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Tuesday, November 29, 2011

About Brother Hassan.......

      About The Author


Hassan Hartley, a.k.a. "Brother Hassan", is a  college educated writer born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, who embarked upon the journey of discovering the nuances of human sexuality among black men primarily as a result of his own journey to self acceptance and awareness. Having been a college student at Tuskegee University, a former member of the Nation of Islam, and having served  time in a Virginia Correctional facility, his own life mirrors much of the complexity of  black men and sexual identity politics discussed in this book.


Struggling with his own sexual identity in the early 1990's when images of black gay men were all but non-existent in any media format, Brother Hassan lived in two worlds at the same time: One, a world of strict discipline in the Nation of Islam, where he hoped to one day become a Minister in the mold of Malcolm X or Minister Louis Farrakhan. The other world, that of a same gender loving man in complete denial about his desires for men in an organization not known for being anywhere resembling sympathetic to gays and lesbians.

Hassan's entire world  was absorbed in the Teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and  the Honorable Louis Farrakhan, while his desires for men grew gradually stronger and stronger throughout his teenage years and into adulthood. As a teenager, he joined the Black Muslim sect and became a part of  the Fruit Of Islam, the name given to the military training of men who belong to the Nation Of Islam in North America.

 Brother Hassan  joined a group within the Fruit of Islam in Chicago known as the Taskforce, a squad of young men ages 16-25 who were being groomed to rise in leadership in the Nation Of Islam for its future. Having joined the N.O.I. at its headquarters in Chicago, he frequently saw, met, and heard Minister Farrakhan and even traveled with the Taskforce to provide security for the Nation Of Islam leader. A shy, timid and quiet teenager, Bro. Hassan felt overwhelmed by such nearness to so much going on in such a controversial organization, but eventually adapted.

 After graduating from Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in Chicago, Brother Hassan  moved south to the prestigious Tuskegee University, where he would study for the next 5 years Political Science and Business Administration.


 An internal scandal within the Nation Of Islam's own headquarters in March, 1993 involving Hassan's squad, the Taskforce, culminated in a suicide of a top lieutenant in the squad, as well as the revelation that nearly two dozen young men within the same squad were allegedly involved in homosexual activity with each other. Those that were not excommunicated from the organization for Fornication and Sodomy, left  the Nation Of Islam before they could stand trial in the Nation of Islam's stringent Restrictive Laws of  Conduct. Brother Hassan, ironically, was not involved in any of these activities, despite his own sexual orientation becoming clearer to him as years passed. The scandal was kept out of the media, for obvious reasons.

In August 1994, Hassan was awarded a partial scholarship from Minister Farrakhan personally to assist in his college tuition and studies. After a bloody, near-fatal, and  tumultuous split with the Nation of Islam in November 1994, however, Bro. Hassan came to terms with his sexuality, although he would wander deeper and deeper into a  7 year chasm of criminal activity that culminated in a 3 year prison sentence in Virginia. During this time, Hassan began not only began the arduous process of self correction, but  studying those black men around him who were at different levels in their awareness of their own sexuality, and thus the basis of this book was born.


Hassan's research would not only extend to those around him in prison while incarcerated, but to those in many other prisons all over the United States after his release in  August 2006. With the help of correctional officers that bent more than a few rules to allow him to interview inmates, internet websites designed to establish pen pal relationships with inmates, and other useful tools, he interviewed thousands of inmates in a 6 year period, confirming some theses he already had, and being enlightened on others. This book is Volume 1 of that research, and proves to be controversial, enlightening, entertaining and revealing, much like its author, Brother Hassan.



BUY YOUR COPY TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

When The Lights Go Out :Final Excerpt before Release!(GRAPHIC CONTENT)

.....Standing approximately six feet tall, caramel brown complexioned, with a face very reminiscent of  superstar rap artist Nelly, with a tattooed, chiseled body to match, Grimy oozed a sexual confidence that was blinding and overwhelming to me. A young man, Grimy was only 24 years old at the time, but had already fathered seven children and had dropped out of high school at an early age to deal drugs, the crime for which he was currently incarcerated.  I initially was upset that Grimy “spilled my tea” (a phrase meaning that he exposed my true sexual identity to other inmates), but I later would find out that it would open my stay up at St. Brides Correctional Center in many ways.

The whispers grew louder at the small facility. No one questioned me openly, but I could hear inmates talking as I walked by. I began to feel uncomfortable, because openly gay inmates did NOT last long at St. Brides. The longest I personally had witnessed another gay inmate who was “clock-able” or displayed visibly stereotypical gay mannerisms, was two days…two days. They immediately were harassed, bullied, and for security reasons, had to be shipped off the compound for fear for their safety.  Somehow, despite the rumors of my sexuality, NONE of that occurred with me.  If anything, it made these young, mostly uneducated inmates draw nearer to me.

I would hear the whispers of, “Hassan is a faggot,” during the daytime, but at night, when I went to take a shower, these young men eventually started propositioning me for sexual favors. Why were effeminate gay men harassed and bullied, but I was approached in so markedly different a manner? This was simultaneously confusing and fascinating at the same time. The sexual ethos of St. Brides was completely different than that of Deep Meadows. Grimy followed me into the shower one night, and let me know that he wasn’t as heterosexual as I thought he was.

The showers were open, with a maximum capacity of eight inmates at a time allowed at any one moment. However, at this particular moment, there was only Grimy and myself.  My initial reaction to noticing his presence was fear. His body was magnificent, and his penis was enormous. Would I gain an erection simply from glancing at his naked body? I turned away so as to not directly stare at him. I would find out that this only turned him on.

I was in the midst of a minor “spat” with D-ray , and wanted to explore something new, if given the opportunity. I was about to get just that chance. I turned around to find Grimy staring directly at me, stroking his now-erect penis, licking his pink lips at me boldly. The fact that cameras could not see into the shower made being caught not an option. The worst that could happen would be that another inmate could walk in and see us (Showers were open 24 hours when the new facility opened up, and the “cell block” was actually an open dormitory with bunk beds, not cell bars). I had masturbated at just the thought of getting it on with this guy, and now here he was, naked as a jaybird, with what appeared to be a thick, 10-inch dick standing straight out like a lead pipe.

I began to flirt back, soaping up my ass, and bending over deliberately to wash my feet, so that Grimy could see my ass bent over. I turned around, and there he stood, this time less than a foot away from me, with a sex-filled gaze in his eyes that made me weep. Without hesitation, I got on my knees and deep-throated Grimy like his dick was a tall glass of water on a hot desert day.  I relished every inch of his pole, and he was amazed at my deep-throat skills.  As he climaxed, I motioned for him to be as quiet as possible, so as not to alert the other inmates. His legs began shaking uncontrollably as he shot his load down my throat.  At 31 years old, and after 9 years of same-sex encounters, I still had not ever sucked a man off to completion in that manner.  Oral sex was just a foreplay-oriented ritual for me when I had sex with a man. Now, I would find that Grimy almost would exclusively seek this pleasure from me.

Grimy was the epitome of the prison version of a DL man. As extremely difficult as it is to maintain a secret in prison, Grimy and I managed to do so flawlessly. No conversation ever was offered to discuss our encounters, nor did we even acknowledge each other outside of the prison shower or classroom. On some level, no conversation was necessary. We both knew what time it was. I only was interacting with Grimy when in the classroom, as I was a GED tutor for  inmates with less than an eighth grade reading and math level ( Grimy, for all of his sexual aura, smooth talking, and street smarts, only tested at a third grade level in his subjects). 

Being a GED tutor allowed me to interact with some of the hottest inmates on the compound. Although this was certainly not my initial reasoning ( I was BROKE  and  needed the income to buy snacks and such), having a college education came in quite handy in this regard, and I was pleasantly surprised at how these inmates yearned to obtain their GED and learn more than what they currently knew, believing that their opportunities on the outside might increase, and the chance of returning to prison decrease.

I would notice that Grimy would stare at me when I would tutor certain inmates one-on-one.  One inmate who needed a tremendous amount of help, named Marcus, was a 21-year-old dark chocolate -complexioned man with a bright smile and easy, warm  eyes. Testing at a second grade level, however, made it frustrating when teaching even the simple addition and subtraction to him. Grimy appeared to be jealous at the attention that I was showing Marcus, and I would soon find out what made him feel the way that he did. Marcus, although a young Black male who dropped out of middle school to sell drugs in Richmond, Virginia, seemed to be more gifted than I expected in matters of flirtatiousness.

At first, Marcus was assigned to me by the teacher, Mrs. “Doolittle” (name changed), an elderly Black woman from Portsmouth who had a fragile ego, and for a teacher who had been teaching for 35 years, out-dated and seemingly useless teaching methods. Her expertise was in teaching elementary school children, NOT adults, and especially black MEN. My background of teaching GED classes in Washington, D.C., made being a GED tutor a natural fit for me, and many of the students I  was assigned to began making progress immediately. Mrs. Doolittle had some of the same students in her class for seven and eight months, and they had made no visible improvement in test scores.

After only a few weeks as a tutor, I got several of the inmates up to an 8.0 ( eighth grade math and reading level) and ready to move on from pre-GED class, to GED class in the prison educational structure. Marcus was progressing under my guidance, and when we went back to the dormitory, he often sought additional tutoring from me.  The GED tutoring became my niche in the social structure, and soon became the way that I was seen and noticed by the other inmates.

One night, I went to take an early shower (I had a headache that day from arguing with Mrs. Doolittle), and Marcus was in the shower bathing. He struck up a conversation with me while we showered, and I noticed that, just as he did when I tutored him, he would look me directly in my eyes as if he were looking into my soul.

About a minute later, he then came near me, and kissed me firmly on my lips. I felt conflicted about this, as Marcus was my student.  Not typically my type, (he was shorter than me), his Michael Vick like  resemblance and chiseled, ripped-up  body more than made up for his lack of height.  Before I could fully process everything, Marcus was on his knees sucking me off in much the same way that I pleasured Grimy and D-ray.

My sexual encounters with Marcus only occurred when Grimy was out of the dorm either cutting hair (he was a prison barber who worked until 10pm) or when he was out on the recreation yard working out. Initially, I didn’t notice this. One day, while I was tutoring him in class, he opened up his math book, and there, in the middle of it, sat a condom. I was stunned.


Where the fuck do you get a condom in prison?


 He looked at me with a devilish, cagey grin. On the notepad, I wrote the question, “Where did you get that from?” to him. He wrote back, “From my cousin that came to visit me last Saturday. I got more in my trunk.” That evening, around 1 a.m., he tapped my bed and motioned for me to meet him in the bathroom. After three or four minutes, I entered the shower, and there he was. After two or three minutes of kissing, he handed me the condom. I put it on, and began to fuck him standing up, until he and I ejaculated at the same time.

 Safe sex in the penitentiary!

WOW, I thought. This took planning and proper timing. I was impressed. If he took that level of critical thinking and strategy into the GED test, I thought to myself, he was sure to pass with flying colors.

I began to realize that St. Brides was a DL haven......


Grimy gave me some good sex later that night. Perhaps as a result of seeing me later that day with a frustrated look on my face due to the queen incident, or just because he was horny (Grimy had developed a sex cycle with me of hooking up in the shower once every five days. This was the third day of the cycle, so I figured his pattern was changing for a reason outside of normal horniness). As we had sex in the shower, he whispered to me, “I won’t never chase or hate on you like they did to that gump today, baby, you know that, right?” I looked back and saw a sensitivity in his eyes that I never had seen before or since. I whispered back, “Yeah, Daddy, I know,” and smiled. After calling him “Daddy,” he IMMEDIATELY began to climax. He enjoyed calling me his “wife,” during sex, even though we barely spoke outside of the shower, except for class.

The last time that Grimy and I had sex, he did something that he had never done before: He pulled my face to his and kissed me. He NEVER had kissed me before in all of the hook-ups we had. After he climaxed, he kissed me yet again, and held my forehead to his. Smiling, I felt so safe and protected, more than I had ever felt with any “relationship” on the street. Intimacy in a shower in the Penitentiary?  What in the hell?

Grimy was released a few days later. He knew his release date was drawing near, but in a shrewd move, told NONE of the other inmates about it (When other inmates know the date of your release, they often can initiate conflict with you to get you to fight them, thus adding time to your sentence—haters). To this day, I have not been able to track Grimy down, although  I heard from another recently-released inmate that he is back together with one of his children’s mothers (When I met him, he had seven children by five different women), and hustling drugs again.

Marcus kept after me for more dick. With Grimy gone from the cell block, I began to hook up with Marcus for “light encounters” (he would perform oral sex on me almost nightly. He wasn’t the cleanest “bottom” in the sexual universe, and with him out of condoms, I didn’t want my penis having shit stains on it.)  Marcus would even get outright mad when I wouldn’t penetrate him more regularly than I did.  I was hoping that he wouldn’t become a “fatal attraction” to me, as he clearly kept his eye on me from a distance all day, to see who I would communicate with, and if I was  doing a little “DL” flirting with other brothers on the block. In all of my “dating” and hookup encounters at St. Brides, it wasn’t as if I ever was going to fall in love with any of these guys. Two of them, Grimy and Marcus, could not read and write very well (not that I’m discriminating, I just would like a literate, intelligent mate that I could have conversations about things like politics and world affairs), and D-ray satisfied my immediate physical and short-term emotional needs, but came off more like he could be a “playa” if given the opportunity.

St. Brides proved to me, through my sexual encounters, that DL men in fact are in the penitentiary in much higher levels that I ever would have imagined.  What fascinated me about the DL man in prison, as opposed to the “straight” man in prison, was the level of OPENNESS of the straight man in his romantic and sexual liaisons with other men.  The DL brothers I would meet in prison were so extremely good at hiding their desires and lusts for same-gender sex, they would go to ANY lengths to hide it.








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