Important: Everything Is Stories is created specifically for listening and is best experienced audibly. If you have the means, we highly recommend listening to the audio version. It captures the emotions and emphasis that cannot be conveyed on the written page. Transcripts are produced using a mix of speech recognition software and human transcribers, so there may be some errors. It is advised to refer to the accompanying audio for accurate quotes when using this content in print.
MARK OLMSTED: When I look back at the extent of my lying, I remember when I was like seven or eight, and this awareness came on me that I was different in some crucial, shameful way. And I definitely couldn’t tell anybody about what that was from very early on. And a lot of gay people will tell you this, but particularly gay men, around 7, 8, 9, I just realized that I was different. I had a secret. And that I had a real preoccupation with some of the best looking teenage boys on my street.
Say what you want about children aren’t supposed to have sexuality until puberty, but it wasn’t the case for me. I also knew that that was a big secret that I couldn’t tell anybody. It was nothing that was shareable, and somehow even though I had never heard anything about homosexuality consciously. I just knew that whatever this thing was, it was very wrong. This came to a first head, so to speak when I was in the Boy Scouts.
I went to Camp Wabika in the summer of 1970 and there was a scoutmaster there, a 28 year old man named Chuck Falco. He immediately told me, he gave me a nickname, which was Frenchie, because I’d just come from a summer in France. He would throw me up in the air a lot, tease me and wrestle me, and he was very good looking, and he had that masculine voice and those hairy arms, and I was just fascinated by him.
He did something called the Indian Games during the two week Boy Scout camp experience, and they set up a big teepee, and they got all the cutest boys from all the surrounding troops and he put loincloths on us, and he had us run Indian races. But before we ran the races, he would summon us into the tent, and two by two, would lift our loin cloth and put lube on our testicles, and tell us that it was because they didn’t want them to be chafed while we were running.
Afterwards, I was like, something was off about that. But they were authority figures and we were eleven year old kids. We just like, ‘Well, I guess that’s just a sensible precaution.’ There was no idea of grooming or anything like that back then.
So that night in front of the campfire, under the teepee, Chuck made sure my sleeping bag was right next to his. And while he was telling stories about being a Marine in Okinawa, I sort of got a little bit sleepy, and suddenly his hand went into my sleeping bag and grabbed my penis. And this is while he’s telling stories in front of all these kids, but because the sleeping bags were so bunched up, you couldn’t even tell that’s what he was doing, and he started masturbating me.
He was very smart and very experienced because he knew that it would be so shocking for me that I just wasn’t going to go, ‘What are you doing?’ And if I did, he would just say, ‘Oh, just fooling around.’ like he was tickling me. Almost immediately it started to feel really good, and I’d had erections before, but I never had an orgasm. And so he masturbates me and I had my first orgasm. I just had it, and it was like such an intense experience and so surreal, because it was like in front of everybody, but no one knew. As soon as that was over and he put out the fire and the story time was over, I was still thinking about what had happened as I tried to sleep, and he slowly unzipped my sleeping bag, and unzipped his, and reached out and did it again to me. Then he pleasured himself until he came all over my back, and then sort of wiped me off, and then I said, ‘Please stop.’ I remember him saying, ‘These things happen too easy.’
You would have think that I would have kept it a secret or that he would have told me, ‘Don’t tell anybody.’ But I don’t remember him doing that. I wanted to tell somebody. So I told this kid named Bruce, who was basically a friend of my brother’s, that I’d been molested by Chuck Falco last night. And I happened to choose someone who knew Chuck well, and knew that he was creating a lot of difficulties in the camp. So he told my brother, and my brother told my father. My father told my mother and when I got home after the two weeks, she goes, ‘What happened exactly?’ And I was like, ‘He just put his hands down there.’
And she goes, ‘But you’re okay?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I don’t want to talk.’ Of course I squirmed away. For me, it was a sexual experience and I didn’t want to talk about it with my mother. But my father reacted by calling the Boy Scout authorities at the camp requesting that his contract not be renewed. And that was it.
Later when I asked my parents, ‘Why didn’t you call the police?’ They were like, we didn’t want to re-traumatize you by you having to testify and stuff like that. And what really strikes me now is they didn’t seem to have the slightest thought of the fact that this wasn’t a one-off, and that he was going to do it to other kids, which is in fact exactly what he did. But I didn’t find out until 50 years later.
The first time I was arrested was just because of the dealing. The second time I was arrested was when I had sent in my fake death certificate and they realized that I wasn’t dead. Forgery and fraud were added to more possession, and possession with intent to sell. At the sentencing recommendation, they were like, ‘We don’t recommend bail for him, we think he’s a high flight risk. He has several identities.’ And they recommended a prison term. That was when I had that first thought. It’s like, you need consequences. You need to feel that if you do all these things that these things happen. That had gotten flipped around because I did all these bad things, but I managed to avoid bad consequences of them. And here I was like, you’re moving toward a kind of sanity again. It’s just in a very insane place, which was the prison system. It reminds me of the TV show M. A. S. H., where the theme is the only way of surviving an insane situation like a war is to also be insane.
After West Hollywood Sheriff’s Department, you had to go downtown to LA County Jail, and that processing is a shock because you’re stripped. They have to investigate you to make sure there’s nothing in your ass, they give you clothes, and it’s about as prison-y as you can imagine.
Then you’re waiting for medical processing. You’re handcuffed to benches in a downstairs room and you’re called one by one into medical processing, and they ask you if you’re having any suicidal thoughts. And even though I was crashing and starting to have withdrawal, I wasn’t feeling suicidal, but I said I was because in my mind I was going to be more likely to be seen with sympathy by the judge and maybe sent to rehab rather than have a prison term. So I said yes, not realizing they were going to immediately react right then. And so I get called soon after and I think, oh, I’m going to a dorm at least. They put me in this straight jacket where your arms are wrapped around you, both feet are chained and your arms are–there’s a chain going from there to them, and you can only move by shuffling slowly around. And it would be very hot if I was on crystal meth, part of a sexual encounter, but this wasn’t hot at all.
I’m taken up to a cage, this three tier, very modern, glassed in cells with tiny windows where you can see the freeway of Los Angeles just barely. They took my glasses, I got sent to a week of solitary suicide watch.
They don’t let you have even a toothbrush because people have evidently sharpened them and killed themselves with toothbrush. That was horrific. And I was going through withdrawal. Now, withdrawal from crystal is not that physically challenging. It’s nothing like withdrawal from heroin or an opioid. But what was there was just a sort of utter bleakness. What I could hear constantly was the cacophony of voices from the other tiers because there were a lot of genuinely mentally ill prisoners there.
But the whiteness of it all, the walls were very white, the sterility of it all, it was very unworldly, but I remember white kept coming into my mind. Like, you’re snow blinded by your experience. My environment looked like how I felt. My life had blown up, I was afraid it would, and I knew it had to, and it was nothing but me and my thoughts and these lame attempts to entertain myself by singing to myself, a lot of talking to myself. I started to get really freaked out.
So, no one says that in seven days you’ll be reassessed. And so three days in, I’m getting my pills, and the nurse would come around, and they would open the door and just hand you your pills, and before she could close the door, I just stuck my foot in there, and I say, ‘Listen, I need to see somebody. I need to get out of here, I don’t belong here, I need to see somebody.’ And the guards came into the room and they said ‘You don’t block the door, alright?’ They couldn’t really punish me. There’s cameras ahead so they couldn’t beat me up. So, they took all my clothes except for my underwear and that was my punishment. It was a gratuitous humiliation. God forbid anyone should answer my questions.
A lawyer came to see me that my sister hired during those seven days I was in solitary. We basically agreed that as soon as the seven days were up was going to go and submit a plea, which was a guilty plea, and he got eight counts down to four: forgery and fraud, and distribution with intent to sell, and possession. But I wasn’t going to be sentenced for a while because I had to go through the sentencing agreement with the parole officer. They asked to recommend it to the judge. So, I went from suicide watch to the gay dorms of county jail. It was there that I was going to have to wait a month and a half for the parole officer to do all the paperwork to submit to the judge for sentencing.
So, county jail had like ten floors and the overwhelming majority of them were regular general population dorms, but there were three dorms on the fifth floor that were exclusively gay. They were much safer, and a lot of straight guys tried to get in the dorms. In order to get in, you had to go through an intake with an officer who would ask you all these questions about gay life.
There were two intake officers who supervised the gay dorms, and they had an interview process where they asked you a bunch of questions to prove that you were gay. It was like, name some gay bars that you used to go to. That was basically it. Of course I passed with flying colors. It was nothing for me because I’d been to all the gay bars in Hollywood and West Hollywood 12 times over. And, once you also say it, with a certain amount of unrehearsed ease, it doesn’t usually take a rocket science degree to figure out just by manner and affect that someone is gay, and I think that’s what tripped up a lot of the straight guys, because they acted too straight. But, they obviously had rehearsed the right answers and some of them got in.
Because I was a first-timer, they put me in 5100, which was the Hilton of the gay dorms. I finally get into the gay dorms and I’m really excited because I knew that money had been put on my books and I could order commissary, which was the sheet that you could fill out for products that you could order, and I knew I had two hundred dollars in my commissary because a close friend had deposited them for me. And that means a few days afterwards I would get toothpaste and soups and cosmetics–things that I desperately wanted.
I get there on a Thursday night and the commissary orders had just gone out, so I had nothing and I was thinking another week of nothing. And so I’m getting acclimated to the dorm, feeling completely upset about this, and who do I see? But Larry. Larry was my dealer from Oklahoma. (Speaking in an accent) Talk like this. I gave him the biggest hug of my life, and I was so happy to see him. He’d been around the block and had done several terms before, so he knew everything. And when Larry found out about my not being able to have a commissary order, he went and he just filled a bag full of toothpaste and chips and what would get me through the next week. It was the most kind thing anyone did for me in my entire time at prison, and I just burst into tears. He was like, ‘Well, don’t get all crazy on me now. I just gave you a little this and that to get you through to next week.’ It was really comforting to have an ally there, someone I knew, who could show me how things work.
I learned what prison was gonna be like, and at least I didn’t have to be in the closet there. There are moments of extreme sadness, because I remember when I watched Thelma and Louise, and I’d seen it 10 years before with good friends who had since died of AIDS, and then that end of that movie is very depressing. And I remember I just went back to my bunk and I felt a sense of such–it wasn’t loss for the life that I just had–It was an accumulated sense of loss and grief and all the friends I had lost. How did I fucking get to this? How did I screw up my life this badly that I’m waiting for sentencing to go to prison?
And I just sobbed in my pillow. I never did anything like that in the straight rest of prison. But you could do that in the gay dorms because they understood. No one bothered me or asked why, ok, because everyone knew.
During that month in the gay dorms my lawyer visited and he would tell me what the negotiations with the DA had been, and that they were going to finalize what my plea would be. One morning at 5am, I got my court date and we got up very early, and we were all chained and brought down to the bus. The bus went downtown to court and it happened to go down Melrose. So, I passed within two blocks of where I lived. That’s a difficult bus ride because I saw my life. I realized that if I could get out and go to my house right then and have everything disappear, that I could go back to my old life. I realized that I wasn’t ready. I needed the consequences that were about to occur.
We get down to the Beverly Hills courthouse and you wait almost all day in this waiting room down in the basement. I knew my two sisters and brother were going to be there, but as soon as you try to look at them they just push you face forward, almost angrily. And then you go in front of the judge. The judge was a very nice man, actually, and he noted that he’d gotten about 15 letters of reference from friends and relatives that my sisters had gathered. Then he said, ‘Okay, you’ve pleaded guilty, and your sentence is 16 months. It was one of the hardest days because your family’s watching, and there’s no way around anything anymore. I had this thick beard from solitary, and my hair was too long, and I hadn’t been able to get access to a razor yet, so I looked terrible.
Of course, the first thing I do is look for my family, and that’s immediately the guard shushes you forward, and says, ‘Look forward.’ But I did catch a quick glimpse of them, my two sisters and my brother. I managed to mouth, ‘Thank you.’ And just knowing that they were there and that I had nothing but unconditional love from them, that was extremely important.
And then you wait a good month and a half for your assignment to what they call the mainline, which is the prisons that you’ll spend the rest of your time in. We got the news that I was shipping out to Delano, which is actually a transit center where everybody would go while they’re awaiting their final assignments.
That was in the desert, but it was recently built, so it had the air conditioning, thank God. Two floors with about 200 bunks and plenty of politics that shifted very quickly, because every week an eighth of the population went to their final destination. So there was all those people coming in and all those people coming out. It wasn’t just minimum security, there was a lot of medium security, and there may have been some maximum security inmates there too, but it was extremely rigid.
When you’re transferred between prisons, the first thing you do, you settle in, and then if you’re like me, you try to lay as low as possible. I knew immediately to find my allies and perceive who my enemies might be.
My first instinct was to go back rapidly into the closet because prison just was not a place to tell the truth. So, I was not open about my sexuality. You just don’t want to attract attention. And in my case, that was very important because I didn’t want anyone to pick up on that I was gay for as long as possible.
The thing is that when you get a lot of mail, and I always got mail in prison, it attracts attention because the guard goes and does mail call every day. A lot of these guys never got mail and I would get one, two, three pieces a day at least. So people were just, ‘What’s going on with him?’ And there was some jealousy and some irritation because if you didn’t ever get mail, you’re very envious of the people who do.
There was a moment where one of the inmates was going, ‘So is that mail from your girlfriend.’ And I said, ‘No, cause she’s the type of person who can lick everything but a stamp.’ That got a huge, huge laugh. And that was when I realized that what was going to get me through prison was my sense of humor. It’s very hard to dislike a guy who’s just made you laugh. My strategy was to get guys to like me by making them laugh. One of the guys who did that was this Romanian hitman named Thumper. He was ruggedly handsome like a boxer. He clearly liked me and I felt, like, under his protection.
As the weeks went on, a new character appeared. A tall, bold, but very handsome Aryan nation type named Chainsaw. He almost immediately started to rise through the ranks and he wanted to be the shot caller, and he started to take a lot of interest in my sexuality.
So, Chainsaw asked me what I was in for and I said, ‘Selling meth.’ And then he asked me, ‘Where did you sell the meth?’ And I said, ‘Where did you get the meth? Where the money was.’ And then he said, ‘West Hollywood’ sort of skeptically. And I said, ‘Sure. West Hollywood.’ And it was very clear that he was trying to get me to admit I was gay. And we had a few more run-ins and I wouldn’t tell him, he said it was his business to know everything about the whites in case someone else said something. And I said, ‘The blacks or the Latins aren’t giving me any hassle, you are, and it’s none of your business.’ So that really pissed him off.
I tried to avoid him the best I could, and then on my last day there, we had a razor exchange. And that means you hand in your ID card and you could get a razor, and you had to shave and then hand it back in very quickly. I shaved at the same sink upstairs where he shaved and as we left, he points to it and in front of everybody he says very loudly, ‘Hey Olmstead, you left a mess here.’ And I’d left no mess more than anyone else, but it was like a challenge. I went to the sink and I said, ‘Here.’ And I wiped it and he goes, ‘I don’t know. That was pretty messy as far as I’m concerned. I think that you need to do 125 burpees for me.’ Everybody knew that this was an order, that this was a challenge, that he was trying to prove himself to everybody watching. I also knew that most people watching liked me because I had been generous with my coffee. And they could also tell that he was being completely unreasonable. I also knew that if I did the 125 burpees, that I would probably have a heart attack, you know, I wouldn’t get through them. There would have been a humiliating moment and he would have said, ‘You still owe me.’ It was just extremely tense. And I didn’t know if I didn’t finish them, there wasn’t going to be a beat down on me that he justified by me not having performed the punishment. But after this really tense moment where we’re staring at each other and everyone’s watching, I just said, ‘You know what? I have to return my ID card.’ And I went down the stairs, petrified he was going to follow me or shout after me or just make some sort of scene that I was forced to defend myself or do the burpees.
And so I immediately looked for Thumper because everyone had a reputation there. And Thumper, being a bonafide hitman, he had a reputation of someone you didn’t want to mess with. He was a boxer and it’s not someone you wanted to fight. So, if he had my back I knew that Chainsaw would not force a confrontation.
As luck would have it, we got our assignments at the same time of where we were going, and I was getting shipped out the next morning. So, Thumper calmed me down and we said our goodbyes, and I was shipped out the next morning. But at that moment I felt that Chainsaw was maybe gonna be my first physical confrontation in prison, and I was gonna lose.
So, the ironic P.S. to this is that Thumper wrote me after I got out and he had been sent to the same prison as Chainsaw, and he says, ‘Your friend Chainsaw’s here. He’s not that bad a guy.’ And so they evidently became friends.
A few years after I got out of prison I looked up Thumper, thinking maybe I’d find him in some other prison or something like that. And I got a hit on him because I actually looked up his real name, and it turned out that the year before he had gotten out and murdered an older gay man in Palm Springs. I could tell he’d been hustling, but he was doing life upstate, and he was actually quoted in a Bible magazine of having ruined his life but been saved by Jesus.
PRODUCER: How did that make you feel when you read that, considering you were so close to him and he knew who you were?
MARK OLMSTED: I really debated how to react to that. I thought maybe starting a correspondence with him, but the fact that it was a gay man, it just gave me chills. I decided to just leave it be, but it felt very chilling. This guy was in prison for a reason. He was probably telling the truth when he said he was a hitman for his Romanian mafia family. Even the vague possibility that he could get out in ten years and look me up, I didn’t want to risk it.
So, dorms, to Delano, to Chino, and within Chino they sent me to the only place that there was a bed available, which was a wing of the prison of Chino called Sycamore. I had a week at Sycamore West, which was a special disciplinary unit where everyone who was there was serving extra days onto their time for offenses they’d committed in prison. And they only sent me there because they didn’t have any beds when I got there. It was just the worst week of my life and they kind of forgot about me. And that was one of the classic jails, the way you see it in the movies, and we were on lockdown for several days. That means everyone’s in their cell 23 hours a day. In this tiny cell with barely two bunks and a toilet, you have to do everything in front of your celly. And you better get along with him. And that’s where my celly was Drifter, and he was an Aryan Nation guy. That was really, really nerve wracking.
Drifter wasn’t physically that scary. He was short. He had slightly frontal teeth. Not buck, but enough that if he didn’t have them, his face would have been great. He had a rockin’ bod because he did exercises, push ups, etc., every other day, that I couldn’t keep up with because I was 44 and out of shape. And man, I almost had a heart attack. And they would watch you with mirrors to make sure you were doing it. It was very military in that special unit.
The noise in that dorm was horrible and people were screaming. I didn’t realize it was a place where you were sent as a punishment added onto your sentence until Drifter told me he was there because he had hidden knives for someone higher up in the Aryan Brotherhood. So they tacked 120 days onto a sentence. And I realized that this was not a unit I was supposed to be in, and they just kind of forgot that I was in this unit.
Drifter was an artist who was penciling a beautiful aquarium on the wall, and so I just kept talking about what a great artist he was. And then my sister sent me a book of my poetry that he asked if he could look at. And then he fancied himself a poet. And so on talent night, in which everyone, black, Latin, white, offered something from their cell. So, mostly a lot of rapping, some singing, some joke-telling. And he, without asking permission, said, ‘I’m going to read a poem.’ And he read one of my better poems called Strange Friend.
He did a good job, and at the end of it he didn’t turn and say thanks. I was going to read one of my other poems, but I didn’t get asked to do anything. I think that it was best that I didn’t, because everyone would have known that Drifter had stolen my poem.
I started to realize at the end of this talent night, Rebel, who was the shot caller, who was the head of the Aryans in that unit, said, ‘Hey, I got a joke.’ And he says, ‘This is for your celly, Drifter.’ And the joke was, ‘How do you define a best friend?’ And I was like, ‘What, how rebel?’ And it’s like someone who goes downtown to get a blow job from his girlfriend then brings one back for you. So, basically he told everybody that the celly of Drifter was a little faggot.
The next morning on the way to the showers where you could talk alone with a guard who escorted you for two minutes when Drifter was in the shower I said, ‘Listen, you got to get me out of here. I’m gay and HIV positive. And my celly definitely suspects.’ Cause I was like, I was getting my HIV meds every day delivered, and I said it was for bladder cancer or some other cancer and I was in remission, but he wasn’t that stupid, and I just knew that any day, something could happen.
The guard took me to the front, and she says, ‘This guy says he’s a gay Aryan and he’s gotta get out of there.’ And the guy behind the desk said, take off your shirt, and was like, ‘You don’t have any Aryan tattoos.’ And I said, ‘I did not say. I was a gay Aryan. I said, I’m a gay person, and my celly is an Aryan nation guy, and I’m pretty sure he knows I’m gay. And it feels like any day I could get beat up. So I need to get out of here. I wasn’t even supposed to be in here.’
So, he looks through the paperwork, and about the fifth page he finds my name. And you could tell from his look that it was like, ‘Uh oh, we forgot about this one. He’s not supposed to be here.’ But they didn’t have any room at Cedar, the orientation place where I was supposed to go. So, I went almost immediately to the special protective custody dorm. And I went back to pack up my things, and Drifter was already packing up his things. They call that rolling up, and he’s like, ‘Where are you going?’ And I said, ‘I’m finally going to where I was supposed to be this whole time.’ And so we pretended, oh man, it was great to meet you. Great hanging out with you this week.
Then, from there, I was transferred to Birch Hall, which was a protective custody dorm. This was really at the height of the overcrowding, so it was a big converted cafeteria. So one big room, just crammed with bunk beds. About a third were older men who were there because they were over 45, or they had health problems. Then there were about a third straight guys who had rolled themselves up, who’d gotten in some sort of trouble and been caught because they’d informed on someone.
And then there was a third gays or transgender who were transgender women, but they were put with the men. That was one of the better places because I also didn’t have to worry about being gay. The conditions were a little rough, there weren’t a lot of amenities. After a month and a half at Birch, I was transferred to Redwood where I would do the rest of my time.
At Redwood, when I was starting out, I was like, alright, on the down low, just discreet about it, but they sensed that I was gay pretty fast. It was very tense when I got my first quarterly package. My bunkie, Steve, tells me when the quarterly packages come that there was a rumor he heard that I would get taxed, which is something that happens to gay inmates, and they just open your package and they take what they want and then they hand you the rest. It’s all justified because you’re gay.
He told this to me, but kind of asked me at the same time, like trying to figure out how I would react. And basically they’re hoping that as a gay man I’m just going to take it and give them their stuff, and they want to know if I’m going to fight back.
When I sensed that, I realized that I also had a trump card there. And I said, ‘You tell them that not only will I fight back, but I’ll fight to the point of bleeding. And you don’t really want a package that I’ve bled all over if you catch my drift.’ That’s when I used my HIV positive status for the first time. Since in prison already, the assumption, if you’re gay, is that you have HIV. They very much got the drift. And he kind of looked at me a bit stunned, and then he says, ‘Okay, I’ll tell them.’ An hour or so later, he comes back and he says, ‘You’re cool. We’re not going to tax your package.’ And I never really knew if that’s what worked. I think that they really mostly want to know if I would fight back. That was when my opportunity to show that I was not going to be the passive gay person like a lot of gays would be.
The level of ignorance of AIDS was so bad in there that you were never allowed to eat after or smoke after someone gay. They thought if I had an orange and I gave you a slice of it, you could get AIDS that way. Same thing with cigarettes. Later, I found out it wasn’t even that. It was more your lips couldn’t touch anything that gay lips had touched. Like, they were afraid of catching gayness. When my bunkie and I bought a bunch of tobacco to roll into cigarettes we had to get a third guy, a straight guy, to do the rolling, because no one would have bought them off us if our lips had been known to touch them. I wasn’t allowed to use the clippers to get my hair cut because they had a superstition about that too. AIDS or you could catch the gay or whatever. One guard actually held on to an article that he had and it said, you could still possibly get it through saliva and kissing. It was in the LA Times. This was, you know, 2004, and he’d kept that article for like, I don’t know, 10 years. And he thought he was being helpful to inform the prisoners.
By that time, I ate alone because I was shunned as a gay person for the first month and a half there. And I didn’t mind, I had my little New Yorker magazine, I was at my own table, and I just read the New Yorker, and I didn’t have to engage in this stupid ass conversation.
Then suddenly a new inmate showed up. His name was Jimmy. He was so proper and handsome, and I think he was in on a parole violation. I was immediately drawn to him and he took a liking to me. He rapidly became the shot caller for the whites. There was a shot caller for each race: the Latin, whites and blacks, and he actually invited me to sit at his table one night, and I was in, and I made him laugh.
He was a good storyteller too. And from that moment on, I was under the protection of the head of the whites, and I didn’t have to worry at all about anyone screwing with me, even though he was reputed to be really incredible with his fists if he needed to be. I think he was mostly a shot caller because he was very charismatic.
By that time, I’d started to be open about being gay to more and more people, and word got back to him, and he didn’t seem to care. That’s when I found that they ended up respecting it, because they didn’t respect a liar. But yeah, I’m gay, but at least I’m open about it.
The dorm was about 200 beds down a long corridor and even though you had a white bunkie in your bunk bed, to your right and to your left was usually inmates of another race. I had black guys on my left and black guys on my right. We were very close together, and even though we weren’t really supposed to socialize, we ended up knowing each other’s business and having conversations. Once I was under Jimmy’s protection it was easier for me to have more social interaction with the black guys on the left and the right, and they were always very curious about gay things.
In 2004, the California prison system was still absolutely divided by race, and there was no attempt to break out of it. Separate tables, separate bunks, cellies always of the same color. They also were convinced that being gay was a white disease. There was a few transgendered black people, there was one in the dorm in particular. Most of the black guys really believed that you had to be white to be gay, it was a white disease. And so, by talking to me, they didn’t risk getting hit, so to speak. And the whites, because I was gay, tolerated me talking to the blacks more. The whites didn’t feel I was really representing a fully white person. Well, it’s because I was gay, I was less of a white. I didn’t really represent them, so I could talk to the blacks.
There were gay black guys there, and I knew it because I was on line with them during pill call for our HIV meds, but the other regular guys couldn’t figure that out because so many guys were on pill call for just psych meds and nobody knew what kind of pills they were getting. But I knew, and I would watch these guys from afar, try not to be too friendly, because I had to be super on the down low. And I started to become friends with them.
A very interesting thing was, they had seen how I had been shunned and had to eat alone, although blacks were at their own tables they felt kind of bad for me because they knew what it was like in society at large to be marginalized. So I ended up having a lot of good and interesting conversations with the black guys in prison. I had some advantage of being educated. At first, it was almost a disadvantage. They called me professor because they were very suspicious of the way I talked. And reminded them of guidance counselors and judges and stuff like that. But I also had a very honed wit and I could come up with one-liners.
It didn’t matter what race, I could make you laugh, and that saved my ass. That really saved my ass. It’s not something anyone can just decide to do. That happened to be the gift of my particular background and experience, but to find my sense of humor again, without meth, that was a great gift.
One of the things I was very aware of in prison is that I had to try to make amends to my mom. I think one of her biggest fears was that me going to prison was somehow a reflection on how she’d raised us and she’d screwed up. So I wrote short stories, which I call memory pieces, which were like bits of memoir about our childhood for her to let her know that we had as an idyllic childhood as we had, and nothing she had done could be faulted.
That’s when I started to really start observing the inmates around me and writing very detailed letters to my sister. At the end of that one and a half months, she said, ‘I want to start blogging these and putting them on a blog.’ So, between all the letters I wrote and the short stories, I still had plenty of time to think, and I wasn’t really ready to examine too deeply the ten years that had brought me to prison because It was all too fresh and too painful, and I felt really, really bad about it. I was more likely to write short stories about my childhood, but I was able to see that I’d started out as a very innocent and pure kid, then I’d slowly started to lie about being gay and having this secret life in the city. And then it evolved into lying like a master class, to doing all the crime that got me into prison. And then I had to lie somewhat at the beginning of prison because it was too dangerous to come out as gay.
But around a month into Redwood, which was where I did the last four months, I basically had come out and everyone knew I was gay. I started to realize I had no reason to tell any more lies. In fact, I was telling the truth in a poetic way in my letters.
When I got out of prison, I started realizing I was gay, that I had no cause to tell any lies at all, really about anything. Not in 12 step rooms, obviously, where honesty is considered key, not to my family, because I had nothing to hide.
It’s amazing that something that I felt was so necessary to my existence turned out to be completely unnecessary. I was living a lie under a neon dark room light, like, not the dark, but more like nightclub red light district light, and then I was just living in the sunlight now. It’s such a burden lifted. It’s a freedom in the most pure sense of the word.
It’s worth going back a little bit because the letters I wrote home from prison, my sister posted on a blog that I continued after I got out of prison.
Over the next, really, 10 years, that became a daily habit, and it was very important for me for my writing. And I finally wrote a blog about Chuck Falco, because I found a picture of me as an Indian that he’d taken a photograph of–this 10 year old boy that looked very pure and sweet, that he just molested the night before.
He actually sent a picture to my house! It was like, look at this beauty shot of your son, so proud of him. My parents were like, lovely, put it on a mantelpiece, and they know what he had done. The lack of connection-making back then was just extraordinary. He was taking these because they were going around hand to hand in pedophile circles. I’m sure that picture got all around when he sold it.
Years later on my blog, I just decided to share the whole Chuck Falco story, and someone comments, ‘Do you have any idea what happened to Chuck Falco?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And then he sends me a series of articles, one from 1979, which was 10 years after he molested me when he was a group home leader with his wife somewhere in Florida. And he set up a booby trap in his home with a rifle. It was the kind of booby trap I later found out that he used to set up in Vietnam because there were burglaries in the neighborhood. In fact, I’m convinced that he knew this boy, and I’m convinced that boy was breaking in to get pictures that Chuck had taken from him. But the gun went off and killed the kid.
Chuck, because of the lax stand your ground laws in Florida, he only got six months for a manslaughter conviction. That was in 1979. Evidently, he moved through several states, and several jobs, and scoutmaster positions, and group home leader positions that he molested his way through, and just would move on from one place to the next until finally he opened a tree farm in North Florida.
This is in 1994 and he managed to get six runaway boys living in virtual confinement at this farm for a good year before one of them escaped and he told his father, and his father pursued Chuck, and this led to a major investigation, and he was convicted. H e’s now serving 95 years and six life terms in a Florida prison for rape, assault, and kidnapping.
Of the series of articles that was sent, one of them was from the mother of one of the victims, who was insisting that Chuck was tested for AIDS because she was afraid that he had given it to one of her sons. It’s sort of fascinating and it chills me to the bone looking back on it and realizing I was probably at the beginning of a series of crimes that went across several states.They said he was calculated to have abused hundreds of Boy Scouts before he finally did get caught.
At the same time, I learned that New York state had lifted the statute of limitations on charges of molestation.
AUDIO CLIP: The state Senate passing landmark legislation this afternoon, more than a decade in the making. Groundbreaking legislation that is finally passed after years of political debate. We’re talking about the child victims act.
It was a very good day for justice to make sure that people’s voices are heard. They don’t no longer have to hide in the shadows and endure the shame that they’ve had to live with. They were children. It was never their fault. Society is finally recognizing that, and today, the Senate took a major step forward.
The average victim doesn’t come forward with child sex abuse claims until they’re 52 years old. The biggest takeaway here is really the victims, the survivors of sexual abuse, who now after decades, can finally know that the state government and its laws will be on their side.
MARK OLMSTED: So I signed up to this lawsuit against the Boy Scouts, which is going to pay out this spring of 2023, and as part of the process I had to list all the consequences of this molestation. It led to a real rethinking of the effects of all of it. It ended up having a much greater effect on me than I thought.
First off, I told my parents the truth that I’d been molested and there were no consequences to my abuser. Later on, when I realized that I was definitely gay in high school, if I told the truth about that, I would have been ostracized. My parents would have sent me to the psychiatrist. It would have been a disaster. So, of course I lied about it.
I found that aggressive lying was better than omission. The one time I had been honest, which was after the molestation, I didn’t get protection from my parents, and Chuck suffered no consequences. Also, during high school I would have lost power if I had told the truth, and I gained power and status by lying and pretending to be straight. And so I just continued with all of that trajectory.
And then going to France, where the lying went into high gear because I was living with a man. And then through the 80s, through AIDS, then my brother died, and then I began the life of a lot of lying, the double life, the fraud, and all of the activities that eventually led to prison.
When I got out of prison and I started to rebuild my life, I realized how disorienting survival had been in the sense–not the survival–but of the almost not surviving. I realized that I could call it the disorientation of survival.
What happens is that it starts with AIDS coming on the scene and the walls start closing in as your friends get sick and they start dying, you assume that you’re going to get sick, and in my case, I did finally get full blown AIDS in 1993, and then you’re officially on the two year plan. As a way to survive that, what I did was, I took all the space in my brain that was devoted to the future and compressed it, tried to dispose of it, because the future wasn’t my friend. I wasn’t going to get to do all these things most people do when they know they have a future. Everything became about instant gratification and about the present, and if you want a drug that makes you most able to enjoy the present, it’s crystal meth.
It was very easy not to worry about AIDS and not think about the future because everything was instant gratification. Your brain just starts to think in ways it wasn’t designed to think in. Like, we’re supposed to think of a future.
So this went on through all the 90s and through the early 2000s, and then I was arrested and I go to prison, and suddenly it’s total instant sobriety. Quite a place to learn to be in the present again, and to be with your own experience. Suddenly, there’s nothing to lie about anymore and I lived really out in the open, and I was very proud of it.
So, that had enormous value for me, to restart, and restart my psychology of thinking with the future in mind again. I had to reinsert thinking about the future back in my mind, and that was not easy.
When I got out of prison I was 45, and within a few years, with a lot of work, I got a sense of the future back. So I’m like, okay, now I’m like 50, and I got this future stretching out, and there’s still a lot of time to do things. And I did a lot of things when I was 45 and 50 and 55. And now I’m in my 60s, and ironically, I’m kind of where I might have been anyway.
Finally, my life is caught up with my chronology. I’m going through the normal aging process. And now the big irony is that people I know are dying of normal things that you start to die of in your 60s–Cancer and heart disease and accidents and that sort of stuff. And I have a normal fear of approximate death and I’ve caught up with everybody and I know what everyone’s going through because I already went through it once. I do know a few things about proximity toward death that a lot of other people don’t know. It’s not really easy to go through it a second time, you kind of feel pissed, but at least it’s sort of normal.
But I don’t know anyone who really isn’t, I mean, who doesn’t resist aging, who doesn’t hate aging, and who doesn’t hate getting closer to death, but I really have to see it as a sort of privilege. I have the luxury of having lived to an age that I’m experiencing the things that anyone who reaches this age are lucky enough to experience. In a way, like, dying after your parents, usually with, like, a house and a lot more economic success, things that I didn’t plan for.
None of my friends who died or my brother who died in their 20s and 30s, they never got to the point of dying naturally. Perspective is everything, and my whole life, I feel like, has been, like, a hunt for perspective. And I think I’ve gotten a pretty important one. Nice amount of it, but it’s very mixed up with feelings of loss and just the sense that the carpet was pulled out from under you. And the quicksand never really becomes firm again.
You know, speaking about perspective, there’s this memory about my mother that keeps coming back to me. And I really want to tell this story.
My mother survived the occupation of France during the war and knew a lot about the Holocaust, and she’d imagined many times these mothers who were separated from their children, very brutally. So the idea that any children could be separated from their mother was so horrifying to my mother.
There’s this memory that keeps coming back to me and I have to tell the story for it to make sense.
Let me say first that my parents were super duper liberal and my mother, having grown up in France, she had none of the baggage about race that almost every American woman would have.
So, we had two black cleaning ladies who were sisters, and they alternated, and sometimes for big jobs they would both come together.
One was Nancy, she was the older one, and then there was Mary, who was younger, and definitely wilder. One day, Nancy comes to work alone and she bursts out into tears. And my mother says, ‘What’s wrong?’ And she said, ‘DHS, they’re coming to take Mary’s children away.’
What came out is that Mary lived with her children, and what was basically a shack, and it was in bad shape. Someone had reported her and they were coming for an inspection in a few days, and Nancy was sure that they’d take her kids away. My father used to drive Nancy home. She had a prim little house, and it was in a poor neighborhood, but it was very well kept.
And then Mary, he’d always drop her off at the end of her block. My mother said she never got over it. That it was a level of deep Mississippi Delta style poverty, even though this was in Maryland, just a few miles away from my house. It was so filthy and so unkempt, and my mother would say, the irony of this woman who cleans my house so perfectly, can’t seem to clean her own house, and she had three kids.
My parents set out that weekend and went to her house.They went Saturday and they went back Sunday, and they cleaned that place top to bottom. They bought new bedding and sheets. They painted as much as they could. Just cleaned and cleaned and cleaned, and my mother said at the end of that weekend she didn’t know if they’d made a dent, that’s how bad it was. And there were snakes under the house. And then these three little kids who were just watching them with these wide eyes, they couldn’t believe that these white people were coming in to clean our house. I mean it didn’t fit into anybody’s brain, because Maryland is Mason-Dixon, but it’s very southern still in the 60s.
And my mother testified on Mary’s behalf that she should keep her children. And when she got back, I remember her on the stairs in the clothes that she usually wore to church, but she’d worn to testify. And she just couldn’t stop sobbing. I was seven maybe, and she just said, ‘I don’t know if I did enough, I don’t know if I did enough.’
A few years later, when I was an adult and we could revisit this story again, I asked her why she’d been so upset in the sense that she didn’t know that Mary’s kids were being taken away yet. She’d done her best between cleaning her house and testifying to make sure she kept them, and she told me it’s because I hesitated when the judge asked me if Mary should keep her kids. I paused before I said yes, because the truth was she didn’t. That was the best for the kids.
Being the one she felt who could cause a mother to be separated from her children, that was way worse. There was a world of pain in that hesitation. That’s how my mother lied and told the truth at the same time.
Over the years, she would tell this story and it was always starting with, ‘It was unimaginable to me that anyone’s children could be taken away from them.’ And then that also became, ‘It was unimaginable to me that any one of your children could die.’ And later, when my brother did die, I was thinking that had been an invocation on her part. She was telling the gods it would be so impossibly painful, that I’m telling you right now, it cannot happen to me. And on some level, she felt she was protecting herself. How she imagined it was exactly how it was. People say that, unimaginable, but it was every bit as horrible as she was afraid it was.
So, 20 years after we’d last spoken of this story, my mother was in her last year at my sister’s and we talked a lot about things about the past, and I said, ‘Mom, do you remember whatever happened with Mary? Did she get to keep her kids?’ And my mother, who definitely knew, you know, if she had kept her kids at one point, could not remember. It really struck me that here is something that was one of the most painful things that happened in between the death of her brother in 1960 and my brother’s death in 1991, and that my mother, who definitely knew, couldn’t remember.
I really think that we are only capable of feeling a certain amount of pain. You have to make space for new pain by removing old pain.
My theory is that Mary’s kids were taken away and this was so painful to my mother, she had to displace that pain when my brother died. And I think that’s when she forgot whether Mary’s kids were taken away. She couldn’t keep all that pain in one heart. She just literally had no more space. And I didn’t help going to prison because she had to make a lot of space for that.
I think that we’re capable of an infinite amount of love, you can always add more to your heart. You can always add more love. Because love is uncontained, but not pain.