The New Prison Drama

Herbert's play concerns a group of four young men in what he calls “a Canadian reformatory.” The play is set in the boy's dormitory, but “the whole upstage wall is barred”: Herbert has designed the most dominating feature of the set to be a signifier for the boys’ incarceration.Footnote ⁷Fortune follows a young man named Smitty, a first-time offender who is taught the difficulties, horrors, and politics of prison life by his three cellmates, Queenie, Mona, and Rocky. Queenie, the most ostentatious of the play's characters, is a hardened and clever prison queen, adept at prison politics and expert in her manipulation of sexual power. Herbert describes Mona, on the other hand, as “hang[ing] suspended between the sexes, neither boy nor woman” (8). Mona is quiet and submissive, and the play always treats him as an honest, sensitive character who cannot quite take care of himself.Footnote ⁸ Rocky, by contrast, is brutal and mean, insulting everyone in the cell as often as possible and constantly differentiating himself from the two “queers” with whom he is forced to bunk (12). Like the characters in older prison dramas such as William Douglas Home's “Now Barabbas . . .” (1947) and Tennessee Williams's Not about Nightingales (1938; first produced 1998), the young men in Herbert's play represent what British penologist Alexander Paterson described as “a most bewildering variety of different types. Each man is distinct and completely different from each of the others. The only thing they have in common is that they are all in prison.”Footnote ⁹

Before Herbert throws the naïve everyman Smitty into this mix, he offers the audience a brief exchange of prison argot as the three young men try to figure out what is happening outside their cell:

This rapid-fire dialogue immediately accomplishes a number of things for Herbert's dramaturgy. It disorients the play's audience by mobilizing unfamiliar language, and it demonstrates the power structure of the cell as Rocky bullies Mona and Queenie defends him. The struggle for dominance in this dormitory is so far not a violent one, but the terms of the fight are intensely sexualized and sexualized, moreover, in a homoerotic way.

It is important to note, as well, that the winner in this miniature verbal battle is Queenie. That is, Herbert sets up a convention, from the first minutes of the play, whereby Rocky's threats of violence are revealed as empty through the skill of Queenie's pointed humor. Further, Queenie's relationship with the audience depends on another mode of knowledge that she and the audience share: Herbert's inclusion of prison argot indicates to the audience its distance from the world portrayed onstage in the play. However, not all of the language Queenie and Rocky use in these first few moments is particular to prison life. Take, for example, this bit of banter:

This dialogue is not simply the occasionally inscrutable argot of prisoners; it is also a conversation filled with language specific to gay men. As historian George Chauncey has noted, many gay colloquialisms “derived from the slang of female prostitutes” and were adopted by overtly effeminate men such as Queenie long before such language became commonplace for a majority of gay people. That this exchange with Rocky is highly inflected with gay male camp reflects camp's status as both “a cultural style and a cultural strategy.”Footnote ¹⁰ Such analysis helps us understand how Queenie's ability to make the audience laugh—a skill dramaturgically related to her adeptness at verbally trouncing Rocky—is, in fact, heavily dependent on her ability to communicate in code to a gay male audience already familiar with the conventions of camp. As David Halperin has recently argued, “Camp is about cutting everyone down to size [. . .]. Camp is about deflating pretension, dismantling hierarchy, and remembering that all queers are stigmatized and no one deserves the kind of dignity that comes at the expense of someone else's shame.” Herbert crafts Queenie in a style typical of gay male camp; each of her witty retorts to Rocky's threats “both presumes and produces community” with her audience.Footnote ¹¹

As soon as Smitty enters the scene, the three young men begin to school him in the workings of the reformatory. The world of the prison in Fortune and Men's Eyes appears to circulate around sex, and Queenie, Rocky, and Mona each play particular sexual roles. The dialogue remains campy, but it is not at all frivolous; sexual positions indicate positions of power, even as the young men squabble:

Here Queenie describes Rocky as a top, but a bit later, as the two tell Smitty how best to survive among the other prisoners, Rocky describes submitting sexually to older prisoners: “You'll have to serve a little keester to the politicians who wanna put you in the barn,” he says. Smitty quickly informs the three homosexually active young men that he's “not . . . queer” and that he has a girlfriend, but Mona informs him that “life inside is different” (22). According to the young men in Fortune, there is no such thing as a prisoner who isn't sexually attached to someone else for protection or political gain.

At no point does Herbert's play diverge from this sexualized representation of the hierarchies of carceral life, and as the inmates describe it, the punishment for aspiring to independence from this sexual economy is rape. Queenie, attempting to convince Smitty to get himself an “old man,” describes a time when Mona was repeatedly raped. “One day in the gym,” Queenie tells us, “a bunch of hippos con her into the storeroom to get something for the game, and teach her another one instead. They make up the team, but she's the only basket. They all took a whack, now she's public property. [. . .] Don't wait until they give you a gang splash in the storeroom. Mona had to hold on to the wall to walk, for a week” (23). Queenie's description of Mona's rape is brutal, and by the end of scene 1 the idea of being gang-raped has so terrified Smitty that he agrees when Rocky offers to be his old man. Apparently, however, Smitty hasn't quite understood the arrangement, and the play's first scene ends with the following terrifying sequence:

The stage goes to black. Herbert does not dramatize Rocky's rape of Smitty, substituting the violence described in the stage direction: arm-twisting and silence. Rape here remains unspoken as rape and unseen as anything other than the violence Herbert describes.

Act 1 of Fortune continues with Smitty revolting against Rocky at Queenie's urging. She tells Smitty that he needs to be “nobody's punk” and convinces him to get out from under Rocky by beating him up. Smitty agrees, and Queenie offers herself sexually to him. To the offer of sex Smitty responds with an unenthusiastic but assenting “It'd be a change, anyway” (50–3). Act 1 ends with Smitty severely beating Rocky in the shower room. This sequence of violence, like the rape in the previous scene, takes place offstage, the particulars of the beating left to the audience's imagination. Whether there is a sexually violent component to Smitty's revenge as he assaults Rocky, Herbert never makes explicit in the play's text.

Fortune's second act begins with Queenie rehearsing her routine for the prison Christmas show. Queenie does a fan dance in drag. “Looking like a combination of Gorgeous George, Sophie Tucker and Mae West,” she sings a camp version of the Tucker tune “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” but, in a Mae West flourish, she has twisted the lyrics to “A hard man is good to find.” Smitty, Rocky, and a guard are all sexually aroused by the dance, and Smitty, in contrast to his lack of enthusiasm about sex with Queenie at the end of act 1, now says, “you look sexy as hell” and tells her to “sing it for Daddy, and don't forget I like the wiggle accompaniment” (70–1).

Over the course of the play, Smitty has become a hardened convict, and Herbert makes clear that the prison system is responsible for this transformation. After Queenie, Rocky, and the guard go off to the Christmas show, Smitty tells Mona how much he likes him and that he wants to be Mona's “old man.” Mona reveals that he is in jail on a sex charge—he was robbed and beaten by a gang of men and then accused of making a pass at them—but refuses to have sex with Smitty.Footnote ¹² Mona is in love with him and doesn't want him to be a part of his real life, a life of constant sexual abuse at the hands of other prisoners. “I—separate!” he tells Smitty. “I separate things in order to live with others and myself. What my body does and feels is one thing, and what I think and feel apart from that is something else. [. . .] It's to the world I dream in you belong” (89). The two reconcile and are laughing together when Rocky and Queenie enter and (apparently out of jealousy) cause a fight. The guard breaks up the brawl and blames Mona for it. He is accused of “making a pass,” and the guard hauls him offstage to be beaten. Smitty threatens Rocky and Queenie. He then listens as Mona is beaten, and again Herbert asks us to imagine the offstage action. Smitty returns to center stage a changed man. “His face now seems to be carved of stone,” Herbert declares, “the mouth narrow, cruel and grim, the eyes corresponding slits of hatred. He speaks in a hoarse, ugly whisper. [. . .] Looking coolly out to the audience with a slight, twisted smile that is somehow cold, sadistic and menacing.” The play ends with Smitty directly threatening the audience with revenge for the violence against Mona that he has just heard: “I'm going to pay them back. I'll pay you all back” (96).

Strange Bedfellows: Social Justice with a Camp Sensibility

On paper, Fortune and Men's Eyes is a complex—perhaps awkward—combination of social critique, gay romance, and campy humor. David Rothenberg, moved by the story and by the fact that it was based on the author's own experiences in a Canadian prison, used his own life savings to produce the play's original theatrical run when he couldn't find anyone else to fund it.Footnote ¹³ For Rothenberg, the first production of Fortune was intended as a critique of the prison system in the United States. This critique contained an awareness of the racial makeup of U.S. prisons: the producers decided to cast gay black actor Robert Christian as Mona, a role ostensibly written for a white actor and played by a white actor in many subsequent productions of Fortune.Footnote ¹⁴ The casting of Robert Christian reflected the producers’ awareness of the increasing number of black men incarcerated in the United States and the vehemently racialized discourse surrounding prison rape in the late 1960s. The intended social critique of this first production was further made clear in weekly audience-feedback sessions at the theatre. Post-performance conversations between the cast and interested audience members were a Tuesday-night tradition at the Actors Playhouse. A wide range of formerly incarcerated men were invited to report their own experiences of prison conditions in the United States. Rothenberg himself moderated these sessions, and by all accounts they were productive, provocative, and exciting.Footnote ¹⁵ The New York Times, which covered these postshow discussions, reported that “Gradually, out of this experience, there grew the decision to ‘do something’ about prison reform. In November, 1967, an organization took shape, its name derived from the play—the Fortune Society,” a charity designed to help incarcerated men and women after they are released from prison, speak to young people about the horrors of prison life, and work for reform of the prison system.Footnote ¹⁶

The establishment of this charitable and political organization designed to help improve the lives of prisoners came directly out of the publicity that the first Off-Broadway production of Fortune and Men's Eyes garnered. Caoimhe McAvinchey credits the play itself for this effect, arguing that “Fortune dared to reflect a version of the world that was raw, brutalised and unjust and demanded that theatre audiences think about what happens in prison and do something about it.”Footnote ¹⁷ Theatre scholar Neil Carson calls Fortune a “hard-hitting drama about prison life” that “exhibits in a particularly emphatic way the violence and corruption of prison society.” For him, the play is a meditation on dehumanization and the effects of incarceration. He asserts, for example, that “the significant human problems [. . .] are not those related to glandular functions or even to social conventions. They are the problems which transcend sexual categories—the problems which arise in moments of crisis in war, in emergencies, in prison.”Footnote ¹⁸ These discussions of the play frame Fortune as a very serious drama about conditions prisoners are made to suffer and place the play in conversation with new debates in the late 1960s about prison reform and inhumane prison conditions.Footnote ¹⁹

Several of New York's theatre critics saw this first production differently. Dan Sullivan, in the New York Times, understood that Herbert intended the play as a critique of the prison system—“Obviously, he feels strongly about his subject; obviously, he wants us to feel as enraged, as disgusted at the system that breeds such corruption”—but he noted that the play's “only live character [. . .] is an outrageously funny ‘queen’ played in the style of the immortal Mario Montez.”Footnote ²⁰ Edith Oliver of the New Yorker offered a similar critique, remarking that “the play appears to have been written in good faith; there was no evidence—to me, at any rate—of pornographic intent” but adding that, “There is no overwhelming evidence of talent, either, in anyone concerned. Fortune and Men's Eyes is repulsive, but it is not disturbing, for beneath it beats a heart of corn.”Footnote ²¹ Both Oliver and Sullivan see that the play aspires to seriousness but find those aspirations undermined by the marriage of social critique to sentimentality and a camp sense of humor.

“The Boys in the Band Get Busted”

The first production of Fortune and Men's Eyes was a hit. But although advertisements for the play emphasized its profundity and gritty realism, comparing Herbert to Peter Weiss and Jean Genet, audiences for the play appear overwhelmingly to have been gay men.Footnote ²² Perhaps even more important, Fortune was unquestionably a play about gay men. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times about gay characters in literature, a commentator who wished to remain anonymous complained that Fortune was yet another drama in which gays are shown only in a negative light,Footnote ²³ and Margaret Harford, in her précis of the play for the Los Angeles Times, ignored entirely the acts of rape in the play and stated that Fortune “deals with homosexuality and various other indignities of prison life.”Footnote ²⁴Variety's review of the film version of Fortune even carried the epigraph “The Boys in the Band Get Busted.”Footnote ²⁵

If audiences understood that the 1967 production of Fortune and Men's Eyes was a piece about gay men—more interested in titillation than social justice—then the London premiere in 1968 and Sal Mineo's productions (in Los Angeles and New York) in 1969 cemented the association. In the London production, director Charles Marowitz attempted an audience-immersion technique, fingerprinting audience members and posting ushers as prison guards. “The audience was assaulted by distant sirens, the sound of alarm bells and droning voices making prison announcements,” but Marowitz also added an element of nudity that was never present Off-Broadway.Footnote ²⁶Variety reported that “The play has been ballyhooed over a scene in which three men were said to emerge from a shower room and dry themselves.” But although the Variety critic called the scene “over-publicized,” his description is explicitly crafted as a promise of titillation: “There are swift backviews of two of the men and only a theatergoer with swift, keen eyesight will catch a glimpse of the genitals of the other actor as he turns on stage.” The critic seems almost to invite those with exceptional abilities to test their skill. Variety's review focused solely on sex and did not mention prison conditions; the critic synopsized the play as the story of “a young heterosexual serving his first reformatory term, sharing a dormitory with three convicted homos and swiftly becoming depraved.”Footnote ²⁷ Despite the director's stated intentions, in the popular press Fortune and Men's Eyes was not a play about social justice; it was a sexy play about gay life in prison.

In the United States, Hollywood actor Sal Mineo—who rose to fame in Nicholas Ray's Rebel without a Cause (1955) but whose star had been on a slow fade since the early 1960s—directed the West Coast premiere of Fortune. Taking onstage male nudity several steps further than the London production had, Mineo, who played the rapist Rocky, “decided to strip at stage left and walk across the stage with just a towel tossed over his shoulder.” Mineo biographer Michael Michaud described the director's modified version of the rape sequence in the following way:

Mineo also changed the play's ending. After Mona was dragged offstage, Smitty masturbated as he listened to Mona being beaten by the guards, an “auto-erotic ending” that the Los Angeles Times noted was “the director's idea, not the author's.”Footnote ²⁹

The reviewer for Daily Variety understood Mineo's production as a drama about violence; he offered that “the controversial piece is handled with such good taste that it rises far above the somewhat objectionable subject and results in an entertainment that should assure tingling tills [sic] through a long run”; the critic also noted that the “Simulated [rape] scene is candidly presented but so well blocked that it is in no way obscene.”Footnote ³⁰ Mineo claimed to be more interested in the treatment of prisoners and prison conditions than in sexuality; he visited California's San Quentin prison to research the play and appeared extremely conscientious in all of the interviews he gave promoting it.Footnote ³¹ Mineo's changes to the show involved an attempt at a greater degree of realism: he installed a working shower onstage and, as Marowitz had done in London, brought the prison setting out into the audience through the use of scenic elements and ushers dressed as prison guards. Once again, however, the majority of critics—Daily Variety included—focused on the eroticism present in the play. The Los Angeles Times review, while mostly kind to the director, referred to “the cell's inmates” as “young perverts” and opined that the staging was “graphic enough for reverse peristalsis.”Footnote ³² Mineo continued to emphasize the play's interest in prison reform with statements such as “my intention was not: where can I put a nude scene. I didn't believe the kid's transition from a typical nice boy into a boy-slave—just like that—with no sign of it at all. I mean, they don't show anything in the original play—not one moment of physical violence.”Footnote ³³ The director's attempt to make the violence visible to Fortune's audiences reflects a particular ethical point of view related to representations of violence: for Mineo, the effects of the violence that Smitty experiences in Fortune ring false because the audience has not actually witnessed it. Mineo's production placed that violence where his audience could see it.

That these interviews about the ethics of nudity and the importance of representing violence realistically were given to publications with a predominantly gay male readership, such as In, After Dark, and Avanti, suggests, however, that Mineo was well aware of his play's intended audience. Michaud reports that Mineo's publicity team “targeted a predominantly homosexual demographic” and provided these magazines with titillating photographs of the cast taking showers and in various stages of undress.Footnote ³⁴ As with the first New York production, audiences were overwhelmingly male,Footnote ³⁵ and Dan Sullivan offers that “A tip-off to the essential thrust of this particular production [. . .] was the irreverent giggle heard from the audience recently during a tender scene between the boyish hero and [Mona]: ‘Oh, give IN! I would!’”Footnote ³⁶

The show did so well in Los Angeles, where it ran for seven months, that Mineo found backers for a second production on the East Coast only two years after its first New York production. This time the show opened at Stage 73 in the Upper East Side, far away from the predominantly gay neighborhood of Sheridan Square (which had been the site of the Stonewall Riots earlier in the year). Mineo kept all of the elements he had added in Los Angeles—the nudity, the onstage sexual violence, the autoeroticism—and extended the rape scene into a three-minute “gladiator battle in the shower.”Footnote ³⁷ This time, reviews were brutal. Clive Barnes said in the New York Times that “Mr. Mineo's version of this play is pure and tawdry sensationalism.” His bitter review included vilifications such as, “If this sounds like the kind of play you would like, it is to be found at Stage 73 [. . .]. But Sir or Madam, I suggest that if this does sound like the kind of play you would like, you need a psychiatrist a lot more than you need a theater ticket,” among many others.Footnote ³⁸ A kinder but still dismissive Village Voice critic opined that “Mineo's lively presentation of prison life has all the authenticity, depth, and social consciousness of a gay-oriented 42nd Street novel on the subject.”Footnote ³⁹ The Variety reviewer described the revival as “crass sensationalism and a blatantly pandering production. It's poorly directed and even more poorly acted, but it has a lot of boxoffice impetus and should run indefinitely,”Footnote ⁴⁰ and the Los Angeles Times critic referred to it as “a play of singular sleaziness.”Footnote ⁴¹ Critics rejected what they perceived as Mineo's cynical appeal to a gay male demographic. John Herbert himself even wrote an op-ed piece in Variety criticizing Mineo's directorial choices and distancing himself from the production.Footnote ⁴²

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the chords consistently sounded in reviews of Mineo's 1969 production was its alleged departure from Herbert's original intentions. Barnes claimed that the play's “first production was fundamentally a serious indictment of the North American prison system,”Footnote ⁴³Variety's critic seemed to remember the original Fortune as “a thought-provoking blast at the inhumanity engendered among inmates by prison life,”Footnote ⁴⁴ and Sandra Schmidt claimed in the Los Angeles Times that even the fan dance that is such an important structural component of act 2 “had nothing to do with the play,” which she remembered as a drama about “the operation of power” and “the all-pervasive workings of love.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Critics, however, had been hostile to Fortune from the play's first production. Fortune and Men's Eyes had never been the ideal play about social justice in American prisons that scholars and critics wanted it to be.

Despite the pans in the Times and Variety, the play continued to run at Stage 73 for nearly seven months. Mineo biographer Paul Jeffers attributes the show's longevity to gay male audiences, claiming that “gay men who hailed ‘the Stonewall rebellion’ considered it a duty and act of loyalty to flock to the box office of the small theater on 73rd Street.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Mineo's production may not have been to Clive Barnes's taste, but it hadn't offended New York's gay male population, and audiences clearly remained interested in what the Village Voice (despite its objections to the show) called “an honest [. . .] accurate portrayal of four homosexuals.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Audiences for productions of Fortune and Men's Eyes, at least in the United States, have always been overwhelmingly gay and male. Fortune—with its campy humor, gay love story, and frank portrayal of sex exchanged for power—was, in fact, aimed at gay male audiences as originally written.

Perverting the Prison-Reform Play

The interpretive frame for male/male rape set up by these productions of Fortune and Men's Eyes in the period 1967 to 1970 ought not to be underestimated. Fortune is the first attempt by any dramatist to portray the damage caused by male/male rape, and it left a legacy with far-reaching effects. The play opened the door to prison drama about sexual violence, and MGM released a film version in 1971. Fortune was also followed almost immediately by two other notable plays about prison life in the United States: Rick Cluchey's The Cage (1969) and Miguel Piñero's Short Eyes (1974), which was also made into a film (1977).Footnote ⁴⁸Fortune’s influence on both of these plays is undeniable. This is not because Cluchey or Piñero would have read Herbert's work—Cluchey had begun to sketch his play almost at the same time that Herbert finished writing his in Toronto—but because as a public event Fortune set up a series of expectations and paradigms for the new prison drama that deeply affected reception of The Cage and Short Eyes. Reviews of both plays frequently mention Fortune as an interpretive touchstone, often comparing the authenticity of these newer plays with Fortune’s model.

Prison dramas in the United States and United Kingdom have often included queer characters, but these stories have, from the first, been invested in the brutality of prison life. Fortune and Men's Eyes marks a historical moment when dramatic representations of the brutality of prison life transformed into representations of the brutality of prison sexual hierarchies. Traditional prison dramas in the realist genre—beginning with John Galsworthy's Justice (1910) and including plays such as Albert Bein's Little Ol' Boy (1933), Tennessee Williams's Not about Nightingales, and William Douglas Home's “Now Barabbas . . .”—follow a similar pattern: a young, innocent, or otherwise naïve protagonist is incarcerated and attempts to survive life behind bars.Footnote ⁴⁹ These plays uniformly represent prison life itself as harmful. They document overcrowding, substandard living conditions, and mistreatment by guards and wardens. Although the protagonists invariably try to behave properly and stay out of trouble, they are uniformly crushed. These characters are destroyed by the prison system itself, which the playwrights indict as corrupt and damaging. Many of their protagonists have been killed by the final moments of the play; others have been transformed from good, honest people into hardened criminals.Footnote ⁵⁰ In either case, the prison play engages in a call for social justice by using a kind of perverted Bildungsroman Footnote ⁵¹ in which the young prisoner is not allowed to come of age but is instead killed or becomes an antisocial figure to be feared.

Fortune and Men's Eyes attempts to follow this traditional pattern of the prison-reform drama, and Herbert makes it quite clear in his play that the administration of the prison is what needs reform. The guards look the other way while Smitty is raped; their actions condone all of the sexual violence that occurs in the prison. Mona, we find out by the play's end, has been incarcerated not for a criminal act but because of the failings of a Canadian justice system that sees an effeminate man as de facto deserving of incarceration. Although the play ends with Smitty vowing revenge against Rocky and Queenie in particular, he also breaks the fourth wall, looking out to the audience and promising to revenge himself on the entirety of the prison system and, by extension, society at large.

As Herbert updated the social justice prison narratives of the 1930s and 1940s, he naturally described the brutalities of carceral life that he had personally experienced in Canada and that he saw as reflective of his contemporary moment. It is understandable, too, that the playwright's attempt to depict prison conditions realistically necessitated a portrayal of prison sexual hierarchies and the ubiquity of sexual violence in prison systems. Herbert's frank treatment of male/male rape as a normal if terrifying component of life in prison was so convincing that, after 1967, representation of rape became a dramaturgical technique that worked to indicate a play's authenticity as a prison drama. The lasting effects of this authenticating gesture remain with us. The Cage and Short Eyes, the two prison dramas following Fortune most immediately, could not claim authenticity as prison dramas without a portrayal of sexual violence among incarcerated characters. Both involve frank discussions of prisoner rape, and virtually no play or film produced in the past forty years with prison as its subject has been able to avoid some portrayal of rape or the threat of rape. British and U.S. representations as different as David Mamet's play Edmond (1982); the BBC miniseries The Jewel in the Crown (1984); the award-winning film The Shawshank Redemption (1994); Simon Bennett's Drummers, produced in 1999 by the British theatre company Out of Joint; the 2004 science-fiction movie The Butterfly Effect; the U.S. television series Oz (1997–2003); and the 2008 stoner film Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay all explicitly refer to rape as though it were a conventional aspect of prison life. In film, this list could go on almost indefinitely, including forgettable comedies such as Let's Go to Prison (2006) and I Love You Phillip Morris (2010) as well as serious dramas such as Spike Lee's 25th Hour (2002) and Tony Kaye's American History X (1998). The link between rape and life behind bars has become so widespread that in 2001 Human Rights Watch confidently asserted that “few members of the public would be surprised by the assertion that men are frequently raped in prison, given rape's established place in the mythology of prison life,” offering in addition that “judging by the popular media, rape is accepted as almost a commonplace of imprisonment, so much so that when the topic of prison arises, a joking reference to rape seems almost obligatory.”Footnote ⁵² The mention of male/male rape has become a discursive technique, a shorthand signifier that allows a representation of prison to demonstrate its authenticity as such; accordingly, prison rape has become de rigueur in drama about prison, cementing and continually reinforcing these cultural associations.

Male/Male Rape and Homosexuality

I have already noted that the early critical reception of Fortune in the press focused on the play's attention to homosexuality, but the overwhelming majority of scholarly work on Fortune has also addressed the play from the point of view of the homosexual, a figure newly visible in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Peter Dickinson notes that Fortune and Men's Eyes is often considered the beginning of “modern gay drama in Canada.”Footnote ⁵³ Alan Sinfield's Out on Stage also emphasizes sexuality as the play's most important subject; extraordinarily, however, in Sinfield's gloss of the play there is no reference to rape anywhere. In this reading, Fortune is transformed into a play about bullying: Rocky doesn't rape Smitty, he “exploits” him.Footnote ⁵⁴ Further, Out on Stage places Fortune on a historical timeline with prison plays such as Little Ol' Boy,Footnote ⁵⁵“Now Barabbas . . .”, and Jean Genet's Haute Surveillance (Deathwatch) (1949), plays that include queer characters but do not include any male/male sexual violence.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although “Now Barabbas . . .”, for example, includes the suggestion of sexual relations between prisoners, the play only describes homosexual desire and does not characterize that desire as violent. Sinfield's reading figures Fortune as a kind of thematic heir to these three plays, and he therefore ignores the rape that is central to the action of Fortune. His reading works to characterize Fortune's descriptions of violence as simply one more aspect of male homosexual relations.

I note Sinfield's conflation of male/male rape with homosexuality in Fortune and Men's Eyes because nearly every critic of the play's original production framed the play in exactly this way.Footnote ⁵⁷ Martin Esslin, speaking about a growing trend of nudity in the theatre, refers to “John Herbert's play about homosexuality in a prison”;Footnote ⁵⁸ in the New York Times, Sylvan Fox referred to “the brutal, homosexualized world of a prison cell”;Footnote ⁵⁹ and the Los Angeles Times reviewer claimed that the play examined the “dark side of gay life.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This array of responses is representative of reviews for the productions of Fortune in London and Los Angeles, for both productions in New York, and for Harvey Hart's 1971 film. For these critics, the prison is not the site of legally sanctioned sexual violence or racial discrimination; instead, it is a breeding ground for “homosexuality.” Put another way, these critics interpret male/male rape as a sexual act and both the rapist and his victim as homosexuals. Such criticism makes no differentiation between the perpetrator of sexual violence and the man who is subjected to it.

Because of this conflation of male/male rape and homosexuality, reception of the play by both scholars and mainstream critics has focused not on the play's portrayal of male/male rape as one of the harrowing circumstances obtaining in Canadian and U.S. American prisons but rather on the pernicious effects of homosexuality as such. It is as though what is wrong with American prison systems is homosexuality itself, not the harsh conditions under which prisoners are forced to live. For the majority of critics, Fortune was much more a melodrama about male homosexual sex than it was a play about the brutality of prison life, the flaws in American justice systems, male/male rape, or the inability of the prison system to rehabilitate young criminal offenders. Perhaps even more accurately put, male homosexual sex was interpreted as equivalent to the brutality of prison life, the flaws in American justice systems, male/male rape, and the inability of the prison system to rehabilitate young criminal offenders. As one former warden at San Quentin prison put it, “There's plenty of sexual activity in our prisons, but it's the wrong kind. No inmate . . . is entirely spared homosexual advances, and many succumb.”Footnote ⁶¹ Rape, in this view, is not read as rape but as sex, and homosexual sex is presented as what makes prison life brutal. Male/male rape, if it manages to be legible at all, is legible not as violence but as normative or perhaps slightly sensational gay male behavior. In Fortune and Men's Eyes, rape is a gay thing.

Here, perhaps, is where the discrepancy between the play's reception and Herbert's dramaturgical intentions becomes most apparent. In Herbert's text, rape and homosexuality are polar opposites. Rocky violates Smitty at the end of the play's first scene. Smitty then begins to have consensual (if hateful) sex with Queenie over the course of the play, and in act 2 Smitty attempts to seduce Mona. When Mona refuses to have sex with Smitty, he describes homosexual desire as something beautiful and precious, a kind of ideal love that he is not willing to abandon. Mona says he loves Smitty, and when he characterizes himself as separating his real world from his dream world, Mona places his love for Smitty in the dream world and his experience of rape at the hands of other prisoners in the real world. Mona tells Smitty, “It's to the world I dream in you belong. It endures better. I won't let you move over, into the other, where I would become worthless to you—and myself. I have a right to save something” (89). In Mona's imagination, then, homosexuality is redemptive and beautiful, an ideal love set apart from the quotidian. Male/male rape is its opposite, simply a component of the violence and brutality of the world as it really is. In this way, Herbert places male/male sexual violence in stark contrast to homosexual desire. They are, in Fortune, each other's thematic opposites.

Yet this aspect of Herbert's play appears, for whatever reason, to have made no significant impression on either reviewers or scholars. The view of critics in the popular press that homosexuality is a de facto part of the punishment of American prison systems was to become widespread in Anglo-American society. Regina Kunzel has demonstrated that accounts of prison sex in the 1960s and 1970s “were newly ubiquitous, newly graphic and newly univocal in depicting sexual violence and brutality, so much so, in fact, that rape would come to be understood as the defining practice of sex in men's prisons.”Footnote ⁶² Further, if to be raped was equivalent to a homosexual experience, then homosexuality was reproducing itself, finding new recruits and converting them.

Homosexuality and male/male rape remained equivalent in the two prison dramas that immediately followed Fortune. In Short Eyes, for example, Paco attempts to seduce Julio—also known as Cupcakes—in the shower by kissing his neck; Julio spurns his advances, but the two have a dangerous conversation where they frankly discuss male/male rape and link it explicitly to homosexuality.Footnote ⁶³ Piñero depicts rape as an extension of homosexual desire: Paco offers Julio sex, then threatens to rape him, and then offers sex again, all while telling him that he loves him. Paco is willing to go both ways—he offers to allow Julio to penetrate him as well—but what Paco cannot get through seduction he will take through violence. In this shower sequence, Piñero figures rape as a clear result of Paco's frustrated homosexual desire for Julio, and Julio explicitly identifies Paco more than once as a homosexual, not simply as a frustrated heterosexual.

The Cage is a more formally complex play than either Fortune or Short Eyes—it has a ritual, dreamlike quality to it that differentiates it from realism—but in The Cage, too, sexual violence and sex are equivalent. Though Doc and Al are lovers at the beginning of Rick Cluchey's play, Doc threatens Al with rape over the course of the narrative, and both of them threaten the new inmate, Jive. Their advances are seductive at first but grow violent when seduction doesn't work; they use violence as a means to achieve sexual satisfaction.Footnote ⁶⁴ Although Fortune and Men's Eyes clearly distinguishes between homosexual desire and male/male rape, critics—and the two plays that followed Fortune—consistently conflated them.

Prison Sexual Violence and the Cultures That Produce It

Finally, it is important to note that Herbert's placement of male/male rape inside a prison also worked to separate male/male sexual violence from normative heterosexual behavior. As critics discussed the brutal, “homosexualized” world of the carceral, they restricted male/male sexual violence to an activity created by the monosexual world of the prison and discursively cordoned male/male rape off from the world outside this system. Fortune, Short Eyes, and The Cage all portray prison as a world entirely incommensurable with society at large. All three dramas, in fact, are identical in their expositions: they introduce a young white male prisoner who has never before been incarcerated. In each play this man is inexperienced in criminal activity, believes himself to be innocent, and has no idea of the dangers, rules, or language of the prison. Another character in each play quickly explains carceral society to the new prisoner in the play's first scene. The audience, of course, needs these expository sequences in order for the plays to work, but the structure of these sequences requires an emphasis on the differences between society outside and society inside.

The effect here is to depict the world of the prison as a discrete, often racialized, system populated by people who are very different from the audience, who operate according to rules that differ widely from those of normative society, and who use a language only partially comprehensible to speakers of “standard” English. What is taken for granted in this prison world (dense argot, monosexuality, hierarchical structures of violence) is represented as inherent in and the result of the processes of everyday life within prison society. As portrayed in Fortune and its immediate followers, male/male sexual violence is a product or consequence of the prison system. These theatrical representations give voice to male/male rape as a problematic but then locate that problematic within a community that, though in need of reform, still remains outside of and separate from normative society. In fact, prisons are specifically designed by societies in order to create a discrete field separate from that of the majority, and the dramaturgy of these three plays works to emphasize precisely this difference. The plays characterize prison as a space for deviants and criminals where activities take place that do not and never would take place among “normal” people. Fortune and its successors, then, ideologically place male/male rape outside the realm of possibility for normative society by placing it inside the four walls of the American prison.

The problems perpetuated by this ideological sleight of hand are especially immediate in the United States, where overall prison populations have risen exponentially since 1973 and where the federal prison population, according to the Pew Center on the States, continues to grow rapidly, “more than doubling since 1995.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In January 2008, one in every one hundred adults was behind bars in the United States, and incarceration continues to be “heavily concentrated among men, racial and ethnic minorities, and 20- and 30-year olds. Among men the highest rate is with black males aged 20–34.”Footnote ⁶⁶ These statistics reflect an extraordinary imbalance in incarceration of U.S. citizens: one in nine black men in the United States between the ages of 20 and 34 is imprisoned by the federal government or by a state government. In comparison to the prison populations of the world's other countries, the United States stands out as an aberration. According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, “the United States has the highest prison population rate in the world” by far. And although the U.S. accounts for only an approximate 4.4 percent of the world's population, it incarcerates nearly 22 percent of the world's prisoners.Footnote ⁶⁷ What these statistics demonstrate quite clearly is that nations produce their prisoners in different ways and that incarcerated populations are tied ineluctably to the cultures that imprison them. Although Human Rights Watch has noted that “few members of the public would be surprised by the assertion that men are frequently raped in prison,” few members of the U.S. public have voiced concern about the expanding prison population or about the increased frequency of sexual violence that attends such expansion.

What Fortune and Men's Eyes and other early prison rape plays do not do—what, indeed, is entirely outside their agenda—is question the binary structures of masculinity–femininity, dominance–weakness, penetration–impenetrability, and receptivity–aggressivity that adhere to representations of rape. Rather, because these dramas are focused on the damaging effects of incarceration and the failings of the U.S. American and Canadian justice systems, it is in the dramas’ interests to represent prison life as shockingly as possible. In this way, the plays portray prison rape as simply the way things are in prison, an attitude toward sexual violence that avoids interrogating rape as a problem inherent in societal structures formed and sustained outside the prison system. In 1968, therefore, when Rosalyn Regelson opined in the New York Times that “another interpretation of the action” of Fortune and Men's Eyes “might be that behind the brutal sexual assaults made on the weaker prisoners by the stronger was the need to assert our culture's sick idea of ‘masculinity,’” she was the lone voice in print to do so.Footnote ⁶⁸ The overwhelming majority of critics saw the carceral world in Fortune as unconnected to their own society, and Fortune, Short Eyes, and The Cage do not discuss the hierarchical structures of prison sexuality as a reflection of the masculinist hierarchies that obtain in the world outside carceral systems. Instead, prison rape and the intracarceral power that it produces appear to be hermetically sealed off from the very society that has, in fact, made such power dynamics possible. In Fortune and Men's Eyes, prison sexual violence is not caused by gender dynamics invented outside the prison but appears, rather, to have emerged, fully formed, from the discrete space of the prison.

In these ways, Fortune and Men's Eyes, though it has been all but forgotten by cultural theorists, has had a profound impact on the figuration of violent masculinity in Canadian, British, and especially U.S. culture. The play's four important and very different productions in the late 1960s represented prison as a homosexual space where sexual violence was commonplace. By classifying male/male rape as simply one more aspect of the normal violence of life behind bars, these theatrical events crystallized popular discourses of the time, refashioning and sexualizing representations of prison life for years to come, while constructing these sexualized spaces as fundamentally different from the cultures that incarcerate young men and produce carceral spaces through legislative action. Fortune and Men's Eyes established a tradition of imagining sexual violence as something that burgeons and develops within the walls of prisons instead of locating the causes of sexual violence—male/male or otherwise—in a masculinity that structures and subtends our culture as a whole.