Oakland's ABO Comix Publishes, Advocates for LGBTQ Prisoners

ABO has since paid incarcerated artists roughly $15,000 for contributions to standalone collections and three anthologies. The growing nonprofit, sponsored by the Queer Cultural Center, was recently awarded a California Arts Council grant to develop prison-based graphic-novel curriculum. It’s also received more than 1,200 pieces of mail from prisoners.  On Saturday, Dec. 14, ABO celebrates the third anthology’s release at Classic Cars West with a set by punk band Anti-Repression Music, which collaborates with incarcerated writers.

ABO is part of a larger movement centering prison abolition, the belief that the prison-industrial complex must be dismantled instead of reformed, in the struggle for queer and transgender liberation in light of the way LGBTQ people are disproportionately policed and incarcerated. Black and Pink, one of the national organizations that inspired ABO, boasts more than 10,000 members “on the inside,” and describes its mission as to “abolish the criminal punishment system.”

Popular media such as Orange is the New Black have also buoyed trans prisoner visibility. Rachel Kushner set much of her abolition-inflected 2018 novel The Mars Room in a California women’s prison, and included a trans-masculine character named Conan. Early in the book, while discussing muscle cars, Conan passingly references how the prison system invalidates his gender identity. “If I was a dude I’d be like I am right now,” he says. “‘Cept not locked up.”

The movement is deeply rooted in the Bay Area: The Oakland-headquartered Critical Resistance popularized the phrase “prison-industrial complex,” and local writers Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith co-edited Captive Genders, an influential collection of essays on trans-embodiment and incarceration published by AK Press in 2015. One strategy these activists promote in order to mitigate state violence against LGBTQ prisoners is writing letters.

Many ABO artists are serving life sentences; often they’ve been incarcerated for decades, and their ties to outside kin are broken. “So mostly we form friendships, send birthday and holiday cards, or reference photos for their art,” Cendre said. “Basic human needs.” In prison, word of reliable pen pals travels, and ABO’s contributor clusters have spread from Texas and California to throughout the country.

Because ABO’s main audience is prisoners—it sends publications free upon request, and earns money when people buy them online on prisoners’ behalf—the publisher self-censors content, such as nudity, to accommodate prison guidelines. Yet facilities in states such as Kentucky and Nebraska still reject mailings for “inciting violence” or “overt sexuality”—examples, according to Cendre, of how prison administrators perceive any challenge to gender normativity as a threat.

ABO also plays the role of advocate. For example, when Cendre learned a pen pal suffered a stroke while isolation, through word from another prisoner, ABO volunteers inundated the facility with phone calls. (According to Black and Pink, queer prisoners are more likely to experience solitary confinement.) “Only then, days after the stroke, did he get any medical care,” Cendre said. Pressure from the outside, according to Cendre, can be more effective than from within because corrections officials tend to consider prisoner complaints illegitimate.

The publisher received more submissions for its first anthology than it could publish, but Cendre and other volunteers responded to every letter, often returning detailed feedback on the artwork. Sirbrian Spease, author of the Homo Thug’s Swagger strip, sent his first-ever drawings, and then dozens more over the course of a year. His crude outlines developed into intricate shading and perspective, and facial expressions subtle enough to convey the kind of joy found in hell.

ABO itself is often cast in the comic depictions of queer life in prison, referenced in speech bubbles and drawings of outgoing mail (or, in one strip, as the brand name of toiletries). Me and My Jelly Roll, Jamie Diaz’s contribution to the third anthology about her “extreme hairstyle,” seems to be written with the confidence that, through ABO Comix, the author’s grievance will reach the outside world: “I want people to know what is going on in here with girls like us.”