San Quentin Prison, California

(All photographs within the prison via the Digital Transgender Archive)

San Quentin is one of the world’s best-known prisons. It is the oldest and largest in California, and the only one in the state where executions have been done. It is known for recorded concerts by Johnny Cash and BB King.

The prison was opened in 1852. It was so named as it is located on San Quentin Point. That, also, is not named for the 3^rd century saint in Gaul. It is named for a renowned sub-chief of the Coast Miwok first nation.

There has been more drag and trans at San Quentin than you might expect.

See also: Trans in prison which I wrote in November 2012.

Part I: to the conviction of Oscar Wilde

Part II: to Stonewall

Part III: to Farmer v. Brennan

Part IV: to the Synthia Kavanagh Human Rights Case

Part V: to the National Offender Management Service, New prison guidelines, 2011

Part VI: Comments & Bibliography

1914

Artie Baker, 14 years for bank robbery, San Francisco, was in San Quentin for some time before being discovered to be female-bodied. (Peter Boag. Re-dressing America's Frontier Past, 2012: 211)

Prison Vaudeville Show featured cross-dressed prisoners.

1915

Prison Vaudeville Show again featured cross-dressed prisoners.

1930

The 17th annual field meet held at San Quentin in 1930 when James B. Holohan was the acting warden. Olympic Club member, Frank G. Kane, was Master of Ceremonies. The entertainers depicted are San Quentin inmates; the cross-dressers were a popular attraction.

1933

20th Annual Olympic Club Track & Field Meet at San Quentin prison was sponsored by the Olympic Club of San Francisco. Prison inmates held a field and track day. Consisted of some 29 athletic events, stunts, chorus girls and vaudeville acts performed by prisoners. Some 5000 inmates attended.

1940

• Leo L.Stanley & Evelyn Wells. Men at Their Worst. By L. L. Stanley ... with the collaboration of Evelyn Wells. Illustrated. [The autobiography of the Chief Surgeon of the California State Prison, St. Quentin.], 1940: 203. Dr Stanley relates that while examining an apparently male prisoner, he discovered that the prisoner had been surgically transformed into a woman.

1950

Josephine Montgomery was arrested and convicted of strong-arm robbery. After two months in the women’s wing of the Imperial county jail, and one night in the women’s prison at Tehachapi, a routine physical exam resulted in a transfer to a man’s cell at San Quentin. NewsArticle.

1972

Katherine Marlowe, author of Mr Madame, 1964, met her future husband while lecturing at San Quentin prison, and finally transitioned to female in 1972. (Richard Nelson. Call Me Kate: The Story of Katherine Marlowe, a Transexual, 1999)

1980

Guthrie Danowski, 24, who was serving a life sentence at the prison, apparently slipped into some of his wife's clothing in a restroom of the crowded prison visiting room. His wife arrived at the prison early in the day, checking out two hours after her arrival. About five hours after that, San Quentin officials realized that Danowski was missing. (The Gateway, 2,12, June 1980: 9. Online)

1990

Janet Kolmetz on death row at San Quentin – at that time the only known trans woman in San Quentin. (TV-TS Tapestry, 55, 1990: 15-6. Online)

1998

Jeanne Hoff, the last doctor at Harry Benjamin’s practice, had become returned to being a psychiatrist after transition in the 1980s, and was employed at San Quentin. She was in the news in April-May 1998 when she was the only one of three psychiatrists to testify that murderer Horace Kelly might be competent to be executed, and the defense attorney attempted to impeach Hoff. Although Horace Kelly's lawyer subpoenaed Hoff's prison personnel file in an attempt to impeach her, he presumably hadn't heard rumors that she was transsexual, didn't find it in the file and didn't read her. Otherwise he probably would have used it to defame her. She had been in a 1978 television special under the same name, but that was 20 years earlier. Jeanne was also named as trans in Jayne County's 1995 autobiography, but presumably the lawyer didn't read punk biographies. GVWW.

2008

• Stuart Cabb (dir). Louis Theroux: Behind Bars, with Deborah Worledge. UK BBC 60 mins 2008. Deborah was filmed shortly before her release on Sept. 2, 2008. Two days after release she was dead from a drug overdose.

2009

Skylar Deleon, who had killed to be able to afford transgender surgery, arrived at San Quentin death row.

2014

Mandi Camille Hauwert,  Correctional Officer at San Quentin. One of the first US Correctional Officers to transition on the job. Another is Meghan Frederick who works at the state prison in Sacramento.

2015

Lady Jae Clark, who came out in 1973 and has been in San Quentin since 2013, was the first trans woman to play Lady Macbeth in San Quentin’s production of the play. Newsarticle.  She co-founded a program called Acting with Compassion and Truth (ACT) in San Quentin to increase understanding and decrease violence toward LGBTQ inmates. Newsarticle.

Trans woman at San Quentin approached the Insight Prison Project. They asked for support for the formation of Acting with Compassion and Truth (ACT) at San Quentin. They didn’t want a support group. “We live our lives here every day surrounded by thousands of people who have been for the last 20 or 30 years who haven’t had exposure to the evolution that we know is happening out there.” A year-long curriculum was set up. Newsarticle.

Shiloh Heavenly Quine, incarcerated at Mule Creek State Prison was approved for transgender surgery, which set a precedent so that other trans inmates in California could hope.

• Kristin Schreier Lyseggen,. The Women of San Quentin: Soul Murder of Transgender Women in Male Prisons. 2015: 109 – 136. About trans women in prisons, but most are not in San Quentin, despite the title of the book.

2018

Lisa Strawn who transitioned at age 18, but has been in men’s prisons for 25 years following a three-strikes burglary charge, who had helped establish an LGBTQ group at Vacaville prison, was transferred to San Quentin and joined ACT. Newsarticle.

2019

The LGBTQ education program was replicated on death row. Newsarticle.

First TDOR at San Quentin’s Catholic Chapel emceed by Lisa Strawn, the first such in a California prison. Newsarticle.

Child killer death row inmate Jessica Hann filed for change of name and legal gender.

Jeanne Hoff (1938 – ) psychiatrist

++revised February 2019 to include extra detail from Gill-Peterson's book.

Eugene Hoff  was born in in St Louis.  He did an MD at Columbia University, College of Physicians And Surgeons 1963 followed by a doctorate in solid state chemistry at University College, London (where he also converted to Catholicism), followed by training and a residency as a psychiatrist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

He initially thought of himself as homosexual, but in exploring homosexuality found out that he was not. He was introduced to the Harry Benjamin practice, possibly by Wardell Pomeroy of the Kinsey Institute.

Hoff was a guest on the the NBC television program Not for Women Only where he explained transsexualism from a medical viewpoint referring to trans women as 'men' as was the then practice.

"You can say that you know that you are a woman, therefore you want to be one. But no woman I have ever asked has been able to tell me what that means, and I doubt that transsexuals will be the first to define it."

He took over the Harry Benjamin practice in New York in 1976, after Benjamin's successor Charles Ihlenfeld resigned to begin a psychiatric residency in the Bronx.  This was his first clinic practice other than the residency in St Louis.  The practice was being managed under the aegis of the Orentreich Medical Group, a dermatology and hair restoration practice, and was located at 1 East 72nd St. It was then still administered by Benjamin's office manager and assistant Virginia Allen.

Hoff fired Virginia, the nurse, Mary Ryan, and the physician, Agnes Nagy. He pleased Dr Orentreich by moving the practice downtown to a townhouse he had bought behind the Chelsea Hotel, at 223 West 22nd Street.

In this period Dr Hoff confronted Charles Socarides and his reactionary views that homosexuality can be cured by psychoanalysis. 

Hoff's best known patient was the punk musician Jayne County.   

Hoff transitioned to Jeanne and had surgery with Dr Granato in 1977. She was interviewed at home by Lynn Redgrave and Frank Fields immediately before surgery and two months afterwards. The resulting television program "Becoming Jeanne" won the prestigious Ohio State Broadcasting award in 1979.

+++It was now the case that for the first time a trans psychiatrist was in charge of a practice for trans persons. Gill-Peterson comments:

"Though the medical model was still based in gatekeeping and an unacknowledged racialization of gender, Hoff cared deeply about the well-being of her clients to a degree that is viscerally embedded in the archive she gifted to the Kinsey Institute. Her work demonstrates a level of empathy entirely absent from transsexual medicine since its advent—not to mention its predecessors in the early twentieth century— an ethic of care that, although greatly constrained by the material circumstances and history of psychiatry and endocrinology, was also entangled with her situated perspective as a trans woman. It is important to underline that Hoff represents yet another trans person who took an active and complicated role in medicine, rather than being its object."

+++Gill-Peterson has read Hoff's interview notes in her archive papers at the Kinsey Institute.  He comments:

"Because she took the time to interview them without only reducing what they said to standard diagnostic biographies, her notes offer comparatively richer glimpses into trans boyhood than those of her predecessors." 

+++In 1978 Hoff became aware of a young black trans woman, then 30, who had been committed to a psychiatric Institution in New Jersey for 15 years.  Initially labeled  ‘schizophrenic’, her gender identity issues were taken as evidence of ‘delusion’, ‘mental retardation’ and ‘sexual perversion’. Hoff interviewed her, and petitioned for her release.

“Through all the florid language of the [psychiatric] reports there is an unmistakable moralistic disapproval of her effeminacy and homosexuality but not the slightest hint that the diagnosis of transsexualism was suspected, even though it was quite evident from the details provided. . . . She should be placed in the community, preferably living by herself” and “she should be permitted to explore the various problems that arise from cross-gender living, hormonal therapy, and surgical gender reassignment.”

However by 1980 there were few patients left in the practice, and Hoff had already taken a job in a psych ward in Brooklyn. The next year she sold the building and moved away, first to Massachusetts and then California.

She became a psychiatrist at San Quentin prison. She was in the news in April-May 1998 when she was the only one of three psychiatrists to testify that murderer Horace Kelly might be competent to be executed, and the defense attorney attempted to impeach Hoff.

She is now retired and in 2013 donated her archives to the Kinsey Institute.

• "Masculine, Feminine or Androgynous?" Not for Women Only. WNBC 1976  hosted by Polly Bergen and Frank Fields, produced by Madeline Amgott.  Online at: www.kinseyinstitute.org/library/jeannehoff.html.
  
• Becoming Jeanne…A Search for Sexual Identity. NBC 30 June 1978. Jeanne Hoff interviewed by Lynn Redgrave and Frank Fields. Was online at: www.kinseyinstitute.org/library/jeannehoff.html which is now Archived.
  
• Jeanne Hoff. "Multiple personality disorder?" The Journal of clinical psychiatry, 48(4), Apr 1987. 
• Jayne County with Rupert Smith. Man Enough to be a Woman. London: Serpent's Tail, 1995: 99-100.
• Michael Dougan. "Killer's mental records turn up". SFGate, April 17, 1998. http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Killer-s-mental-records-turn-up-3094483.php,
  
• Maria L LaGanga. "Killer Understands He Faces Execution, Prosecutor Says". Los Angeles Times, May 01, 1998. http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/01/news/mn-45268.
  
• Michael Dougan. "Sanity trial outcome rests with minutiae". SFGate, May 5, 1998. http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Sanity-trial-outcome-rests-with-minutiae-3092031.php.
  
• Sara Catania. "The Alienists: Where experts divide, jury must decide". LAWeekly, May 13 1998. http://www.laweekly.com/1998-05-21/news/the-alienists.
  
• Andy Humm. "Socarides, Leading Anti-Gay Shrink, Dies". Gay City, 4,52 Dec 29-Jan 4, 2005. http://gaycitynews.com/gcn_452/newsbriefs.html.
  
• "Jeanne Hoff Archive". The Kinsey Institute. Online. 
  
• SJ Parker. Emails to Zagria, 15,17 September 2013.

+++ 

• Julian Gill-Peterson. Histories of the Trangender Child. University of Minnesota Press, 2018: 159-160, 171, 174, 192-3, 248n105, 251n32, 252n45, 253n79-82, 254n84-5.

____________________________________________________________________________

Although Horace Kelly's lawyer subpoenaed Hoff's prison personnel file in an attempt to impeach her, he presumably hadn't heard rumours that she was transsexual, didn't find it in the file and didn't read her.   Otherwise he probably would have used it to defame her.   She had been in the 1978 television special under the same name, but that was 20 years earlier.   Before the internet it was much more difficult to make connections.

++Jeanne was also, in effect, outed in Jayne County's 1995 autobiography, but presumably the lawyer didn't read punk biographies.  

+++ Other sources led me to write that Hoff left New York in 1981, having sold her building at 223 West 22nd Street.  Gill-Peterson writes that she stayed in practice through the 1980s.  ??

Trans in Prison: Part II to Stonewall

Part I: to the conviction of Oscar Wilde
Part II: to Stonewall
Part III: to Farmer v. Brennan
Part IV: to the Synthia Kavanagh Human Rights Case
Part V: to the National Offender Management Service, New prison guidelines, 2011
Part VI: Comments & Bibliography

1897.	Cicero, Illinois. Municipal law against cross-dressing.
1899.	Cedar Falls, Iowa. Municipal law against cross-dressing.
1901.	Bert Martin, in Nebraska Penitentiary for horse theft, was accused by his cell-mate of being a woman. He was redressed and transferred to the women's section. Early in 1902, the Governor of the state commuted the sentence and Bert was released. Bert is known to have fathered 3 children.
	Mexico City. 41, 19 in female dress, were arrested at a private party. There were no formal charges, no trial. 19, probably not the same 19 who were in female dress, were unable to buy their liberty, and were inducted into the army and sent to do forced labour in the Yucatan as part of the war against the Mayans.
1903.	HMP Holloway, a mixed prison since 1852, became women only.
	San Francisco. Second municipal law against cross-dressing.
1904.	Emma Becker, President Theodore Roosevelt's cook, was arrested for being drunk, and then discovered to be male-bodied. 4 months in jail.
1906.	Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Municipal law against cross-dressing.
1907.	Orlando, Florida. Municipal law against cross-dressing.
1909.	Amy Bock/Percy Redwood, New Zealand, arrested 3 days after marrying his landlady's daughter. Because of a history of frauds, Amy was declared a habitual criminal.
1910.	Alice Baker, teacher in Colorado, arrested on suspicion of being a man. However she was charged with deserting her husband. As 3 physicians testified that she was a man, charges were dismissed.
1911.	Netherlands introduced an anti-homosexual law similar to Germany's.
1912.	++Alexander Bergman.  Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.  Mother Earth, 1912.   Bergman was imprisoned 1891-1906 for attempting to assassinate Henry Frick after 9 union workers and 7 guards were killed during a strike.  This is the first book to discuss homosexuality among the prison population.
1913.	Wilmington, North Carolina & Charleston, West Virginia. Municipal law against cross-dressing.
1914.	Columbus, Georgia. Municipal law against cross-dressing.
1911-20.	Dörchen Richter of Berlin arrested several times for cross-dressing, and sent to male prison.
1916.	Artie Baker, 14 years for bank robbery, San Francisco, was in San Quentin for some time before being discovered to be female-bodied. (Boag. Re-dressing America's Frontier Past: 211)
1917.	The new Soviet Union effectively legalized no-fault divorce, abortion and homosexuality, when they abolished all the old Tsarist laws. However this held only in the Russian Republic.
1919.	Sarasota, Florida. Municipal law against cross-dressing.
1920.	Harry Crawford, Sydney, NSW, was convicted of killing his wife, sentenced to death, but detained at the Governor's Pleasure, and released after 11 years in women's prisons.
	Pensacola, Florida. Municipal law against cross-dressing.
1923.	Azerbaijan & the other Caucasian Soviet Republics criminalized homosexuality.
1924.	Cleveland, Ohio. Municipal law against cross-dressing.
1926.	West Palm Beach, Florida. Municipal law against cross-dressing.
	Uzbekistan criminalized homosexuality.
1927.	Turkmenistan criminalized homosexuality.
1930.	Italy. The Fascist Government's Rocco Penal Code does not mention homosexuality.
1931.	João Francisco dos Santos, aka drag artist Madame Satã, Rio de Janeiro, sent to prison for 10 years for murder, likely self-defence.
	Norma Jackson. St Helens, Lancashire, was convicted of procuring another to commit a gross indecency. She was sentenced to 18 months hard labour in a men's prison. The sex-reform movement adopted her case, and were able to get her transferred to HMP Wormwood Scrubs so that she could attend the Tavistock Clinic three times a week for psychotherapy.
1932.	The anti-sodomy laws in Poland had not been enforced since independence in 1918. Now they were officially repealed.
1933.	Germany. Malicious Practices Act enabled "preventative custody" of paupers, homosexuals and Jews.
	Soviet Union. Article 121 which criminalized homosexuality, was added to the criminal code for the USSR. Abortion was also banned.
1936.	David Petillo, New York, transvestite and gangster sent to Sing Sing prison on white slavery charges. He served 20 years.
1937-45.	Many German gays and trans sent to concentration camps, and identified by a Pink Triangle.
1938.	Michael Higgins, Los Angeles, was arrested on charges of grand theft and fraud, and found to be female-bodied. He had been previously arrested without his body-sex coming to light.
1940.	Iceland, under UK occupation, decriminalized homosexuality.
	A physician at San Quentin prison, California, discovered that one prisoner, born male, and living as male, had been surgically altered to female. (Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: 48).
1942.	Switzerland decriminalized homosexuality.
	Vichy France passes 1st proscription of homosexual acts since 1789: prison for sex with any man under 21. This law was retained after Liberation in 1945.
1944.	Sweden & Surinam decriminalized homosexuality.
	Charlotte von Mahlsdorf of Berlin was sentenced to 4 years for killing her Nazi father, but released with the fall of the Nazi regime.
1945.	German gays and trans who survived the concentration camps were transferred to regular prisons to complete their sentences.
1945.	Fascist Portugal decriminalized homosexuality.
1940s-60s.	Los Angeles. From the late 1940s on, so many gays and trans were arrested, often as a result of entrapment, that an entire section of Lincoln Heights Jail was reserved. This was known at the 'fruit tank'.
1947.	John Herbert Brundage  was mugged, but he was the one arrested on charges of solicitation.  6 months in Guelph Reformatory.
1948.	Bill Allen, Lancashire, was convicted of murdering a neighbour. He was held at HMP Strangeways, and hanged a few months later.
	Poland, now Communist, again decriminalized homosexuality.
1949.	Newly independent India repealed the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871.
1950.	Josephine Montgomery, California, was arrested and convicted of strong-arm robbery. After two months in the women’s wing of the Imperial county jail, and one night in the women’s prison at Tehachapi, a routine physical exam resulted in a transfer to a man’s cell at San Quentin. John Herbert Brundage  was arrested for being a gay transvestite.   Several months in Mimico Reformatory.
	East Germany partially abrogated Nazi additions to Paragraph 175.
1951.	Greece decriminalized homosexuality.
	The future Gloria Hemingway was arrested en femme in the women’s restroom of a Los Angeles movie theater. Hemingway's mother, Pauline Pfeiffer flew down to be supportive, but was dead of a pheochromocytoma tumor on her adrenal gland two days later. Hemingway was then released.
1950s-1970.	In California and other states, merely being gay, and trans was taken to be a symptom of being gay, could result in a life sentence. Many such in California were incarcerated in Atasceradero State Hospital, a maximum-security facility, which came to be known as the 'Dachau for queers'. Atasceradero was frequently visited by Dr Walter Freeman who specialized in ice-pick lobotomies. This was done through the eye socket. Of the 4,000 patients he treated this way, over 30% were diagnosed as homosexual.
1952.	Miami, Florida. Municipal law against cross-dressing.
1954.	Spain's Ley de Vagos y Maleantes, was amended by the Franco dictatorship to include homosexuals.
1956.	Miami, Florida. Second municipal law against cross-dressing.
	Thailand decriminalized homosexuality. Jacquie Sarduy arrested for soliciting and spent three months in male prison  La Sante.
1957.	West Germany increased the maximum penalty for homosexuality from 5 to 10 years. Jacquie Sarduy arrested for soliciting during visit of English Queen and spent six months in male prison at Poissy
1959.	Mobster Vito Genovese, owner of the 82 Club and other gay bars, was convicted of heroin trafficking, and sentenced to 15 years in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
1960.	Carmen de Mairena imprisoned under Ley de Vagos y Maleantes.
	Florencio Pla Meseguer of the anti-Fascist Spanish Maquis was captured, convicted of atrocities that he had nothing to do with, and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted, and he was included in the 1977 amnesty.
	France strengthened the 1942 proscription with increased penalties.
1961.	Czechoslovakia & Hungary decriminalized homosexuality. Kurt Freund was one of those who argued for it in Czechoslovakia.
	Leslie Elaine Perez and girlfriend were sentenced to the electric chair for killing a john. After a last-minute reprieve, a retrial, incarceration in a mental institution, an escape and five years on a prison farm, Leslie was released in 1971.
	Max Perkins, North Carolina, sentenced to 20 years under the 1533 Buggery Act for consensual sex while partner released after 17 months. After 3 years got a retrial and found not guilty partly partly because she dressed as a man this time.
	David Van Rippey, in Monroe County Jail for bigamy, was found to be female-bodied after refusing a medical exam. This led to both his marriages being deemed to be void, and he was paroled.
	New Zealand Crimes Act abolished all common law offences and all offences against Acts of the British Parliament, and defined what are crimes in the country. Part 7 criminalized crimes against religion, morality, and public welfare, which included homosexuality, blasphemy and incest, although it did reduce penalties.
1962.	Up to this year sodomy was a felony in every US state, punishable by lengthy imprisonment, sometimes with hard labor. That year the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code removed consensual sodomy while retaining solicitation for sodomy. Illinois adopted this change. The decriminalization would not be adopted nation-wide until 2003. See here for state-by-state details.
	Toronto. After a car accident which killed her best friend, Dianna Boileau was charged with criminal negligence causing death and dangerous driving. She was read by the prison matron, and transferred to men's facilities. She spent 4 days in the Don Jail for men, until her boss raised the bail amount. At the trial, after 10 minutes the all-male jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
1963.	Israel decriminalized homosexuality.
	HMP Strangeways, Manchester, became male-only.
1966.	Charlotte Bach did three months for obtaining credit under false pretences, and trading as a psychologist without disclosing that he was an undischarged bankrupt under another name.
1965-8.	Zazu Nova, New York, was in prison several times.
1967.	A Montréal woman explained to a judge that she was dressed as female because she intended to get the operation, and he sent her to prison for a year for that alone. (Namaste, Sex-Change, Social Change: 13)
	England & Wales. The Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexual acts between two men over 21 years of age in private. This was followed by a surge in the number of arrests for 'indecency between males'. John Herbert Brundage's Fortune and Men's Eyes, based on his two terms in prison for being gay and trans, a theatre event of the year.  Released as a film in 1971.
	Chad decriminalized homosexuality.
1968.	East Germany & Bulgaria decriminalized homosexual acts over the age of 18.
	Valerie Solanas, butch lesbian, shot Andy Warhol. She was indicted on charges of attempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a gun., but was found incompetent. The next year she was deemed fit and she pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to three years the New York State Prison for Women.
1969.	Rae Bourbon, aged 75 and in ill-health, was convicted in Texas of being an accomplice to murder. He was sentenced to 99 years and died 2 years later.
	Mobster Vito Genovese, owner of the 82 Club and other gay bars, died in USP Springfield, Missouri.
	Canada. Criminal Law Amendment Act decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults.
	West Germany decriminalized homosexual acts over the age of 18.
	While many were arrested at the raid on the Stonewall Bar in New York, many also escaped from arrest, in particular Ed Murphy who was running the blackmail ring that was the nominal excuse for the raid. Apparently nobody went to prison as a result of the raid.