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walls - except to some of the new fish, maybe, who have the misfortune to be young,
slim, good-looking, and unwary - but homosexuality, like straight sex, comes in a
hundred different shapes and forms. There are men who can't stand to be without sex of
some kind and turn to another man to keep from going crazy. Usually what follows is an
arrangement between two fundamentally "Heterosexual men, although I've sometimes
wondered if they are quite as heterosexual as they thought they were going to be when
they get back to their wives or their girlfriends.
There are also men who get 'turned' in prison. In the current parlance they 'go gay', or
'come out of the closet'. Mostly (but not always) they play the female, and their favours
are competed for fiercely.
And then there are the sisters.
They are to prison society what the rapist is to the society outside the walls. They're
usually long-timers, doing hard bullets for brutal crimes. Their prey is the young, the
weak, and the inexperienced ... or, as in the case of Andy Dufresne, the weak-looking.
Their hunting grounds are the showers, the cramped, tunnel-like area way behind the
industrial washers in the laundry, sometimes the infirmary. On more than one occasion
rape has occurred in the closet-sized projection booth behind the auditorium. Most often
what the sisters take by force they could have had for free, if they wanted it; those who
have been turned always seem to have 'crushes' on one sister or another, like teenage girls
with their Sinatras, Presleys, or Redfords. But for the sisters, the joy has always been in
taking it by force... and I guess it always will be.
Because of his small size and fair good looks (and maybe also because of that very
quality of self-possession I had admired), the sisters were after Andy from the day he
walked in. If this was some kind of fairy story, I'd tell you that Andy fought the good
fight until they left him alone. I wish I could say that, but I can't. Prison is no fairy-tale
world.
The first time for him was in the shower less than three days after he joined our happy
Shawshank family. Just a lot of slap and tickle that time, I understand. They like to size
you up before they make their real move, like jackals finding out if the prey is as weak
and hamstrung as it looks.
Andy punched back and bloodied the lip of a big, hulking sister named Bogs Diamond -
gone these many years since to who knows where. A guard broke it up before it could go
any further, but Bogs promised to get him - and Bogs did.
The second time was behind the washers in the laundry. A lot has gone on in that long,
dusty, and narrow space over the years; the guards know about it and just let it be. It's
dim and littered with bags of washing and bleaching compound, drums of Hexlite
catalyst, as harmless as salt if your hands are dry, murderous as battery acid if they're
wet. The guards don't like to go back there. There's no room to manoeuvre, and one of the
first things they teach them when they come to work in a place like this is to never let the
cons get you in a place where you can't back up.
Bogs wasn't there that day, but Henry Backus, who had been washroom foreman down
there since 1922, told me that four of his friends were. Andy held them at bay for a while
with a scoop of Hexlite, threatening to throw it in their eyes if they came any closer, but