Reading rainbow

“One time in a letter, I apologized for not writing as frequently as usual. I was dealing with some personal stuff,” John Thompson says over coffee at Dollop in Uptown. “She wrote me a six-page letter of solidarity and inspiration to get through the hard times, which included a poem! I totally cried when I read that letter.” Thompson, 25, is referring to his pen pal, a trans woman serving time in an Illinois prison.

Incarcerated transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals are subjected to segregation, harassment, assault, and denial of medical care, gender expression and hormone therapy, according to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project in NYC. They’re also at a higher risk for contracting HIV/AIDS. Wanting to provide support for these largely ignored members of the LGBT community, Thompson and fellow activist Jakob VanLammeren decided to do something about it.

In spring 2009, the two friends, who met through the queer-activist community, founded the Write to Win Collective and began connecting with transgender and gender-nonconforming prisoners in ten penitentiaries in western and southern Illinois. They were put in touch with inmates through the organization Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois, a collective of radical lawyers, social workers, activists and community members who work with this demographic. “When Write to Win received our first letter from an inside pen pal, I was literally jumping up and down,” says VanLammeren, 28.

Write to Win matches the inmates, ranging in age from 18 to 60, with pen pals in allied communities. Marco Hidalgo, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at DePaul, has been writing to his pen pal for about five months. “I wanted to connect to folks in our community who are marginalized in ways that we don’t understand,” Hidalgo says, “to try to connect with someone on the inside who has an experience where they already might be isolated but then also having to deal with being on the fringe.” Of the break from the e-mailing, texting and tweeting to which we’ve grown accustomed, the 31-year-old says, “There’s a certain realness to writing a letter and knowing that is the only thing that represents you to this person.”

Of his pen pal, Thompson says, “Whenever she writes about trouble she’s having, she always has a positive spin on the situation. Like, sometimes when she attends worship services in her prison and sings and dances to the church songs, the men in the prison will stare and talk about her and say offensive things to her, but she just keeps singing and dancing and laughing.

“Sometimes it takes years for a friendship to get to that point when it’s in person,” Thompson continues, “and it took a few months with this person via letter correspondence. I think that is incredible.”

With full-time jobs, Thompson, an HIV research assistant at Howard Brown Health Center, and VanLammeren, a facilitator of creative writing groups for young people at Broadway Youth Center, run the collective (with two other members) on a volunteer basis; they pay office-space rent from their own pockets. Write to Win also relies on the LGBTQ community for collaboration; queer dance party Chances Dances, for example, donated a month’s proceeds. It’s through such events that the org often recruits writers and volunteers. Now 40 pen pals strong, Write to Win has proven the word-of-mouth model successful. “We try to make it as easy as possible for people to be pen pals,” VanLammeren says of those both inside and out. “This entire project comes from a place of such love that we just want everyone to feel safe, we want everyone to feel heard.”

Write to Win joins Critical Resistance: A National Day of Fundraisers on Friday 8. Visit writetowin.wordpress.com for more information.

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