page_title: Stephen Donaldson (activist)
section_title: The darkness on the edge of society (1980–1984)
hierarchical_section_title: Stephen Donaldson (activist) / Subsequent arrests and incarcerations (1976–1990) / The darkness on the edge of society (1980–1984)
caption_attribution_description: Stephen Donaldson (aka Donny the Punk, Robert Anthony Martin) at the Oakland, California, airport, July 1984
context_page_description: Stephen Donaldson, born Robert Anthony Martin Jr and also known by the pseudonym Donny the Punk, was an American bisexual political activist. He is best known for his pioneering activism in LGBT rights and prison reform, and for his writing about punk rock and subculture.
context_section_description: Donaldson continued to suffer from depression, insomnia, and panic attacks in the late 1970s, and attempted suicide in 1977, the year after the suicide of his mother Lois Vaugahn. In 1980, Donaldson "hit rock bottom" and committed a semi-deranged incident at a Veterans' Hospital in the Bronx. Having been denied medicine for a sexually transmitted disease, Donaldson returned with a gun and fired it. During the subsequent trial, Donaldson heavily criticized the United States Government's policies. The judge ultimately found him guilty.
  Although nobody was hurt, Donaldson was convicted of assault with intent to commit murder and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. He was guilty of counts 1–6, "Unlawfully, willfully and knowingly within  the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States did seize, confine, inveigle, decoy, kidnap and abduct and hold for ransom and reward and otherwise a person and did commit assault with intent to commit murder, in that while at a Hospital".
  In a 1982 essay written from jail, Donaldson described the event:
  At the beginning of 1980, circumstances arose which produced in me an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness, helplessness, of not being recognized as a human being but rather being treated in purely bureaucratic terms by a government agency to which I had turned in vain with an urgent need for help.
  I felt that my masculinity was at stake, that I had to regain control of the situation or go under trying. As the Bruce Springsteen song goes, "Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode...."  These feelings are directly related to my D.C. experience, the subconscious emotions that are dredged up when I feel completely vulnerable. In this state I went out with a gun and violently confronted the government, though without injuring anyone. I knew I would be going back to jail for it, and this was probably a major factor as well in determining my action. It was in jail that I felt I knew the rules and could find security, a means of coping with my helplessness. The jail Punk in me was looking for a way home, even as the man in me was striking back, by force of arms assuming control of the situation, returning the government some of the rape it had given me.
  Having accomplished my objective, I surrendered to the police and was led away once more to the darkness on the edge of society, to the "darkness on the edge of town" that Springsteen sings about.
  Less than a year into his term, Donaldson had been "raped once, assaulted once, and claimed by five different men" in jail and was fearing his upcoming transfer to his first maximum security prison, where he went on to spend over a year in protective custody, which he described as "a solitary retreat" in a letter to Bo Lozoff. Lozoff was leader of the Prison-Ashram Project, which encourages convicts to use their prisons as ashrams (religious retreats) for spiritual growth. In their correspondence, Donaldson expressed his desire to help other survivors but lamented that:
  Writing and working on the rape question and the enslavement of punks (and gays) poses a major dilemma for my own spiritual work...[because] everything I do in it reinforces my own identity as a punk, since I am speaking out of experience....
  Perhaps one reason why I work to help other punks in transcending their punk identity, is that the destructive results of assuming that identity are all too manifest in my own life—where the identity has become so firmly attached as to be part of my own name, "Donny the Punk". Oh physician, how to heal thyself?
  Donaldson was released on parole in April 1984 and returned to New York City. He violated his parole by visiting India for religious study in 1987–1988, which led to his final prison term, in federal prison, in 1990.
caption: Stephen Donaldson, July 1984
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