Fox News, bulwark of sensationalist right-wing reportage, recently issued this headline: “Lesbian Prison Gangs Waiting to Get Hands on Lindsay Lohan.”
The article, a sleazy regurgitation of the “exclusive” that ran on July 13 in UK tabloid The Sun (“Everyone Will Want a Piece of Lindsay”), chronicles the “brutal conditions” that “bisexual Lindsay” will face in Lynwood, California’s Century Regional Detention Facility, given the “fearsome lesbian gangs desperate to get their hands on her.”
LiLo, argue Fox and The Sun, will have to be on her toes if she’s to dodge the “clutches” of these dangerous lesbians. Warns interviewee and convict Tamara Haley: “The gay inmates wear their shirts inside out to let others know they are available. So if Lindsay doesn’t want someone to grab her ass she’d better keep her shirt on straight. Women grab each other like animals when the guards aren’t looking.”
Let’s back up a minute.
On July 6, Lohan was found guilty of breaching her probation (remember those two DUI arrests back in 2007?) and sentenced to 90 days in the slammer. Further, within two days of clink completion, she’ll sign into a 90-day in-patient rehab program and post-prison probation will involve routine drug and alcohol testing.
Judge Marsha Revel cited numerous probation violations: Lohan’s alleged half-assed attendance at court-ordered booze education program Right On; her absenteeism from a compulsory May court date (Lohan was stuck in Cannes, passport allegedly stolen); the accusatory bleep of Lohan’s SCRAM bracelet during the MTV Music Awards festivities (Lohan maintains the alcohol-monitoring gadget went off of its own accord); the lies Lohan has allegedly told authorities and her refusal to acknowledge accountability.
Lohan, granted a two-week respite to prepare for her sentence, surrendered on July 20. (Her stint behind bars will likely climax at 22-23 days. As LA County Sheriff’s Department rep Steve Whitmore explains, excessive overcrowding means women convicted of non-violent crimes generally serve only 25 percent of their prison terms.)
Fox News is known to peddle phobia, panic and hysteria. In fact, the last time Fox reported on “lesbian gangs” (The O’Reilly Factor, July 2007), the station was blasted for its bloated fabrication of fiction as news. Bill O’Reilly and so-called crime analyst Rod Wheeler reported on “a national underground network” of violent pink-pistol-packing “lesbians” who were “raping young girls,” “indoctrinating them into homosexuality” and “terrorizing” America.
Wheeler was forced to retract much of his so-called evidence, and though O’Reilly refused to invalidate the segment, he admitted its hyperbole. (Indeed. Pink Pistols is actually a national queer gun-rights advocacy group “dedicated to the legal, safe and responsible use of firearms for self-defence of the sexual-minority community.”)
Where Fox News’ 2007 “lesbian gang” story conflated lesbianism with sexual and physical violence to induce straight terror, its Lohan tale is invested in desire. Indeed, Fox’s speculative rape of Lohan is seedy, lewd and wholly scopophilic — this is the stuff of fantasy. In fact, Fox concedes as much, noting Lohan will serve her time in isolation, segregated from the general population. Fox’s hypothetical rape of Lohan, then, is — my God — wishful thinking. But to what end? The Lohan rape fantasy is ultimately a phobically inspired exercise in disciplinary action: at once punishment for LiLo’s queer transgressions and a ray of light (lest sexual assault by a swarm of rapacious prison dykes be enough to scare LiLo straight).
I’ve written at length about the media’s obsession with Lohan as “a site monstrosity,” its “predatory fixation” on “the way she moves, looks, functions and fucks,” its aggressive attempts to manage her unruly queer body. What began with an alleged pre-penned Lohan obituary has culminated in graphic details regarding the “full cavity search” Lohan will have undergone upon incarceration intake and a garish rape fantasy passing as news.
Add to this the recent rekindling of Lohan and DJ Samantha Ronson (pre-surrender, Lohan and Ronson — who infamously split in 2009, two years into their media-gawk-and-stalk-beleaguered relationship — spent most of their time together), and the stale inquiry into the legitimacy of Lohan’s queerness is also back on the table.
As gawker.com’s Brian Moylan snidely quipped in his Lohan jail coverage: “[T]he real news is SamRo is back! Does that mean that Lindsay is also a lesbian when she’s sober?”
Here, I’ll invoke Lohan, who doodled the following on her manicured middle finger while she awaited Judge Revel’s verdict: fuck u.
Lisa Foad is the author of The Night Is a Mouth. Mouthpiece appears in every second issue of Xtra.
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