How Sex Works For Boys In Mental Institutions
Speaking as a trans girl stuck with those boys during the 90s?
Sex wasn’t allowed under any circumstances. Any.
So how did it show up?
Any way it could.
Bathrooms, Bedrooms, and Broomsticks
Some guys jerked off in the shower, but you only had five minutes in there. If you took longer, the entire hall and all of the orderlies humiliated you. They made fun of you for wanting to jerk off, for needing to jerk off, for actually jerking off, anything to shame you into never doing it again. You had to learn to not do it — or accept humiliation as part of the experience.
But just as often, you found power on the other side. Sometimes you were the one being humiliated. Sometimes you were the one humiliating the other person.
To escape the threat of intrusion, some guys jerked off in their private rooms, but let me tell you how THAT went.
No one had their own room. You were paired with another boy. Those boys became what they called prison friendly. They satisfied each other. Turn off the lights, pretend until it’s over. You never knew how that kind of need affected a boy until they had to live with it.
The people who seemed scariest were instead sent to their knees. They couldn’t live with such a need, not to be filled by it or needed for it.
When they got caught, they were punished. They were separated into single rooms and taught the evils of homosexual desire. The orderlies reminded them that heterosexual desire was evil, too, if it took longer than five minutes.
I was the one exception
I had a room at the very beginning on my own, but that wasn’t what it sounds like. I was in a room by myself with the door open at all times. And even with the door open, an orderly checked on me at all times.
I was on suicide watch.
They checked on me every fifteen or twenty minutes. They checked when I was asleep, too. They couldn’t risk that I was faking. I’d faked many, many, many times before until it was safe for me to try to escape in whatever way I could.
Even if those ways were final.
Part of me wishes they’d put me on the girl’s ward. Wouldn’t I have finally felt among friends? But girls were also the people who’d most often hurt me. What hurt the most was that they were the ones who never came back.
Boys, even the ones who went too far, said they’d wage wars to keep me safe.
Is a prison full of predators so bad if you’re the one person they’d never see as prey?
If the scariest were the safest, what did that make the people who seemed safe?
My first roommate was Brent. A slightly larger guy, buzzed hair, really polite. He found out I’d studied martial arts for several years, so he showed off some kicks. I was surprised he had such good form for a kind of tubby guy.
I also found out he had something of a girlfriend on the girl’s ward one floor below. They couldn’t touch and weren’t really dating, but they sometimes talked when the guys and girls found each other on the recess field.
I liked hearing those stories. I liked knowing a girl felt safe with him. I liked the idea that a boy could be safe for a girl.
Back at home, no one was safe for this girl. It made just as much sense that a mental institution was where I found friends and family.
More than a couple of weeks couldn’t have passed. I met with my therapist. My counselor. My team of counselors and case managers. They asked if I had made any friends, and I said I thought I’d made a friend with my roommate Brent.
I was assigned a new roommate immediately. I found out when I came back to the room — and Brent was so angry that he almost punched a hole in the wall.
His face turned red. He took one puffed breath, a bigger puffed breath, BIGGER —
He brought his fist back and twisted toward the wall with a casually violent grace.
Inches from the wall, he restrained himself, deflated the speed almost like magic. He hit the wall with just enough controlled force that you could see how easily he could have punched a hole through it.
Instead, he’d brought that power back into himself.
Instead, he’d brought it into his eyes when he turned to me.
He said he’d hoped to protect me, he enjoyed being my friend, but he was being reassigned to a different room.
I didn’t understand why.
He wouldn’t tell me.
So I asked my case team why
They reassigned me to a new patient named Josh.
They wouldn’t tell me why.
Later, I found out why.
