Things I thought

Sunday 3 February 2013

An Open Letter To Chris Grayling

Dear Mr. Grayling, Thank you for reading this letter. As one of Britain's premiere fuckwits I realise that you must be very busy. Just working out how to get out of bed and put your trousers on without kicking yourself repeatedly in the head must take hours, and that's before you've even started fucking up whichever department Cameron's deemed expendable enough to put you in charge of this week. That said, I would greatly appreciate it if you would take the time to explain a few details regarding the prison reforms you shat out during an interview with the Mail on Sunday today. I recognise that as you were speaking to the Mail you may have legitimately believed that nobody with a key stage 3 comprehension level or higher would ever read the bilious bilge you let dripple from your slackened maw. Sadly for the rest of us, your imaginative musings regarding the state of British prisons (as well as the revelations the joy you take in attacking people smaller and weaker than yourself) were reprinted in numerous respectable newspapers and the Guardian meaning many more people than originally intended, including my self, have now had the misfortune of reading them. While most of your reforms – for example restricting prisoners' access to Sky TV – are the equivalent of promising to finally rid the nation of unicorns, one measure did catch my eye. To aid you in your valiant effort to fight crime you've promised to end the “growing practice” of gay couples sharing cells – a form of “domestic life” which you say is unacceptable in prison. It is towards this towering totem of Tory toss that I'd like to direct my enquiries.

First of all, at what point in a relationship would the proposed ban on gay couples sharing a cell/prison kick in? Would they need to have had “the talk” regarding what they meant to each other, or could they just be a couple of guys having fun without worrying where it was all going? Does the ban apply just to couples or fuckbuddies too? Will there be an exception for people who love shagging but secretly hate each other?

 By the way, is it just gay prisoners' sex lives that bother you, or is it the idea of them having “domestic” arrangements at all? Because if it's the latter, I've got some bad news: when you're less than 6 feet from someone for 23 hours a day, shit gets pretty domestic whether or not you decide to smoosh your erogenous zones together. In my experience most prisoners live the lives of elderly couples – nattering endlessly about TV and the weather, doing chores together and never having sex. With this in mind will you seek to break up straight prisoners who are just good friends?

Speaking of which, are straight prisoners allowed to fuck? As many of your colleagues will fiercely attest, fucking other men doesn't make you gay, so I smell a loophole.

On the subject of holes, would rimming count, or does your definition of gay sex only include penetration? What if my cell mate and I just decided to toss each other off? Just once? Twice? Three wanks and you're out?

As a former prisoner of Wandsworth, one of your government's shittiest penal establishments, I can confidently say that sucking another man's cock in order to get moved (which otherwise would have taken months or years) would have been a win-win situation. How will you stop wily bisexuals like me jumping the queue for the best prisons? On that note, how are you going to know who's in a relationship, who isn't, and who's faking? Will prison guards have to watch the actual act of coitus (again, a bonus as far as I'm concerned) or will you just move people from cell to cell and prison to prison based on whether they “seem like poofs”?

Considering the rise of polyamorous relationships, how will you ensure that you don't break up a gay couple only to inadvertently reaccomadate them with someone they're already dating? If everyone in the prison system enters a polyamorous relationship with each other, will 97,000 new one-person prisons need to be built?

As I know you'd never just parp out a half-arsed policy fart to appease the fuckbrained gobshites who read the Mail on Sunday (and have been deserting your party in droves lately), I'm sure you've already thought long and hard about all these issues, along with the obvious human rights implications of treating gay prisoners differently to other inmates. What concerns me most, though, is whether you've considered the personal cost. Despite the fevered fantasies of you and your Tory brethren, prison is not a paradise for gay people. In fact, the only openly LGBTQ person I encountered there was the subject of homophobic bullying and threats from prisoners and guards alike*. Many LGBTQ people – in couples or not – may choose to live with other gay prisoners simply because it's safer. So, Mr. Grayling, my last question is this: when the first inmate dies from this policy, either through violence or suicide, what will you tell their family?

Faithfully,

Jonnie Marbles