The armed movements of the 1970s and 1980s carried an openly queer contingent whose members fill this database. The George Jackson Brigade's Rita Brown and Ed Mead were out in prison — Mead co-founding Men Against Sexism at Walla Walla to break the prison's rape trade; Black Liberation Army theorist Kuwasi Balagoon, bisexual and unapologetic, died of AIDS at Auburn in 1986; and the May 19th and resistance-conspiracy prisoners Laura Whitehorn, Linda Evans, and Susan Rosenberg organized as out lesbians through decades inside, fighting for HIV-positive prisoners at every institution that held them.

Their double stigma — revolutionaries in the prison, queers in the movement and the cellblock — made them bridges: the AIDS-in-prison organizing of the 1990s, the queer wing of today's prisoner-support networks, and the tradition by which anarchist queer and trans prisoners like Marius Mason are defended now, all descend from them.