Of Captive Queens and Holy Panthers: Prison Fiction and Male Homoerotic Experience

Prison eroticism can by no means be reduced to decadent phenomena such as transvestism, prostitution and gang rape. On the contrary, the homoerotic subject-matter in fiction is often accompanied by an astonishingly transcendental vision of the prison - comparable with the Dostoevskyan conception that Man is forever in solitary confinement unless he can reach his fellow-prisoner. It is Everyman who is thrown into a radically novel environment, must cope with it, and often has to reconsider his original self- definition as an erotic human being.