PRISONER OF GENDER

Ralph Gardner Jr.

The Soho News, February 4, 1981, p. 9
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At the Taconic Correctional Facility in Bedford Hills, fellow prisoners and correction officers refer to Louis
Quirros as Diane. The first transsexual in the state prison system has learned how to survive in a man’s
world.
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“When I go to the bathroom in the morning and see my penis I feel like cutting it off,” said Louis Quirros, a
25-year-old Hispanic transsexual serving six to 12 years for armed robbery. “I’m trapped between
dimensions.”
At the Ossining reception and classification center, they didn’t know where to place the first transsexual in
the state prison, at first. It was 1977 and Louis was looking more and more like a woman. He had taken
massive quantities of hormones to make his breasts grow and to remove the hair from his face and body.
“I had beautiful reddish hair down to my waist and large breasts,” he said. “They gave me a crewcut and I
cried and begged them to stop but they wouldn’t. They said it was part of the reception process. They took
me into a private room and made me strip. The sergeant took one look at the me and sent me directly to the
box. He said I was a threat to security.”
He has since been shuffled back and forth between the maximum security cellblocks at Clinton, Auburn,
Attica, and Greenhaven.
At the Taconic Correctional Facility in Bedford Hills, N.Y., where he is held now, fellow prisoners and
correction officers call him Diane, the name he took as a teenager. Listening to him talk and watching him
eat his lunch with a plastic spoon out of a styrofoam container in the prison cafeteria, it is easy to understand
why, even though Diane is not a woman. She has not had a sex change operation.
•
“It’s living hell in those dog-demented cells,” Diane said. “I’d rather deal with the rapes than be locked into
one of those bird cages 23 hours a day. Living in a max joint is a nightmare. You’re a sexual object in the
eyes and minds of the inmates who are seeking some kind of release. They’re constantly after you for a
blowjob or to suck your titties. They’ll kill their own mother to have sex with you.”
Despite what fellow prisoners and guards think about her, to a prison official like Martin Horn, assistant to
New York State Commissioner of Correction Thomas Coughlin, it’s still Louis. “Louis is an exhibitionist
and a flirt,” he said. “He incited other inmates to come on to him.” Whenever the authorities tried to move
Diane into the prion population, she attracted trouble, and they’d quickly pass her off to another prison.
Diane’s olive complexion has taken on a gray prison pallor. Skin sags slightly on a nose too small and
delicate for her face. Her eyes are small, deep set, her lips lipsticked. The hair they cut off the day she
entered the prison system has grown in and now, dyed reddish-brown, it falls below her shoulders. She
wears bracelets, rings, earrings and a woman’s watch. She appears to be a woman “in every shape and
fashion,” she said.
“I don’t flirt. I turn down dudes. I don’t sell my body for cigarets or commissary items. The first thing I do
when I get to a prison is to get myself a little boyfriend.”
It’s an unspoken law in prison. Effeminate inmates must “get married.” They find themselves “husbands”
who are among the most respected and feared members of the prison population, and in exchange for
protection, they become their sexual slaves.
“I had a husband at Greenhaven,” Diane said, lighting a cigaret. “He was very tall, very good looking, and a
good provider. He was very well respected because of the way he carried himself.”
Unfortunately, he was not respected enough. Diane wouldn’t talk about it, but officials say she was raped by
four knife wielding inmates at Greenhaven. When her “husband” tried to save her he was beaten. Diane was
transferred again, this time to Attica where she became friendly, too friendly, with David Berkowitz, the Son
of Sam killer.
“David lived three cells away from me,” she recalled. “He was the cellblock porter. He’d bring us hot water
in the morning and all our meals. He used to spend hours in front of my cell talking to me. Then he started
bringing me the Times every morning, and items from the commissary like cans of tunafish. He told me he
loved me and never wanted me to leave.”
To end the jailhouse romance, officials moved Diana to the other side of the cellblock and Berkowitz became
despondent.
“He was love smitten,” said the prison’s deputy superintendent, Richard Feitz. “We were afraid of what
would happen, you know what Berkowitz has done to women. So we burned up the wires to Albany and got
Diane the hell out of there as fast as possible.”
•
The first thing Diana does when she wakes up in the morning is to remove the bra she wears only at night.
She won’t wear it during the day because it arouses the other inmates. The lack of support the bra offers
causes her breasts, which are stuffed with silicone, to hang heavily and ache.
Makeup is considered contraband by the prison officials but Diane has found ingenious ways to improvise.
“I make my lipstick from Koolaid and Vaseline,” she reveals. “For eye makeup I get pastels from the art
shop and scrape it into a powder. And for eye-liner I take the lead from a pencil and rub it for five minutes
into the crack between cinderblocks in my cell. After it’s good and charcoally I take toothpaste and dab it on
to make it thick and then I add a few drops of water. I put a little black line under the eyes every morning.
It’s very feminine, very cunty. I get that real woman effect.”
Diane’s cell is done in reds and yellows. The curtains, the bedspreads and the fluffy pillows are her own.
Three posters, of Bette Midler in The Rose, Jill Clayburgh in Luna and an astrological poster of her sign,
Aquarius, as a young maiden carrying a pitcher filled with water, decorate the walls, along with cutouts of
models from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. “I like pretty faces on women with spiky heels,” Diane said.
Diane reads a lot. “Mostly Robert Ludlum and Sidney Sheldon. But I also love to read Women’s Wear
Daily and the catalogues from Bloomingdale’s and Henri Bendel to see what sales they’re having.”
“A lot of correction officers wanted to have sex with me. They’d bring me little presents and tell me I was
better looking than their wives.” At Clinton, she had an affair with a sergeant, she said.
“He brought me items from the street like hair dye and makeup. I used to sneak off and have oral sex with
him. He was fascinated with me. He was a sweetheart to me.”
Other members of the prison staff weren’t so caring. “Upstate they were a bunch of rednecks and hillbillies,”
Diane asserted. “They’d call me ‘freak’ and ‘the thing.’ They gave me the worst jobs. I was slapped and
punched a few times in my face and in my breasts.”
An official at Taconic explained the attitudes of officers toward Diane: “Correction officers have a macho
thing. They don’t know how to deal with Diane. It’s a question of fear”
•
Unlike many people who end up in prison, Diane was not an accident, of the victim of abuse, or of a broken
home. Her father died when she was a small child but her mother, Carmen, an indomitable and deeply
religious Puerto Rican woman, raised Diane and her brother and a sister on her own. As a child Diane spent
hours styling and brushing her mother’s hair. Whenever her mother was ill Diane refused to go to school and
would stay home to nurse her. Diane’s brother Hector is “bisexual,” she said.
By the age of 15 Diane was kicked out of the High School of Fashion Industries for wearing a dress. She
bought fabrics on 14th Street and made copies of the dresses on display in the windows at Altman’s,
Bendel’s, and Saks. “Every Saturday people would come to our house,” Diane’s brother Hector
remembered. “Diane sewed clothes for all the girls in the building.”
Four years ago, Diane was convicted of robbing another transsexual of several thousand dollars at gunpoint.
Diane claims she didn’t perform the robbery herself, but waited in the next room while a male friend help up
the transsexual with two pieces of pipe fashioned to look like a shotgun. It was Diane’s second felony arrest.
After refusing to plea bargain, the case went to trial and Diane was sentences to 6 to twelve years.
•
Sex change operations are not as popular as they were several years ago. Johns Hopkins, the hospital in
Baltimore that developed the operation, no longer performs it. The reason is that too many people were just
as miserable after they had the operation as before. Many transsexuals, in prison and on the street, no longer
undergo the surgical procedure. They are content merely with the demasculating effects of the hormones.
Diane isn’t one of them. She wants her operation and has appealed twice to Commissioner Coughlin and to
Benjamin Ward, the Commissioner who preceded Coughlin, to have the state pay for it. But they recused,
according to Diane, asserting the surgery wasn’t a life-or-death matter.
“But how do they know what it feels like to wake up every morning with a penis and a pair of tits,” she said.
Diane will come up for parole in 18 months. Until then she must be content with the hormone pills the
prison doctor gives her twice a day to maintain her feminine sex characteristics, with the lipstick she makes
for herself, with the small favors of officers and inmates and with her daydreams.
“I can see myself walking down Lexington or Park Avenue,” she said gazing out the prison’s window at the
barbed-wire fence. “I’m wearing a beige dress and a pair of spiked heels. My hair is loose and the wind is
blowing it in my face. And I’m looking really cunty, so I go into a restaurant and order myself a piece of
strawberry shortcake.”