After college, Cullen Thomas wanted adventure, so he went to South Korea, where English teachers were in demand and the strict Confucian culture was seductively exotic. Seven months later, he was in a Korean prison, sentenced to three-and-a-half years for trying to mail himself a kilo of hashish. Thomas's recently published memoir, Brother One Cell, recounts those forty-two months behind bars, time spent socializing with murderers, playing basketball with Korean gangsters and forging friendships with choros finos ("thieves of quality"). It was also the first time the middle-class Long Island native was forced to face "those great and large themes of suffering and punishment and justice." As a well-off white man, he was statistically unlikely to ever see the inside of a prison in the U.S.

Hooksexup spoke to Thomas about being an American twenty-something living with Korean convicts, and about the sexual side-effects of spending three years masturbating in a closet-sized cell. — Joey Rubin

My first impression upon hearing about your story was that it must have been brutal. But it wasn't like the American prison experience, which is often fraught with violence and intimidation tactics.
Precisely. It's not a Midnight Express or Brokedown Palace or Return to Paradise, where you have an accusation of sorts against the foreign country. I mean, that prison tale — we're all heard it, we've all seen it — the poor guy makes a stupid mistake and then he goes through this hellish experience. That's just not all there was for me.

But spending three years in prison in a developing country can't be easy. What was the hardest thing about it?
The utter isolation. For stretches of time I was the only American. We sometimes spent three, even four days in a row locked in our four-and-half-foot by nine-foot cells. To conjure the experience, you could go into a closet in your apartment and then spend the entire day in it, have the cycle of the day pass you by — daybreak, breakfast, lunch, the sun setting, darkness, night — and you still in that closet, alone with whatever is in your head, pacing, trying to escape into sleep, trying to hold steady. Isolation does things to the mind. I do believe I was going crazy. I wasn't quite at the point of ever contemplating suicide, but I know that I was closer than I've ever been in my life.

What were conditions inside the prison like?
There was the dirty water, the lack of heat — Korea has harsh winters, with Siberian frosts blowing down from the north — the beginnings of frostbite on our hands, feet and ears. I got parasites, amoeba and paramecium while I was there. That was intensely painful. For about the first half of my sentence there was the enormous disorientation of not speaking the language and feeling helpless because of it. [I was] really at the mercy, to a large extent, of the guards and Korean inmates. And among the Korean inmates, with whom I spent a lot of time around, working as I did in Taejon Prison's shoe factory, were a lot of ornery, mentally ill, difficult men, gangsters who demanded our respect. Dealing with them, learning how to speak to these convicted murderers and longtime convicts was a massive challenge. There was no escape from it. We had no choice but to be broken and made to fit the Korean way, to live, think and speak as they did.

In some ways, you describe your experience as a spiritual journey.
Again, I wouldn't credit myself too much. It was the way the Korean prisons are structured — the Confucian codes of brotherhood and obedience to one's elders and to the authorities — that allowed me to reflect and grow emotionally instead of just having to be worried about being raped or attacked. That culture allowed me to live a very basic and simple life, almost like a monastic one. We slept on the floor, we bathed in cold water. We were constantly reminded to live and work as one. And you know there is that great sense of shared suffering

Cullen Thomas

that the Koreans have embedded into their national character. As strange a word as it might sound, I almost fortunate to have the opportunity to go through that with them.

What was it like being an American minority in Korean prison?
I feel a deep humility, having seen the kind of privileges that my American-ness gave me. My national status gave me favor and privilege above foreigners from poorer countries. But because we were in a pressure cooker among criminals, and we [foreigners] were an extreme minority, there was a constant negotiation. There were occasional animosities expressed from Koreans to the foreigners in general, if they thought we were getting special privileges, the fact that we had our own single cells in our own cellblock. One winter they tried to give us hot water bottles because there was no heat in the prison. But the Koreans were outraged by that and quickly put a stop to it.

You write a lot about feeling lucky you were imprisoned in Korea, and not in the Philippines or some other place. Do you feel even lucky to have not been put in prison in the U.S.?
I was in Barnes & Noble the other day and I picked up a book called Fish. The author is an older man now; in the late seventies, he was thrown in prison. He took a toy gun and he held up a photo shop in his hometown. He was an educated, middle-class white kid, and they threw him in a Michigan State Prison. And he was gang raped his first day in general population. I didn't face any sexual violence. There were fights, sure, and it was a dangerous environment. But their prisons are much more civilized than ours.

If there wasn't any sexual violence while you were in prison, what was the sexual atmosphere like? The men must have still experienced sexual pressure and desire.
They have a stiffening sense of shame in Korea. Even our factory captain, himself a convict, was always talking about "chengpay, chengpay, chenpay," you know, "Don't do anything that shames us, don't do anything that shames the factory, don't do anything that shames the prison." There was stuff going on, sure. Remember, the Koreans were living fifteen men to a room. And they'd be sleeping side-by-side on wood floors. So yeah, I'm sure there were guys rubbing each other out. But it was only toward the end of my term, in 1997, that there were these wild rumors that the guards had finally put a stop to the little sex rings, where the older guys and gang members would have money put in the accounts of younger guys as payment for some sexual service, I don't know, maybe head or a handjob once a week, whatever it was to help guys get through.

What did you do for sexual release?
We foreigners were isolated in our own cells, so we just became expert masturbators. And that was fortunate, in a way.

Speaking of self-love, you mention a gangster culture of penis mutilation in the book. What was that all about?
I heard the Japanese do something similar, because the Koreans even called one of the genital mutilations they used to do dama — which is, I think, a Japanese word meaning "ball." That's where they would cut the skin on the shaft and kind of push something underneath to form a lump and it would a scar over it. The other was the haybaragee, or "sunflower," which looked just like that. For that one, they'd scar the foreskin around the head. The first time I saw it I thought the guy's cock must have had a birth defect or something, that it was a disfigurement. But you know, they'd do it wherever; they'd do it in the factories, while we were working, while the guards weren't looking. I'd look over and there would be a guy with his cock out, another guy with it in his hand making cuts with a blade. I never stayed for the whole show.

Do you think your own sexuality has been influenced by your time in prison?
I say in the book that I got a sex addiction [laughs]. I think the escape into fantasy, and masturbating, and coming, was just an incredible release. And so we did it way too often. We'd spend sometimes three, four days in a row locked down. And when there were holidays, we wouldn't even get exercise time. So you would literally be in a four-and-a-half-foot by nine-foot closet, basically, for four days. So what are you going to do? You're going to eat, sleep and jerk off. I tried to be as honest as I could in the book, and that's why I felt it was necessary to address that, because that is real. In terms of how it might have affected my sexuality, I think it might have led me to be more greedy, more lusty. I probably made it too much of a mental exercise when I was there. Spent too much time fantasizing. And sitting inside my cell playing with myself or dreaming of women or my girlfriend at the time. I think I came back with a vengeance and I've since dealt with problems of infidelity, with being a philanderer. In a way, before I went to prison, I was a much tamer guy.

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