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"Birdman of Alcatraz" Robert Stroud in a file photo from 1962 alongside Alcatraz Island prison
The famous "Birdman" and many others imprisoned on the island were queer.
One of Donald Trump’s latest schemes is to reopen the notorious federal prison on Alcatraz Island, just off the coast of San Francisco.
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Alcatraz, which was a federal penitentiary from 1934 until 1963, “had a reputation for being a ‘last resort’ facility where the most dangerous and most unruly in other prisons were sent,” CNN reports. “It was virtually impossible to escape, despite numerous storied attempts.” Among the infamous criminals it housed over the years were Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, and James “Whitey” Bulger.
It closed because the building had deteriorated greatly, and the cost of renovation was deemed too high. It is now a national historic landmark, managed by the National Park Service and visited by about 1.2 million people a year.
Trump floated the idea of reopening a prison on Alcatraz on Truth Social over the weekend. He said it would be a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.” The U.S. Bureau of Prisons is looking into the possibility of implementing this plan, although experts warn that the cost of renovation, again, may be prohibitive.
Many gay and bisexual men were held at Alcatraz, some imprisoned simply because of having sex with other men — and one was a convicted murderer who became a bird expert and had his story told on film. Here’s a look at the little-known queer history of Alcatraz.
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Frank Lucas Bolt, a military man convicted of sodomy in 1932, was Alcatraz’s first inmate. He was initially sent to a military prison in Hawaii, but he was transferred to Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in June 1934, two months before it officially opened on August 11 of that year, according to History.com.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who loved punishing gay and bi men even though he may have been gay himself, signed Bolt’s admission papers. “Hoover wanted Alcatraz seen not only as a prison for America’s most dangerous mobsters and criminals, but also as a symbol of America’s intolerance and prosecution of homosexuality and what he deemed ‘undesirable lifestyles,’” History.com reports.
Bolt was transferred again, to McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington State in May 1936, and was paroled from there in September 1936, according to a biography at FindAGrave.com. Upon his release, he moved to Hawaii, where he became a dockworker for Castle & Cook, a distributor of pineapple and other products. He married a woman, Rachel Lahela Kekoa, in 1940, and they had numerous children — some sources say 11, others nine. Bolt spent the rest of his life in Hawaii, leaving Castle & Cook for a handyman job in 1965. He died the following year at age 58.
The following decades saw more men sent to Alcatraz because of sodomy convictions. “Between 1934 and 1957, Hoover signed documents approving the transfer of over twenty military men charged with ‘Sodomy’ to Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in order to assuage the moral panic spreading across the country regarding ‘sex crime,’” Vic Overdorf wrote in an honors thesis for Butler University in 2017. Many of them said they were not guilty, and they certainly were not violent, like most of those imprisoned at Alcatraz. A majority of the men were diagnosed as “sexual psychopaths,” and Overdorf found evidence of conversion therapy being used at the prison. Homosexuality was considered a mental illness at this time, and sodomy was a crime across the nation.
“By situating homosexual men as a threat to the American public (particularly children and families), the state was able to use the incarceration and punishment of homosexual bodies as a tool of biopolitical control,” Overdorf continued.
Overdorf’s paper lists 29 men who were imprisoned at Alcatraz for sodomy from the 1930s to the 1960s. There may have been more, he noted. Little is known about their post-Alcatraz lives.
Classic movie fans know Robert Stroud from the 1962 film Birdman of Alcatraz, in which he was played by Burt Lancaster, who received an Oscar nomination as Best Actor. Stroud’s history is more complicated than the film would have it, although it does depict his crimes. Born in Seattle in 1890, he spent most of his childhood in Illinois but ran away from home at age 13 and ended up in Alaska, where he was a pimp. He killed Charles F. Damer in a dispute involving one of the women he managed, Kitty O'Brien — most accounts say it was because Damer had beaten O'Brien, although some say it was because he hadn’t paid her or paid her too little. Stroud pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1909 and was sentenced to 12 years at the McNeil Island prison in Washington. There he stabbed another inmate and was “generally troublesome,” Encyclopedia Britannica notes. He was transferred to Leavenworth Prison in Kansas after that, and in that prison he stabbed a guard to death in 1916. He was sentenced to hang, but in 1920 President Woodrow Wilson commuted Stroud’s sentence to life in prison in solitary confinement.
However, Stroud could have canaries and other birds to keep him company in solitary, and so began his study of the avian creatures and their illnesses. He wrote Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds, published in 1943 after it was smuggled out of prison. It “was an important work in the field,” according to Britannica. Stroud also developed medicines for birds. In 1942, he had been transferred from Leavenworth to Alcatraz; there he could continue his research, but he was no longer allowed to publish his findings. He was transferred again in 1959, to a medical center for inmates in Springfield, Missouri, and he died there in 1963.
Thomas Gaddis, a prison reform advocate, published the bookBirdman of Alcatraz in 1955, and it became the basis for the film. “While Burt Lancaster would later portray him on film as a reformed, mild-mannered man, Stroud had serious rage issues,” the Springfield News-Leader reported in 2014 in an article about recently released manuscripts Stroud had written in prison, in which the Birdman confirmed that he was gay. Gaddis apparently knew this but considered it too controversial to put in his book. Dudley Martin, a Springfield lawyer, had represented Stroud when he sued the prison system for the right to publish his work. Stroud died before there was a decision in the lawsuit, but eventually Martin gained the right to the manuscripts and began publishing them. It appears that only one is available, Looking Outward: A Voice From the Grave, which came out in 2013.
