicle not so affectionately referred to as
the Green Goose by its unwilling passengers. The bus carried a maximum of 21
people. It was August of 1976 and it was hot inside the fully loaded bus. Sweating
prisoners were hand cuffed to chains looped around their waists and connected
to the similarly restrained man next to them. We all wore leg irons as well. The
arrangement was called a chain. The trip took what seemed like six hours. During
that time if a prisoner had to use the toilet facilities, which consisted of an open and
very smelly bucket at the back of the small bus, he got permission from a guard to
shuffle like a penguin back to the bucket, where, with hands chained, they did their
best to urinate as the bus merrily bounced its way over the bumpy highway.
As the tiring journey came near to an end, the passengers on the bus looked
26

on the walls of the unit, threw trash on the tiers and then burned it, filed lawsuits
in federal court, and flooded the place by stopping up the toilets with sheets and
then repeatedly flushing them. There were hunger strikes, demands submitted to
prison officials, and articles written to progressive publications on the outside, such
as Seattle’s Northwest Passage.
This trend developed until all four tiers of the unit were working with
what amounted to a single minded objective. We saw ourselves as being in what
could be termed a continuous state of war with our captors. Slowly, taking one step
backwards for every two steps forward, making mistakes and learning as we fought
on, enough of us came to believe that we could win. We knew that what was being
done to us was terribly wrong, and we came to the understanding that salvation
would be achieved through ongoing struggle. We called ourselves the Walla Walla
Brothers.
In each segregation cell there was a metal table that, when struck with the
fleshy part of a clenched fist, produced a deep reverberation up and down the tier.
It was a loud noise, one that had a rich depth of substance to it. I don’t remember
whose idea it was or how it came about, as the years have erased so many of these
memories, but at the height of one particularly bitter and protracted round of
strikes and protests we came to the conclusion that in order to prevail we would
have to enlist the support of the population. Saying words to them would not be
enough; it was only talk. Many people in the population had read our manifesto
and the articles we had written on the nature of our brutalization in the Big Red hell
hole. But what we said and wrote was just not enough to move them from a position
of understanding and sympathy to that of direct and self-sacrificing support. We
needed something more.
The drums did it. We knew what time the population was released from
their cell blocks, one tier at a time, to walk to the mess hall and eat their meals.
While one drummer was loud, a tier of 24 of them, banging together in rhythmic
unison, was both a near-deafening and an empowering experience. And with four
tiers of 24 men each doing it, the awesome sound was like waves of thunder rolling
across the prison compound. Every day we did this, during each meal, until the balls
of our fists were raw and painful. And still we banged on; not passively, like survivors
trapped in the bowels of a capsized ocean liner, sending out periodic bumps for
would-be rescuers, but rather we pounded like fighters beating out a confident call
to comrades to join us in a most glorious struggle for justice.
Our reward was pretty quick in coming. After some three or four days of
periodic pounding on our metal tables, days in which our captors did everything
within their power to shut us up, we received word that the entire population was
on a work strike. They had issued a list of fourteen demands; the first item on that
list was the demand to rectify specified conditions in the segregation unit. The fate
was now in the fire. We in the hole were at first ecstatic over this latest turn of
35

The judge did issue the requested order, commanding that warden B.J.
Rhay permit me to use an institutional typewriter for the purpose of typing my
appellate brief. The warden ignored the court order. I reapplied to the court and
received another order, this one providing a concrete deadline for compliance. The
deadline came and went, and still there was no typewriter. I next filed a motion
asking that Warden Rhay be found to be in contempt of court for his refusal to
honor the court’s orders. Subpoenas were issued for both of us and a contempt
hearing was held at the federal courthouse in Spokane. The judge put the warden
on the witness stand and found him to be in contempt of court. But the judge went
on to tell Rhay that he could purge himself of his contempt by merely providing
me with access to a typewriter. The warden said “Okay” and we all went back to
the joint. I still didn’t get the typewriter! I filed yet another motion, detailing the
history of this issue and emphasizing the dwindling time frame within which my
opening brief had to be filed. The court responded by rescinding all of its previous
orders, leaving me with no typewriter and no avenue for relief. The warden had
successfully worn down the judge’s resolve and in the process once again defended
the prison’s tradition of being a law unto itself, immune to the rules that govern
other agencies.
What I was not able to win in the courts I was able to achieve through
persistent political effort. I did eventually manage to get an old state typewriter into
my segregation cell. Perhaps B.J. Rhay could see further than the judge, as once my
appeal was done I used the machine to put out a typewritten newsletter aimed at
my fellow prisoners there in the hole. Typing away in my cell, and making as many
carbon copies as I could, I wrote about the terrible conditions in Big Red, what it
would take to change them, and who the real enemy is. I’ll leave it to the reader’s
imagination to visualize the type of rhetoric I used back in those days. However
clumsy my language may have been, though, it did get the message across to my
desperate readers. The paper was surreptitiously passed from tier to tier, and then
from cell to cell. Other prisoners wrote articles too, adding their voice to the call for
a fight back. A struggle soon emerged.
It was while I was in the segregation unit that I got the idea of starting an
organization aimed at ending to prisoner-on-prisoner rape. Although I had not yet
spent much time in Walla Walla’s general population, the steady flow of prisoners in
and out of the hole, along with my own experiences in segregation, convinced me
that the principle contradiction among prisoners was sexism — not white racism,
as is the case at so many other institutions. But before any formal organizing could
take place I would first have to get out of the hole.
My little newsletter continued to slowly influence the 96 men in Big Red.
The struggle over the terrible conditions (beatings, the lack of programs, 23-hours
a day lockup, poor sanitation, etc.) intensified; unity grew. We launched a series of
meager work strikes in which seg porters refused to clean, we wrote victory slogans
34

off into the direction of the prison with a strange mixture of dread and anxiousness.
We were happy to be at the end of this unpleasant trip, yet felt considerable
foreboding for what lies ahead. We had heard many terrible stories about the prison
while in the county jail. The old timers who had been to WSP before suddenly
grew in stature, for they knew the ropes. Everyone was looking for the prison, and
those who had been there were telling the rest of us where to look. When the prison
finally came into view, I felt like I was seeing the outside of a place I would not be
seeing the outside of again for a long time. I took a mental picture of the still distant
prison and the surrounding area, just in case I might be able to at some point escape.
The late afternoon sky was dark with humid clouds that appeared to want to burst
into thunder. The land was flat, the endless wheat fields broken only by occasional
outbuildings and the fences that separated them.
We pulled up to the prison and entered the double-gated sally port.
With the first gate closed behind us, prison guards casually inspected the bus for
possible concealed weapons or other bulky forms of contraband. Then we were
passed through the second set of gates and into the prison proper. The bus was
driven behind a large red brick building where it came to a stop. We were ordered to
disembark. Marching two by two, the chain stepped off the bus and into the innards
of the prison. Greeting us was a tough-voiced sergeant who read the new prisoner’s
names from a clipboard and barked orders regarding our housing assignments. Also
greeting us was a gathering of bored Walla Walla prisoners, who used the weekly
arrival of the chain as a mild diversion from the prison’s humdrum daily routine.
Some came to look for friends coming in from the county jail, and if they saw them
they would exchange greetings or instructions. Some came simply to gawk at the
new fish. And some, the predators, came to look over the meat for possible prey —
the young and more vulnerable newcomers who did not have any friends to protect
them.
Those who had partners on the inside would get shouts from their friends
like: “Hey Bob, tell ‘em you want to move into 6-E-21; I’ve already put in a kite
for you.” Others, the young and fair, might get embarrassing catcalls of one sort or
another. “Oh, look at that one, ain’t she pretty.” And so on. Those who had a place
to go and friends were the lucky ones. The rest of us would be immediately placed
in a four-man cell with three strangers. And the cells were so small that the three
already there generally resented the addition of the newcomer. I was one of those
who knew no one at the prison, but at 33 I was also fairly old and con-wise enough
to escape the notice of the sexual predators and their wanna be counterparts. When
my name was called I was given a cell number, had my chains and cuffs removed,
and then followed those before me into the back door of the brick building. It was
the clothing room. We were issued new clothing and some old but clean bedding,
and directed out the front door. Those who had friends were picked up and the
reunion began. Those who had been there before knew where they were going, and
27

went there either by themselves or with a newly-made buddy from the county jail.
I stood in front of the clothing room alone, looking out on the innards
of the prison. Inmates wandered around in small groups, not acting like they had
any place to go. What struck me was the age and filthiness of the place. The many
huge buildings were all made of red brick. Just about everything on the ground level
looked dirty and crowded. The place impressed me as having been put together
without much planning. The buildings were designed in different styles, reflecting
the age in which they were built. The old ones you could tell from their architectural
style were quite old, and their bricks and concrete at the lower levels were chipped
and falling away. Small swirls of dust and litter blew across a big dirt-filled open area
which I would later learn was Peoples’ Park.
I suddenly felt more insecure and insignificant than I’d felt in a long time. I
was also experiencing a fear that I would never leave this terrible place; that I would
be trapped in this little space for a lifetime.
With the blowing dust gritting between my dry teeth, I threw my bundle
up on my shoulders and ventured out into the prison. I asked a passing inmate how
to find Six.
Six Wing was a huge cellblock containing stacked tiers of what should have
been one man cells, but which were crowded with four prisoners. It was like a bee
hive, abuzz with the sound of men settling in for the soon-to-come evening count.
The air was bad with the smell of too many bodies, the poor ventilation not being
able to keep up with the load. And the inadequate lighting contributed to the hivelike atmosphere of the building. I found my way to the cell that was assigned to me
without too much trouble. It was occupied by a man who I would latter learn was
a jailhouse lawyer called Doc. Doc’s other cell partners were kitchen workers and
would not return until later in the evening. We had a brief but friendly talk until
count time was announced over the cellblock’s loud speakers, whereupon the goon
squad suddenly appeared at the bars in front of the cell. They ordered me out, cuffed
my hands behind my back, and then escorted me to Big Red, the name prisoners
gave to the two-story brick building that was the institution’s segregation unit. It
appeared as if I was indeed going to be “singled out for discriminatory negative
attention.”
Being processed into the hole was not much different than all of the other
forms of degradation prisoners must experience on a daily basis. As it happened
there was another prisoner being processed when I entered the unit. We each had
to remove all of our clothing in front of the gawking guards, then allow them to
look into our mouths and ears; lift our scrotum and penis so they can examine
under them; turn around, bend over, and spread the cheeks of our ass so they can
supposedly check to see if there is any contraband hidden inside us. The other
guy being processed with me was a few years younger than me and more slightly
built. I didn’t speak to him, nor he to me, as each of us were caught up in our own
28

the oppressed: The phenomena is essentially part of a much needed cleansing
process, one that prepares a nation for the struggle for liberation and revolution.
The Algerians in Fanon’s book, not unlike Blacks in the ghettos of
America or prisoners in the nation’s gulags, internalized the oppression they were
experiencing, and tended to take it out on each other in the form of what could be
characterized as acts of self-hatred. This was not that unusual, considering the fact
that the tribal people of Algeria considered the French colonialists to be gods of
sorts, who could not be killed. Fanon noted that at first this violence manifested
itself through intra-family conflicts; husbands beating their wives, women violently
abusing their children, and so on. This domestic violence, according to Fanon, then
slowly transformed itself into intra-tribal conflict. Men within the tribe drank and
fought with each other, resulting in many deaths and injuries. The next phase of the
process was one of inter-tribal violence, where now more or less united tribes fought
against each other. As the process continued to unfold the tribes, now skilled in the
application of violence, came together for the final phase. They started fighting the
French occupiers and were eventually able to drive the foreign army from their land.
While I had some appreciation as to why prisoners would be preying on
each other, I was nonetheless angry at the prisoner who killed the weaker youngster.
The killer could not understand why I was so pissed; why his act of murdering
someone else, not even a friend of mine, would bother me. He and I did not get along
well after that. He was one of those people who for all his miserable life had been
told he was a piece of shit, and he was treated accordingly. He ended up believing
it, and behaved like a piece of shit. He had a lot of company in that regard, too. So
there were conflicting trends in Big Red, and the prison in general. On the one hand
there was this kind of cannibalism, with the prisoners raping and killing each other.
And on the other hand, just as intense periods of blind, self-destructive resistance. I
wanted to make prisoners more conscious and to lower their self-destructiveness. I
knew it was going to be an uphill struggle.
Not too long after my placement on B tier of Big Red my direct appeal
from the federal bank robbery conviction was pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals.
I was acting as my own attorney on the appeal (as I did at trial) and had only a
narrow time window within which to file my opening brief. The rules of the appeals
court mandates that all briefs must be commercially printed, using an offset press
(there were no laser printers and fancy word processors in those days), but in the
case of indigent prisoners an exception was made. We could submit briefs prepared
with only a typewriter. The problems was that there were no typewriters available to
prisoners in Big Red, and my constant requests to the administration to provide me
with the temporary use of one were routinely denied. Accordingly, I was forced to
file a motion in the U.S. district court in Spokane, Washington, asking the federal
judge to issue an order directing that I be given access to a typewriter for the limited
purpose of perfecting my then-pending appeal.
33

Joe, Mark, and Carl, all of whom had participated in the December 1974 takeover
of sections of the prison. I learned there had been long periods of spontaneous
resistance to conditions in segregation, a resistance that sometimes took violent
forms. From what I could gather the battle would run hot and cold, sort of like the
principle seasons in that remote corner of Washington state. A few months earlier
there had been tough fighting; a guard or two having been taken hostage by seg
prisoners, convicts being beaten by their captors, prisoners throwing fecal matter
on the cops as they came on to the tier, and the cops putting urine, bleach, and
soap chips in the food and drink before serving it to the locked down prisoners.
Then at some point there would be a change, a few token concessions tossed out
by the warden, and the season of struggle would suddenly change again to one of
peace and cooperation. Many of those who had participated in the earlier protests,
like Kevin and Andy, would become friends with the cops (or at least certain of
them), and those guards, our former enemies, would in turn pull trips like opening
the prisoner’s door for the attempted rape that took place on my first night in the
unit. At that particular moment, the season was currently one of peace between the
keepers and the kept in Walla Walla’s segregation unit. That was the time when we
most often victimized each other.
There was another young kid on B Tier, an innocent 20 year-old whose
principle crime was probably one of being more confused than those around him.
The youngster did not bother anyone else on the tier, and for the brief time he was
with us tried to mind his own business. One night two guys on the tier, a couple
of the wanna-be toughs, passed themselves off as new found friends to the kid by
giving him some barbiturates. Once the young man was groggy from the drugs, the
two of them went into his open cell and raped him. Then, in an effort to conceal
their crime, they made him take a shower. Upon his return to the cell the two of
them strangled the kid to death, then tied one end of a bed sheet around the victim’s
neck and the other end to the bars, and arranged the body so as to make it appear as
if the youngster had committed suicide. While the police did not fall for the suicide
ruse, they charged and convicted only one prisoner with the kid’s murder. The
other one made parole a short time later and went home. I’ve seen this sort of thing
happen on more than one occasion; someone kills and/or rapes another person,
then is turned right around and released. It was not the release but the murder that
so deeply disturbed me.
Why did that happen? Why did prisoners prey on each other like that?
One possible clarification, at least one that provided me with some measure of
understanding, came from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon was
an Algerian psychiatrist who was educated in France, during the period France
colonialized his homeland. He wrote about his observations of the process through
which his people developed the capacity to struggle against French imperialism. I
will badly paraphrase what Mr. Fanon had to say on the subject of violence among
32

humiliations.
When the guards were done with us they threw us each a pair of oversized
blue coveralls and led us to B tier, one of the four tiers making up the hole. I was
assigned to cell 13, the other guy was put next door to me, in cell 14. I looked around
the tiny cell. It was dank, painted barf green, and filthy. There was a more or less
round patch of brown mud-like material smeared on the wall over the bunk. It was
about three feet in diameter. I could tell by the smell and texture that it was human
fecal matter — shit! It took a moment for the shock to wear off, then I yelled out
to the guard, telling them that I wanted a different cell. After awhile a guard came
onto the tier and I showed him the filthy wall and demanded a move. He told me
that there would be no cell change, as such matters were ordered by the assignment
officer and could not be changed. I then asked for cleaning materials, but was told
that would have to be obtained during the following day, as his shift did not issue
supplies.
Temporarily resigned to my fate, I made my bunk and started cleaning
the cell as best I could without actually touching the any of the bugger-infested,
shit-smeared walls. Supper had just been served in the segregation unit and most of
the 24 prisoners on the tier were either taking naps or reading. It was mostly quiet,
with only an occasional snatch of conversation between the cells. No one paid any
attention to me.
It must have been around seven o’clock in the evening when they started
letting selected prisoners out for their one hour exercise periods. While I didn’t
know it at the time, most prisoners on B tier spent 23 hours a day in their cells,
although there were about six men who served as “trustees” and spent considerably
more time outside their cells (but still on the tier). These were the toughest
men in the toughest prison in the state. Some of them were in the hole serving
administration segregation time or awaiting trial for murdering other prisoners. I
did not pay a whole lot of attention to what was going on outside my cell, the traffic
of prisoners exercising and talking with other friends on the tier. One guy stopped
by my cell on his way to the front of the tier to use the phone. He said his name was
Danny Atteberry, and that he and a couple of others on the tier were in the hole for
participating in the December 1974 takeover. He said he knew of me and of course
was supportive of the work the George Jackson Brigade had been doing in their
behalf. He named the other rioters and hostage takers as Joe Green, Mark LaRue,
and, to some extent, Carl Harp. I knew most of the names of these men and was
happy to learn that there were some friends on the tier.
At about nine that evening events took a very ugly turn. A gang of about
six prisoners decided they wanted to rape the prisoner in the cell next to mine, the
kid who was booked into the seg unit with me. I could not believe my ears when
the sound of their efforts to get his door opened invaded my peaceful reality. The
guard on the end to the tier was at the lockbox trying to open the door of cell 14
29

so these guys could get in and rape him. I sprang from my bunk and looked out the
bars at the front of the cell at the unfolding scene. The victim was holding a book
in the bars, preventing the sliding door from opening. His attackers were trying to
grab the book, he’d pull it back, the guard would attempt to open the door again,
and my neighbor would stick the book back in the bars. The rapo gang of prisoners,
lead by a muscularly built black man awaiting trial for murder, then went to the sink
at the end of the tier and obtained a pitcher of hot water, which they threw on the
man trying to defend himself. Still he would not let them get the book or to stay far
away enough from the bars for the guard to be able to open it.
I was afraid to shout out in the other man’s defense, fearful that the mob
would turn on me. I just stood there, wallowing in anguish for both of us, and
hating myself for not taking a more firm stand. Who knows, had it gone on much
longer or if they had gained entrance to the cell I may have actually done something,
like demanding that they stop. On the other hand, maybe I would have continued
to tremble in fear. But the guard gave up and that ended all hope of the prisoners
getting into the younger man’s cell. It isn’t often that I am confronted with an ethical
or moral issue that also appears to be a question of life and death. It is not a good
feeling. I didn’t sleep well that night.
The next morning my cell door opened and I was released, along with the
men on each side of me, for my one hour exercise and shower period. The first thing
I did was to clean the walls of the cell. I then went to talk with Atteberry, Green,
and LaRue about the events of the night before. They shared my sense of outrage
but were unwilling to physically confront the gang of rapo killers. Only one man
said he would take a fighting stand, and that was Carl Harp. He was understandably
reluctant and his support shaky, but it was a start. I also talked to one of the old
timers on the tier, a respected prisoner and escape artist I will call Art. Art told me
not to get too riled up about what was happening, as the “kid” was a punk anyway
and would be giving his ass away if people weren’t trying to take it. Art told me
that at Walla Walla prisoners are raped all the time, even bought and sold by other
prisoners — that’s the way it is. I was amazed, and answered that this attitude must
be altered if we are to ever make progress at changing conditions in the hole. While
it did not appear as if I made much progress during my hour, I later learned that
Danny, Art, and the others spent their times on the tier talking to members of the
“gang” about what is right and wrong for prisoners to be doing. The change was not
deep, but a new mood nonetheless came into being on the tier. The followers had
fallen away from the rapo leader, which was a positive development. On the negative
side, the big rapo took this turn of events as a challenge to his masculinity, and he
clearly saw me as the cause of the change. It seemed to me that he’d decided that in
order to prove himself a real man he must rape my neighbor. It may sound dumb
today, but back then maleness was not something that was biologically determined,
but rather manliness was a state of being that had to be reinforced and proven every
30

day, most often at someone else’s expense.
The next morning the rapo was out on the tier first. He promptly set
up camp in front of the bars of my cell and started his exercise routine, jumping
rope directly in front of me. His shirt was off and his massive muscles rippled with
sweat as he worked out like the professional he was. In addition to being a welldeveloped weight lifter, my new friends would soon tell me that this guy had been a
professional boxer on the streets. This demonstration of the rapo’s prowess certainly
scared me, but when it was my time to exercise I took the jump rope down in front
of his cell and did my rather pathetic workout. I was skinny, and not at all tough, yet
I wanted to communicate the fact that he was not going to be able to make his move
without some resistance from me. I did not particularly like the kid in the cell next
to me. It was not for him that I was doing this, it was for the principle that preying
on each other must be stopped.
That afternoon I found out that the rapo had his “yard period” changed so
that he would be out on the tier with me and the kid the following morning. That
night I got very little sleep. I was certain that come morning I would either die or be
badly beaten up by this much stronger and far more vicious man. Morning finally
came, of course, and when my door opened I stepped out onto the tier determined
to put up as good a fight as I was capable of. The rapo had never spoken to me, and
this particular morning was no exception. He went about his business of exercising
as if I wasn’t there. He did talk to the kid, but no rape took place. When it was time
to lock up again I entered the cell with a great sense of relief.
A day or two later the rapo put in a move slip to be transferred to another
tier, and he was gone soon after that. I subsequently learned that the reason he
did not attack me was that I had succeeded in winning over public opinion on
the tier. The George Jackson Brigade’s bombing attack on the headquarters of the
Department of Corrections and the FBI office in Tacoma, and other actions of the
Brigade, had landed me a certain amount of moral authority on B tier. To have
hurt or killed me would have been very bad politics on the part of the rapo. The
cost of his not having done so was also expensive. His position as the prison’s top
dog was no longer intact. A short time later, while supposedly giving him a nose hit
from a joint, two prisoners I will call Kevin and Andy, former members of his rapo
entourage who had since joined him on D tier, attacked him with knives. He was
badly stabbed but survived the assault. In any case, he was no longer a threat to me.
Although Kevin and Andy would subsequently prove to be serious obstacles in the
path of prisoner organizing. But that was in the future at this point. Right then my
only thoughts were of trying to build something that would move things forward.
As days melted into months I fell into the day-to-day routine of life on
B Tier, and, to some extent, was able to communicate with prisoners on the other
three tiers of Big Red through the vents located in the back of each of our cells. But
mostly I did a lot of talking with my fellow cons on the tier, particularly Danny,
31