Of Captive Queens and Holy Panthers - Prison Fiction and Male Homoerotic Experience (Broché)

Prison eroticism can by no means be reduced to "decadent" phenomena such as transvestism, prostitution and gang rape. On the contrary, the homoerotic subject-matter in fiction is often accompanied by an astonishingly transcendental vision of the prison - comparable with the Dostoevskyan conception that Man is forever in solitary confinement unless he can reach his fellow-prisoner. It is Everyman who is thrown into a radically novel environment, must cope with it, and often has to reconsider his original self- definition as an erotic human being.