Gabriel Guzman spent ten years in prison for having sex with a minor beginning when he was 17 years old. As a gay Latino man, he was a double minority among the prison population.
“In prison, it’s hard,” 31-year-old Guzman tells Progressive.org. “But being gay in prison makes it ten times harder.”
Guzman says he was often the target of homophobic abuse, both at the hands of other inmates and from prison staff. As a result, he spent a lot of time in solitary confinement, sometimes for months on end.
Sadly, this sort of treatment is not uncommon for LGBTQ prisoners.
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In 2014, a class action lawsuit filed by over a dozen former and current queer inmates of San Bernardino County Jail in California. The lawsuit alleged mistreatment and discrimination based on the prisoners’ sexual orientations, including being held in solitary for longer than is allowed and being denied access to rehabilitation programs.
A 2015 survey by Black and Pink found that 83% of LGBTQ prisoners experienced verbal harassment by other inmates, and 70% suffered discrimination and verbal harassment by prison staff. 85% said they had indicated spent time in solitary.
The U.N. declares stays in solitary confinement longer than 15 days tantamount to torture, except in certain cases.
When he wasn’t locked in the hole, Guzman spent much of his time working out in the prison gym. He says he tried to become as physically intimidating as possible in hopes of avoiding further abuse or harassment, and to stand up for other gay prisoners.
Related: Rapper Lil Boosie recalls walking in on two men having sex in prison in viral video
“You have to be on your toes,” he explains. “I always had to be the strongest person in the area, and that was really taxing. I spent a lot of time in segregation for defending myself or others because I did not tolerate others being victims.”
As a result of spending so much time in solitary confinement, which Guzman estimates was probably around three years of his ten year sentence, Guzman now says he has trouble maintaining eye contact with people.
“When you are in isolation, you are cut off from anything stimulating. It’s very demeaning and very tough.”
Guzman was released from prison earlier this year. In April, he spoke before a prison reform group at Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago. He’s currently working on reintegrating back into society after ten years behind bars.
Evie Litwok, a former-inmate-turned-prison-reform-activist, tells Progressive.org that much of the abuse that LGBTQ prisoners suffer goes unreported because it happens behind prison walls.
“Prison is about punishments,” Litwok explains. “And if you are queer, you are punished more.”
“If you think the United States has any permission to say other countries violate human rights,” she says, “then you haven’t been inside of the jails, detention centers and prisons in America.”
Related: What is federal prison like for a gay man? This former inmate shares all the details
h/t: Progressive.org
Mandrake
Why does this article not mention which prison he was in? I doubt it was the San Bernadino County Jail.
Heywood Jablowme
If you click on the link (Progressive.org) the article there says he “served time in several Illinois state prisons.”
happiness17
This article proves that child molesters don’t do well in prison.
ChrisK
That’s rough. I’m surprise they sent him to prison and not some kind of juvenile detention. 17 is still a child.
DMRX
Not true. Not as related to sexual consent. The most common age of consent across the states is 16. It’s 17 in Illinois, assuming that’s where this guy screwed up, since that’s where he spent his prison time.
Billy Budd
He was a minor and he F’d a minor. What is the big deal? Here in Brazil he would not have been arrested to begin with. America is obsessed with punishing men for having sex or taking drugs. It is insanity.
Hermes
More for having sex than taking soft drugs — and definitely more for having gay sex. A lot of methods of harming young gay men have been foreclosed, which frustrates older bigots terribly – this is one way they get around it.
ChrisK
It’s also sexism. If this had been a 17 yo girl with say 13 yo does anyone believe she would be doing any time?
batesmotel
The big deal is that it’s against the law to have sex with a minor. It’s not something that people condone or celebrate.
Heywood Jablowme
@Billy Budd: In many states a 17 year old with a 16 or 15 year old is not a problem (a “Romeo & Juliet” law) . But a 22 or 40 year old with a 15 year old would be prosecutable. We don’t know how young the minor here was, it doesn’t say.
I realize you’re extremely proud of Brazilian sexual perversion, but you can’t brag about your drug laws. Marijuana is still totally ILLEGAL in Brazil in even the smallest quantities. (I just looked it up.) Most U.S. states are way ahead of you guys on that one!
Kangol
The US likes to punish people for having sex, not just men, and not everyone for taking drugs, but mainly poor black and latinx people. What’s really nuts is that there are hundreds of thousands of people in jail for selling pot and other low-level drugs, yet it’s now legal in a number of states to sell pot and over 150,000 people now have those jobs. But without locking lots of poor black and latinx people up, the private prison companies wouldn’t make the money they depend on.
Heywood Jablowme
@Kangol: I totally agree with you, although we should note that even in the states where cannabis is legal, it’s still illegal if you’re under 18.
That’s unlikely to change, even though (probably) the vast majority of us here used it before we were 18.
Tobi
I helped support an 18-year-old who had consensual sex with his 17-year old girlfriend in the USA. Her parents insisted he was prosecuted and unfortunately he was in state that didn’t have Romeo & Juliette laws. He ended up serving two years. The law desperately needs overhauling, given that a 1995 survey showed c. 65% of under eighteens in America have had consensual sex at least once.
kafir
As to batesmotel and its stupid comment about sex with a minor , he was 17 and was a minor himself .
Paco
The article does say that he was having sex with a minor “beginning” when he was 17. Seems like the sexual relationship continued after he turned 18 and it fails to mention the age of the underage person involved.
10 years seems excessive though, and the harsh sentence was most likely influenced by homophobia.
Changeagent
In 1970 I was sentenced to 160 years in Texas prison for commercial burglary. I was openly gay because the news coverage of my bust screamed it in headlines. I actually did 4 years 4 months and 17 days before working my way out as a jailhouse lawyer with a sharp pencil. I never experienced anything like what is described above. I avoided the sex “game” by telling potential suitors, “I did not come to prison to get a husband with a prison number, I have one of those myself. I want a husband with a portfolio and you don’t have one.” I was popular, well known and liked by other convicts and the staff because I did my job (maintenance bookkeeper) well. After I got out I continued as Houston’s senior glbtq activist, actor, writer and radio personality (host and producer of The Prison Show for 32 years before retiring a few years ago) In 1975 I pioneered glbtq radio in Texas and am now the chair of the board of Houston Media Source, our access cable channel. Just use your search engine it all there.
Me2
I imagine that prison life differs from facility to facility, state to state and so on. I also imagine that it can be a very scary place for some openly gay inmates.
Bromancer7
Would you like a cookie?
JohnnyCockets
Congratulations you went to an accepting prison. That doesn’t mean they are all like that. And what does this have anything to do with this story. You actually stole from people and because you brown nosed the staff and Became the attention gay you apparently still are today are you saying this could of been avoided? I really hope you’re not that naive to think that it was his fault for what happened to him.
Richard 55
By identifying as “gay”, you are turning yourself into a minority. YOU are to blame for the problems that come with this.
Why can’t you simply call yourself a man? It’s what Nature made you. You would fit in easier and other men are more likely to respect your homosexual quality.
By calling yourself “gay”, you are creating the very victimhood you complain about.
Heywood Jablowme
The guards and the other prisoners immediately identified him as “gay” because the crime had been reported as a “gay” one. There was absolutely nothing about that under his control. And yet you’re blaming HIM?
A new low even for you.
BigG
Do the crime, do the time.
Happ Chapp
What? no penis shots? no naked men?…why download then…pass i think
Heywood Jablowme
Some of the responses here are awfully cold-blooded. Well, I always expect something perverted from Billy Budd because this is his weird obsession, how Brazil is great because any adult of any age can f*ck any 15 year old and call it “consensual” and it’s all cool. Yeah right.
In this case, we have absolutely no idea how young the minor was. Maybe he was 15. Maybe he was 14. Maybe he was 12. Maybe he was 10. We just don’t know!
Okay, let’s be charitable and say the younger kid was 15. A big deal? Maybe not, but maybe. Personally I can easily imagine being coerced into sex by a 17 year old when I was 15. And having it go on for several months. And the 17 y.o. gaslighting me into believing “hey, you want this. It’s consensual.”
Maybe a ten year sentence was too much. But was it “no big deal”? We don’t know that.
Bromancer7
I have a hard time believing anyone would need to coerce a 15 year old teen male into having sex. While there might be a small minority not interested in having sex at that age I have to imagine that number is extremely small.
I’m not saying it’s right or wrong to have sex with a 15 year old, I’m just saying it’s highly unlikely he was coerced in any way.
Tobi
@Heywood Jablowme – I honestly don’t see the problem as long as the sex is consensual and the person is not in a position of authority, although in France the current President started an affair with his drama teacher when he was 15 and she was 40, subsequently married her, and she’s now First Lady !!
I enjoyed sex from the age of 13, albeit with playmates the same age, but I was gagging to get my randy hands on a 20-30 year-old bodybuilder type. It took me a couple of years, but I succeeded, and that was back when the age of consent for gay sex in the UK was 21, whilst for heterosexuals it was 16.
There still seems to be something of an attitude that sex is only tolerated, it’s something dirty or dangerous, and needs to be restricted like alcohol or gambling in case someone gets hurt. I find it highly hypocritical that 16 years in some states in the USA can drive, get married or join the army, but they can’t have sex.
Heywood Jablowme
@Tobi: You are misinformed. The minimum age to join the U.S. military is 17 and that’s only WITH parental consent. That’s been the rule for many decades.
As discussed, a lot of states have so-called “Romeo & Juliet” laws where minors close in age get a pass. Also many states are finally raising the unaccompanied driving age, and the marriage age, as they should!
@Bromancer7: Again, we don’t KNOW he was 15. I merely presented that as a “hypothetical.”
We don’t even know how the affair was found out, either. Maybe the kid decided (belatedly) it was coerced.
Tobi
OK, 17, but that still means in some states you can’t have sex but can join the army, doesn’t it?
Heywood Jablowme
@Tobi: After looking into it a bit I suspect the main problem is that the most populous state, California, has the age of consent at 18!!!
Anyone younger than 18 who has sex of any kind in CA is breaking the law.
For all their supposed “liberal” reputation, California f*cks up a lot of stuff.
Frank McGinness
Bingo. This form of gaslighting is the same as is done to males (and intersex) by many parents and most USA doctors, made to believe forced genital modification is all good and no bad when carving off genital flesh. This is why many men yell out angrily, “I Love being Cut!”
Bottom line is no one should be forced.
JamJewel
Gimme a break! I was very much aware of what I was doing when I set out to seduce [successfully] the school yard candy man when I was nine and gawd knows how old he was… thirties or forties?
Straight or gay, many of us start real early and the majority of our older partners get away with it because we LOVED it and there were no parents/adults trying to tell us it was wrong – nor would we have listened or would we have cared.
I will never forget the story several years ago [in the days of chat rooms] of the 16-year-old kid who took several trains and buses from NJ to Long Island to be with his boyfriend who was in his thirties and the older guy went to prison even though the kid refused to testify against him. Just because the law says it’s wrong does not mean that the law is right either [like those on prostitution!] since it is mostly always the parents of the minor who bring the complaints to law enforcement in the belief they are protecting their ‘precious!’
The recent push by states to raise the age of marriage for girls to 18 [17 with parental consent] was not sex-based but because “…the marriages [were] arranged for girls by families whose religious and cultural customs support the practice [and were] often wed to older men — even to relatives, like cousins, from abroad who are in search of green cards that allow them to live permanently in the United States.”
I am not saying that non-consensual sex is ever okay, just that there is a lot more consensual sex happening by young folks with partners of all ages than we care to even contemplate and no amount of laws will stem that tide.
ChrisK
A 16 yo can’t give consent though and a man in his 30s is sick in the head for what is essentially rape. Glad he went to prison.
Heywood Jablowme
Yeah, yeah, you were quite the little perv. Now run along. 🙂
Tobi
@ChrisK – that’s just faux morality, the kind of thing I’d expect from a Boring Again Christian. Here in the UK the age of consent is 16, in most of Europe it’s 15, in some places lower at 13-14. I can tell you from experience, that the lowering of the gay age of consent in the UK from 21, to 18, and now 16 hasn’t meant the end of the world, despite all the right-wing moralists insisting it would be.
charlenecoleman4555
??????O ddeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
just before I saw the paycheck which was of $9068 , I did not believe …that…my father in law was like they say actually taking home money in there spare time on their computer. . there brothers friend haze done this for less than seven months and at present paid the loans on there apartment .. .??????? ?????____BIG…..EARN….MONEY..___???????-</b
aDiOrableguy
He shouldn’t be telling other inmates what his real charge was. Everyone knows “child molesters” are the worst kind in prison, even if he was 17. Prisoners don’t hear his side, they hear rapist, child molester, pedophile.
Knight
This guy is NOT a hero or in any way a victim; anyone claiming he is needs to get their head out of their ass. He was originally arrested for ‘Predatory Criminal Sexual Assault” on a minor aged 12 – 16…so this was not in any way consensual. https://www.rapsheets.org/illinois/doc-prisoner/GUZMAN_GABRIEL/S06481
After he was paroled he took off his ankle bracelet and tried to flee http://www.wesh.com/article/sex-offender-who-removed-gps-caught-by-k-9/4426419 which shows he is not in any way repentant or vested with reentering society and living within the law.
Frank McGinness
““If you think the United States has any permission to say other countries violate human rights,” she says, “then you haven’t been inside of the jails, detention centers and prisons in America.””
No doubt true. It’s even more obvious given the mass violations condoned in the USA since INTACT GENITALS ARE A HUMAN RIGHT. And when you’ve been violated to then have but a remnant of your sex, there is forever no sexual freedom. This applies to everyone. For me and my friends, being forced to be without pheromones, stretch, and primary sensors, circumutilation straitjackets the P by its own skin. It’s basic shut up, now model it.