NEW YORK — Lucas Entertainment CEO Michael Lucas’s latest column for OUT magazine sheds light on the disturbing prison conditions that face gay inmates and the tragedy of rape behind bars.
Lucas spotlighted the bullying and humiliation of former performer Milan Gamiani who was an inmate at a Manhattan correctional center after refusing to testify against his boyfriend accused of financial crimes.
Gamiani told Lucas he was verbally abused, robbed, kicked, punched and repeatedly raped while incarcerated.
“Abuse of adult men is something we have been taught to laugh at, not take seriously. No wonder so many victims stay silent about it. Milan Gamiani is a brave exception,” Lucas wrote.
The article points out how the gay community is the most vulnerable in the prison system and suffers the highest rate of victimization. Lucas said it’s bullying on a grotesque scale and a national disgrace.
Recounting his original professional friendship with Gamiani, Lucas described him as friendly, confident and sexy.Now, after his harrowing ordeal, he’s fearful, deeply sad and could barely finish his interview for the story. “A cocktail of medications helps him keep his terrors in check, but only barely,” Lucas said.
After being repeatedly raped and beaten Gamiani attempted to hang himself. His pleas for help to guards and even doctors were ignored, according to the story, that quoted Gamiani as describing officials’ responses as, “’Come on, you guys like playing with each other and now you’re going to call it rape?’”
More than two years after his release, Gamiani is still traumatized and suffers from nightmares and day terrors that have nearly broken him. “I'm not over what I went through,” he said. “My mind can't handle it. I feel like disappearing.”
Understandably outraged over the abuse and rape, Lucas called for action to be taken.He asked people to visit the website of Just Detention International to learn more about the ongoing human-rights crisis in prisons.
“Demand that your elected officials get involved. Prisoner rights are not a popular issue for politicians, who don’t want to look ‘soft on crime.’ But prison assault and rape are crimes, and should be treated seriously as such. People who have been convicted should serve out their sentences according to the law. But those sentences do not include being physically and sexually tortured by other inmates while the law looks the other way,” Lucas wrote.