The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
Journal Entry 8/6/24
The Federal Bureau of Prisons releases a memo, informing all of us that we are no longer “inmates”—we are “adults-in-custody,” or “AICs.”
“Stupid ass shit,” the girls grumble. “Man, just call us inmates. What difference does it make?”
If you don’t look too hard at Officer Spicer’s bullet-proof vest and mace and rings of keys, you might think she’s a high-school counselor. She has long dirty-blonde hair and wears long, loose dresses in pinks and baby blues and florals. She’s trying to get charcoal-filter water bottles on commissary for us, she says. We say thanks, but mostly we just want cinnamon, corn nuts, and better ramen noodles.
“I don’t like the term ‘AICs’,” she says, almost apologetically. “I prefer to use the term ‘incarcerated people.”
I don’t want to be an “incarcerated person”, I want to tell her, any more than I want to be an “AIC.” I don’t want to be an “inmate”, either. I don’t want to be property of the FBOP. I don’t want to be a prisoner. I don’t want to be number 22810509, at bunk “29 Upper”.
I want to be anyone and everyone else. I want to be the masked-up kid hanging off the statues in D.C, making the front page of an angry conservative newspaper. I want to be one of the people that makes Bill O’Reilly turn red in the face when he’s ranting on Fox News. I want to be the woman on a megaphone at a rally with a keffiyeh wrapped around my shoulders. I want to be the old Korean woman tapping a drum at the march and smiling.
I want to be the dancer that slides down the pole into the splits and showers in cash on the stage. I want to be the dancer who cusses out the manager and gets banned from the club for not paying her house fees. I want to be the dyke who picks her up from the club with food in the passenger seat.
I want to be the hiker who knows the names of all the mountains and where the best trails are. I want to be the one to score the winning point. I want a bunch of sweaty athletic women to lift me up while I wave a trophy in the air. I want them to pour Gatorade on me and scream my name. I want to run until my lungs burn. I want to feel my body working for me, feel my heart keeping me alive. I wanna cut across the grass and not worry about getting written up for it.
I want to be an outrageous tabloid headline, and I want to be the journalist who breaks the story. I want to be the photographer behind the camera, and the baddie in front of it. I want to be the upstart in the director’s chair, and the starlet in her film debut. I want to be the defendant who goes to trial and wins, and I want to be the attorney who helped them get away with it. I want to humiliate a prosecutor.
I want to be a wife and mother. I want to carry my butch’s egg in my womb. I wanna nourish it and give birth to a baby, born from only our love and nothing else. I want to be a cottagecore lesbian. I want to be the prettiest garden on the street. I want to be an elder queer who invites the youngsters to dinner and gives them half-decent relationship advice. I want to tell them: “Do as I say, don’t do as I do” and “You remind me of myself, when I was your age.”
I want to be the one who catches a pretty girl’s eye. I want to be the one who makes her nervous when I look back. I want to be the one a woman asks to fix her car. I want to get 0W-20 on my shirt and dirt on my face. I want her to ask me what my tattoos mean, and steal glances at my arms when I roll up my t-shirt sleeves. And I want to be the one with car trouble, too. I want to pretend like I don’t know how to put on a spare so I can watch my butch do it for me. I want her to call me “ma’am.” I want *only* her to call me “ma’am.”
I want to be a dirtbag, and I want to be the one that gets done dirty—real dirty. I want a beautiful dyke to break my heart, so that I know it’s still there. I want it to be worth it. I want to write a corny song about it.
I want to be a bad artist. I want to be the author of a confusing novel and a collection of meandering, woo-woo essays. I want to be the kind of poet that makes people roll their eyes. I want a gay kid, forty years from now, to read my writing and feel seen. I want to be the writer that makes them experience a sudden nostalgia for an era they never knew.
I want to be the girl who drunkenly plays someone’s guitar at a house party. I want to be the girl with a messy bun, sweats, and smudged eyeliner, rolling up to a gas station on a Sunday morning to grab a Celsius and some Camels. I want to be the girl you stay up all night with, getting stoned and watching bad movies and being lazy together.
Because to be free is to be imperfect, strange, and messy. To sleep in sometimes, to leave the bed unmade, to burn the eggs and spill coffee and spend twenty minutes looking for the car keys and end up running late. To lose patience sometimes, to cry in front of people and get embarassed, to say something stupid and regret it.
Prisons are not full of “AICs” or “inmates” or “incarcerated people,” they are full of mothers and fathers and parents, husbands and wives and lovers and baby daddies and baby mamas, addicts and recovering addicts and former addicts, fighters and survivors and victims, bad artists and bad writers and bad singers, dreamers and thinkers and learners and natural-born leaders. Prison is full of humans. Messy, imperfect, strange humans, who deserve to live messy, imperfect, strange, full, and *free* lives. Humans who deserve grace, whether they “earned” it or not.
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.