Boston’s 43rd Pride Parade: Interview with Rev. Jason Lydon of Black and Pink

BOSTON - Over the past few days, local media outlets have flooded the airwaves with photo essays of flamboyantly dressed drag queens, Thank Menino signs, and photos of gay NBA veteran Jason Collins. The atmosphere of Pride parades is often reminiscent of Will and Grace and examples of pop culture stereotyping gays. You lose count of the spandex shorts, the rainbow flags, and the S&M references. But if you looked closely at this Pride parade, there were more political organizations participating as well.

Reverend Jason Lydon, founder of Black and Pink, described his organizations an open community of LGBT prisoners working to abolish the industrial prison complex. Black and Pink currently receives letters from incarcerated LGBT prisoners and coordinates these messages into a newspaper that goes out to prisons nationwide. Their work often runs into opposition.

Lydon said, “Our newspaper is denied from dozens and dozens of prisons around the country. Kentucky state prisons don’t allow anything that promotes homosexuality into their prisons, so we’re denied there. We’ve had trouble with Pride, here in Boston, with the Gay Officers Action League, who are not excited about us, because unsurprisingly we want to abolish positions that they have. There has been tension, but we’re not kicked out of queer space-we’re a reminder of what Pride used to be.”

In Boston, Black and Pink works on campaigns, going to court with the accused and helping released prisoners with T fare and other small necessities. Black and Pink was founded when Lydon was released from a six month stint for political charges served in both a Georgia county prison (15 days of which were spent in a maximum security wing) and a prison in Massachusetts. Lydon said, “I was in a queer segregated cell where I started understanding the realities of the system better, being locked up with a bunch of trans women, and gay men, and other gender non-conforming people.”

“Triage” of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered inmates is legal.

Lydon explained, “They also (in Georgia) ask a question on most intake forms, that say, “have you ever engaged in any homosexual experiences?” And you can choose whether to answer that truthfully or not.”

This question does not exist on Massachusetts prison forms, and Massachusetts’s state prisons do not have segregated cells.

Perhaps the most debated LGBT topic in the state has been the debate about Michelle Kosilek (formerly Robert Kosilek), a transgender inmate in Massachusetts who won the right to have the state pay for her gender-reassignment surgery in a U.S. district court. The case spurred the introduction of “An Act Relative to Appropriate Use of Public Funds,” which seeks to legislatively prohibit the Massachusetts Department of Corrections from administering specified medical care and treatment to transgender inmates. “ Groups like Black and Pink and Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition claim that this is a violation of prisoners’ eight amendment rights. Conservative politicians like Scott Brown have been quick to condemn this, while other Democrats, noting the fiscal argument, won’t touch the issue with a ten-foot pole.