LGBTQ+ Lives on the Line: Gangs, Prison Culture, and the Rise of Outkasst in Florida

Orion Flowers recalls how being perceived as LGBTQ+ inside Florida prisons can instantly place a person in mortal danger, shaped by gang laws, fear, and a culture of enforced violence.

“Are you OK?” Roach, my cellie asked. He was standing at the cell door with a knife squeezed in his fist. Three of his gang brothers, each of them clutching black steel blades, crammed together in the cell’s small doorway.

“Yeah,” I said reflexively. I was high on K2, a synthetic marijuana that typically knocks users out cold for the few minutes the high lasts. The gang members had chosen this moment to confront me after one of my cellie’s brothers had made an issue out of me being housed with him.

“Wait. But I’m Christian now. I gave my life to the Lord. You know that, man!”

LGBTQ+ Identity as a Trigger for Violence

“OK” is the abbreviation for Florida’s prison-based LGBTQ+ self-defense activist organization, Outkasst. It has been labeled a security threat group by the Florida Department of Corrections because a large portion of the membership consists of men who’ve been kicked out of other “nations” (gangs) for indulging in homosexual activity. It’s considered a gang by Florida gang members for that very reason.

Roach and his brothers were members of a Florida Kutthroat Kommittee. It was founded in Jacksonville by some Florida boys influenced by dudes from New Orleans who’d relocated there after Hurricane Katrina. It’s based on the music of Soldier Slim, the New Orleans rapper whose Kutthroat Kommittee was a staple of his rhymes.

Gang Law, Fear, and the Policing of Bodies

Like other Florida gang members, they have an insecurity about being housed with men associated with the LGBTQ+ community. These insecurities are codified in gangland laws. Breaking any of these laws places a man in danger of being considered someone who “gets down” (participates in any form of homosexual activity), a penalty punishable by excommunication from their gang. That excommunication would be punctuated with their getting stabbed by a gang member, who’d be elevated in rank for executing the hit.

As with the law pressing gang members to stab anyone in the LGBTQ+ community rather than fist fight them, the housing law is premised upon fear and insecurity. But the “stab rather than fight” rule is one that threatens the life of anyone in the LGBTQ+ community. It is a point of pride and reputation for gangbangers. No gang member could live down getting their ass kicked by someone considered gay—so they’d rather stab and kill than fight.

Surviving Stabbings and Becoming a Warrior for LGBTQ+ Solidarity

I’d been “hit up” (stabbed) a couple of years before this incident by a crew of Bloods and Zoe Mafia Family (ZMF) members. ZMF is an organization founded by Haitians that recruits its members from anyone originating from the five major Caribbean islands.

A member of Outkasst had robbed a Z for an ounce of crystal meth. That Z had sent a squad of Bloods and Zs at him, and they “wet him up” (stabbed him) something vicious. “Maze” (not his real name) was so fat, though, they didn’t hit anything vital. Some of the brothers stitched him up with a needle and thread, and he was on the compound the next morning.

When I stepped into a Z-run dormitory to broker a peace treaty, I was hit up by Bloods and Zs with knives so lethal they were called “bone crushers.” My collar bone and scapula were broken by two of them. An artery was severed in my shoulder by another. My lung was pierced with an icepick. I was also stabbed in the head, and a sharpened lightning rod was jammed clean through my shoulder. One wound was so sick and deep, nurses refused to stitch it closed, but stuffed gauze down into it for months so it would heal from the inside out.

It took over a year for those wounds to heal. Survival toughened me into a warrior for the cause. By the time this situation with the Kutthroats arose, however, I’d gone to Jesus and walked away from the life of militant activism that oppression of the LGBTQ+ community by the rise of gangland life in Florida prisons had drawn me into. While I continued to express solidarity in spirit with the movement, my life as a Christian had outpaced my involvement as an activist. Which is why I was astounded when Roach and his boys drew steel on me, asking if I was OK.

From Prison Counterculture to Oppression

Life hasn’t always been so tough for the LGBTQ+ community in Florida prisons. Prison homosexuality was an accepted part of chain gang life when I first “fell” (got locked down in prison) 29 years ago. Perhaps the reason was, prior to the legalization of gay marriage and mainstream tolerance toward homosexuals, gay life was counterculture, and counterculture meant “prison cool.” Mainstream acceptance killed the counterculture coolness of gay life. Intolerance of gays suddenly ran counter to mainstream culture, and that brand of intolerance soon became the mainstream culture in prison.

Gangland life rose in prison in concert with the killing of gay prison counterculture. It was the American rights backlash against Obama’s policy of tolerating LGBTQ+ rights in the military, the legalization of gay marriage, and the extension of civil rights to trans men and women that mainstreamed intolerance of gays in prison. In a classic example of Marx’s warning that the oppressed should be careful about taking on the ways of the oppressor, gangs which once stood in solidarity with people standing up for their rights suddenly exhibited solidarity with the oppressors, jamming their knees down on the necks of people who want nothing more than to simply breathe.

The only gangs in prison when I first fell were the Gangster Disciples, Folk Nation, and Latin Kings. The early to mid-aughts gave life to the Bloods, Crips, Zs, and eventually the Kutthroats. Their numbers and influence swelled, making dinosaurs of the old-school convicts who’d run the chain gang up until then and to whom the counterculture of gay life was cool. As the new school gangland life took over, gang members’ fear of being viewed as gay by their brothers, a disqualification for participation in the power play they took by force from the old convicts, began to be expressed in violence and oppression. This was most prominently seen in housing and shower arrangements. Gang members first got vocal about with whom they were housed.

The Birth of Outkasst and LGBTQ+ Self-Defense

What’s funny is that correctional officers from that time commented quite often about doing their night rounds to discover gang members cuddling in their cells or giving blow jobs to each other, protected in their secret by their gang ties and macho signifying. This level of secrecy and false identity projections would ultimately prevail in the new chain gang, but not until rules supporting and protecting that secrecy would rise to dominate prison culture.

This projection was expressed most vehemently in the showers. Where manhood was once demonstrated by a confidence to shower without fear of one’s manhood being questioned or attacked, gang life introduced a pathological fear of a man’s masculinity being questioned by showering with anyone who participated in the LGBTQ+ lifestyle. It was lost on these young men that such an intense level of fear actually betrayed a lack of confidence in a man’s bonafides in himself as a man. It’s beyond their comprehension that expressing this fear actually outs their secret awareness that they could be the fag enticed by the sexual provocation of a soaking wet man’s penis or butt. And if a man is terrified that another man will lustfully eye his penis or butt, then that terrified man is in truth a coward who’s scared of other men. This confrontation with cowardice masquerading as machismo is what led to the birth of a nation called Outkasst.

I met one of the founders of the Outkasst movement, a former Blood, while in the box (solitary confinement) at Hamilton CI in 2021. “It was four of us at ACI [Apalachee Correctional Institution],” he told me. “I’d just gotten out of the box for ‘rockin’ out’ [fighting] with some Bloods and Thirteens who’d tried to put down on a sissy cause they thought she was takin’ too long in the shower. Two Bloods stepped into the shower to force her out, and she knocked both they asses out. Baby was butt naked, ass out, dick swingin’, and she two-pieced botha them fuck niggas, puttin’ them to sleep right under that water. Niggas went to pullin’ knives too. One nigga went out with me. Soldier. Outta Jacksonville. Them 13s “rocked with” [fought alongside] the Bloods, but we wasn’t lettin’ that baby go out alone. So we rocked out too. We stabbed a few of them, and they stabbed the shit out of us too. When I got out of the box, they put me in R dorm, and a few niggas who’d heard about it got with me. We agreed this shit had to stop. It was getting out of control. So we got it together. Drew up the framework for OK. We got the people together and came out swingin’ on February 14, 2016. We hit the gangs hard. Straight knife play. Some of us went to the box. The gangs were waiting on us when we go out, and we rocked out again. OK was born through bloodshed. Us against them. We stood our ground and refused to fold.”

Religion, Morality, and the Civil Rights Divide

Ask many old-guard civil rights activists if the LGBTQ+ movement is the new vanguard of the civil rights movement, and they’ll tell you no. Ask those on the front lines of the movement for gay and trans rights, and they’ll insist the opposite—yes.

The difference in perspective boils down to the moral question. Many of those who were on the left when it came time to protest, march, and fight against the immorality of Jim Crow and white supremacist culture have moved to the political right on the LGBTQ+ civil liberties issue. They feel it’s immoral to be gay.

Though there are no moral ambiguities when it comes to discrimination against Blacks, there are huge gray areas when it comes to homophobia. While it’s intolerable in polite society to call African Americans “niggers,” it’s still acceptable in mainstream culture to insult people by calling them fag or gay.

This is played out most prominently in the bastion of American morality, the church. Mainline congregations have split on the question of the acceptance of gays. While a few congregations do accept them as leaders and lay people, the vast majority don’t. It’s still acceptable in mainstream American church culture to denounce gays as morally unacceptable people. The moral question is answered for these people by the scriptures exiling homosexuals to the proverbial back of the bus. For them, the last word is God’s word, which makes it clear that gay people aren’t welcome in heaven.

For the old guard of the civil rights movement, many of whom never left the Black church, which groomed and steadied them through the struggles they endured fighting to keep their eyes on the prize, the moral question is settled with God’s word. It makes the distinction between the plight of gays and Blacks so clear, they can’t equate homosexual and trans people’s insistence to be accepted as equally human, deserving the same right to love and marry whomever they choose to love with their own hundreds of years of Black struggle for social, moral, and constitutional validation.

This generation hasn’t grasped that it was a radicalized political left that pressed America into definitively answering the moral question of equality for African Americans. Though that quest for equality has been undermined by shrewd political and economic moves by the political right in America, it can be convincingly argued that without the pressure brought to bear by the Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army, and Black Guerrilla Family, America may have continued to call for patience and tolerance of the discrimination and social policies that imprisoned Black folks into second-class citizenship and poverty.

We’ve all forgotten, it seems, that African Americans were still being hanged, beaten by angry mobs, and spit on when Black consciousness rose to challenge that violence with the threat of retaliatory violence. And it was in American prisons before the dumbed-down era of mass incarceration, that this Black consciousness rose most significantly with George Jackson’s Black Guerilla Family and the Black Liberation Army, transforming the prison system into a breeding and training ground for Black militants who spilled into the streets demanding justice at gun point.

Militancy, History, and the Cost of LGBTQ+ Resistance

Like the Panthers, what distinguishes Outkasst is their militancy. Rather than accept the discrimination and oppression gangs in Florida prisons impose upon the LGBTQ+ community, Outkasst insists that proactive resistance through self-defense is necessary. But where the Panthers’ vanguard response was to the oppressive assault Black folks suffered at the hands of the Oakland police force, Outkasst contends with the modern-day front-line bigots and oppressors—Florida gangbangers whose laws require the bloodshed of those aligned with the LGBTQ+ community.

The irony of this is that much of gangland positions itself as the progeny of the Panthers. The Florida Bloods, an acronym meaning Black Leaders of Our Day, claims the Panthers as its point of origin. Never mind that the Panthers originated in Oakland and beefed with LA Blacks over the bodyguard detail of Betty Shabazz back in the day, they swear by their convenient and disingenuous folklore that the Bloods were originally Black Panthers.

The Black Panthers rose as the protectors of the Black community. They were the fruit of the desperation of poor folks who wanted nothing more than to live their lives free of the moral, physical, economic, and social violence they suffered as the result of being poor, Black, and disenfranchised. History sings the song of their betrayal by snitches, government agents, and the influx of crack into their communities. Huey Newton got taken out by that epidemic, and was found shot to death in the Oakland bush. Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, suffered for years from the same genocidal plague. Gangland dismantled the movement with their virulent, oppressive feeding frenzy upon the pain of a disillusioned generation.

As was true in the Jim Crow South, the modern-day bigots of the Florida chain gang demand separate, unequal treatment at the threat of violence. They demand the LGBTQ+ community stay in its place” as supposed inferiors of the supposed “real men” representing the gang machismo. This is a toxic, confrontational brand of faux masculinity that subjects any man not ready to bang or die for the flag they represent to oppression.

I’d represented the Outkasst flag and had well demonstrated my willingness to die for the cause. Loving my wife, a woman who’d taken vows to stand with me through all manner of tribulation, called me to live for something bigger than a chain gang flag, and so I’d thrown that flag down at an altar in a prison chapel to honor our commitment.

Walking Away to Live, Not Die, as LGBTQ+ Wars Continue

I’d answered reflexively when Roach asked me if I was OK, and regretted it as soon as I saw the young man and his friends were clutching their knives. Their voices trembled and their hands shook as they demanded I toss my property into a gray cart they’d wheeled into the room.

“Cool,” I said. “Y’all got that. I ain’t got no weapon, and it’s more of y’all than it is of me.”

In another time, I may have tested their courage and rocked out, but this wasn’t that time. I have a wife to get home to, and getting stabbed up due to these young men’s homophobia would prevent that. So, smiling, I stacked my property into that gray cart and wheeled it out of the dorm into the hallway.

There is a war going on in America that nobody but the players and victims know about. While the Panthers were the vanguard soldiers waging a defensive war against the genocidal intent of a pre-militarized police force, this modern war is being waged in Florida’s mass incarceral system, the legacy of that now fully militarized genocidal intent. In this era, the war isn’t waged through economic or race politics. It’s a war waged and enforced by pawns through sexual, social, and moral politics.

It’s the American backlash against Obama’s policy of LGBTQ+ inclusion in the military, the legalization of gay marriage, and the extension of civil rights to trans men and women that made discrimination acceptable in prisons. In a classic example of Marx’s warning that the oppressed need be careful about taking on the ways of the oppressor, gangs, which once stood in solidarity with the oppressors, jam their knees down on the necks of a people’s will to simply breathe.

Gang culture isn’t yet hip to the fact that the oppression they enforce mirrors the American political right’s classic suppressive tactics. As a nation, America has yet to articulate how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ book banning attacks on free speech, Trump’s political bullying tactics, and billionaire boys club financiers ensuring the poor get even more poor through chainsaw policies that pad the pockets of their businesses harken back to a pre-Civil Rights era, white-washed America. The ingenuity, discrimination, and veiled bigotry on display are bringing the unconscious of the silent majority to a simmering pre-boil.

The issues of today are far more nuanced than they were at the height of the Civil Rights movement. They’re no longer black and white. And the vanguard, quite obviously, is no longer the Black Panthers. A new structure for the self-defense of the disenfranchised has risen to protect a besieged minority people from violence. Outkasst, the liberation front for the LGBTQ+ community in Florida prisons, has risen to oppose that violence, protecting the people. What will their legacy be? Who knows. Only time and circumstance will tell the truth of it.

Want to read more? Don’t miss I Stand Up for the LGBTQ Community

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