“‘Gate gays’, what does that mean?” Insight host Jenny Brockie asks an inmate at Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre.
“Means when you come through the gate you're gay,” says Meagan*, a 32 year-old woman serving a sentence for reckless wounding.
“And when you go out?”
“You're straight,” she says. “You're only gay when you're in jail.”
It’s a concept popularised in television versions of life inside a women’s prison: Orange is the New Black; Wentworth. Insight discovered fiction was not far from reality when speaking with women incarcerated at Silverwater as part of the show’s inside its walls.
Some of the women interviewed had formed relationships with a fellow inmate; a practice so common it is known by a few names: “gate gay”; “gay for the stay”.
“How many women have relationships while they're in here with women?” Brockie asked Meagan.
“Probably 95 per cent of them.”
In 2011, the University of New South Wales released the of research into sexual relationships among women in prison, speaking with 333 inmates in NSW and Queensland. Female prisoners were found to be much more sexually active than their male counterparts, with 36 per cent reporting they had sex with their peers.
'Meagan' during her interview with Jenny Brockie Source: Insight
About 4 per cent of the women surveyed reported that they had been forced or frightened into unwanted sexual activity during their time in jail. With 60 per cent saying they had experienced sexual coercion before their incarceration, the statistics “suggest that these people are at less risk of sexual coercion and rape inside prison than outside," concluded the study’s co-author, Professor Basil Donovan.
You become so much more attached to them because we're locked in so long.
Meagan says she is into the second relationship of her sentence. The first didn’t work out, but she is happy with her current partner. She says forming relationships with peers helps stem the loneliness of prison, but also hints at a sexuality fluid beyond practicality. “Women know what women want,” she says. “A woman can understand another woman more than a male can understand a woman.”
“Is that something you felt before you came inside?” Brockie asked.
“No.”
“So what changed?”
“I guess being treated like shit from a male partner.”
Meagan says she’d like to see where things take her with her girlfriend at Silverwater.
“[Relationships] are more intense in here,” says Shannon*, another prisoner interviewed by Insight who is in a relationship with her cellmate. “Emotion wise, especially because we're living together, [it’s] hectic.”
“You become so much more attached to them because we're locked in so long.”
Shannon says she is in love with her girlfriend, but is unsure what will happen once she’s released. “You don’t trust yourself, or believe that it’s able to be something so real in here, to be so stable still on the outside.”
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