Dear Advocate Magazine,
 
THANK YOU! I can’t even begin to express my gratitude for your last cover… You’ve just made my work so much easier. I’ve spent a lot of time this year cringing and praying “please please please don’t go there”, only to have leaders and colleagues compare lack of wheelchair access to people of color going through the back door, the r-word to the violence of the n-word, and “_____ struggle as the last civil rights frontier”. I know folks still won’t get why it’s not okay to use these analogies in keynote speeches, as points thrown out in heated arguments, or as reason to bring an issue to the table, but damn, with your blatant ignorance and privilege spread out all over the cover of a #1 gay rights mag, you’ve brought light to the issue of privilege in a way i never could. for that, i have much love and appreciation for you. 

today i had the honor of moderating a call where media makers came together with disability activists to talk about the issue of inclusion and how we could support micah fialka-feldman’s fight for access*.  analogies were made on this call— analogies that did not silence anyone or render anyone invisible. grace lee boggs connected this issue of inclusion to the environmentalist movement and said that both raised questions of humanity and recreated a world that was based less on individualism. a fellow blogger explained how the issues micah were bringing up on his campus were similar to those raised by students of color around what education is (competition? degrees? or community education?) when andy smith was denied tenure. another connected this to the feminist movement, with the personal being political. it was so good to take disability issues and connect it to issues of liberation for all. i’m so damn happy, can’t even work cause i’m just sitting around grinning…

so for those that were worried about how you can fight the good fight without coming off as racist or a cultural appropriator, the answer is yes— you *can* indeed make connections to other movements that do not offend people, make assumptions about our lives, require us to be silent, relegate us to textbook cases, or rewrite our history… it is easy! listen. ask. don’t go for the easy route. think before you speak…or use native american story sticks.

love,
cripchick

ps. oh yeah. this post was in reference to this:

the advocate's recent cover: gay is the new black

*micah is a student w/ a cognitive disability who is advocating to live in his school dorm. his activism has brought up questions around what education is, what inclusion can mean, and who the disability community fights for. this case is precedent-setting in that there are a lot of initiatves sprouting up around the nation for students with intellectual disabilities on college campuses and this will determine what they are and can be.

a little girl smiles
sitting on a cover of a magazine
smiling
smiling
she’s beautiful
the text around her face
says she’s from so and so country
devastated by war and poverty
we need to buy shit and give her money
[not rethink our policies]
next to the little girl on the magazine
sits a API sister typing away on her blackberry
surrounded by her 2 big Coach bags, she’s smiling
smiling into that blackberry
i’m supposed to be like her
the spitting image of success (social mobility and all that)
we even have the same haircut
except today mine is dirty and hiding under a hat

how can i make them happy?
most white americans would say do what makes YOU happy
and though there is truth to this,
how can i be happy if my family is not?
i’d lie– i do lie– if it kept my family together in one piece
i’d bury parts of myself
pulling these parts out at night, examining them
in poems, letters,
conversations
the sun coming up, i’d put them away tidily in their compartments
until it was time to pull them out again
no this story is not new
maybe your out and proud just doesn’t work for me
maybe i like it this way
queer with my girls
quiet at home
is it your business anyways?
i’m more complicated than that.
ha—
i say all that shit and then a sister in a postal uniform shows up
and i’m like fuck that fake happy bullshit
tossing this poem away,
smiling and saying hello

i’m angry. i’m resentful. i don’t know where to begin.

a best friend and i just had a really deep conversation about how private i am about my sex/relationship life. i am unable to allow anyone to get close to me in that way. learning about doctors as a for-profit industry [medical industrial complex] has equipped me with the tools to describe my anger in words.

i am ANGRY that i have never felt ownership of my body in the last 20 years.

i RESENT the fact that the only way i can own my body is to stay away from doctors and people. to stay away and never let anyone near. this has been very detrimental in my physical health and emotional relationships that require physical closeness.

i am forever SCARRED by movies, news stories, authorities, religion, and people who have told me that my existence as a disabled person, a woman of color, as a queer person, as a queer disabled woman of color is reprehensible [to be blamed] and ugly.

i am FRUSTERATED that a life of surgeries, biopsies [tests], physical therapy, and appointments with every specialist has left me feeling like i have lost parts of me for some unknown quest to be normal (that was not even wanted or requested by me).

i can’t believe that all these years later it is leaving such a real big imprint on my life and how i interact with people. i hate this. i hate them. and at this point, i don’t even have the energy to hate right now.

where the hell does this leave me? how do i claim my body as my own? does anyone know?

Gaydar—
When does this function begin to work?
Is there a help number
I can call?
Hi, Hello.
Yes, the gaydar you gave me just won’t turn on.
Yes, I read the instructions.
I have my queer proof of purchase right here,
Can I get a replacement?

Is immersing myself in queer culture required to getting this thing up and running?
After my sister graduates, she’s going to my aunt’s place in Seoul
There she’ll learn the gayageum and brush up on her Corean,
Maybe that’s what I need to do?
Assimilate myself in all-queer surroundings
Get the language down right…

If there is a password, just tell me
Maybe I can guess
“loveLorde”?
“heternomativity”?
“ENDAtransexclusiontheHRCdoesntspeakforme”?

Or is it that I’m so used to being stared at,
So used to everyone watching my every move,
That I’ve drowned all you out?
Ah yes maybe I’ve missed step one—

direct your eyes towards the subject.

I feel hopeless when I’m supposed to be speaking on sexual consciousness but am feeling disconnected from my own body because I don’t look white, skinny, or able-bodied like the masses of queer people there

I feel like I’m misleading people and betraying my own when I talk about disability in a cross-disability intersectional framework and the only visual image people are getting is that disability=mobility because the only disabled people presenting (including myself) are wheelchair users

I feel home when I fly into North Carolina and am surrounded by bodies of all sizes, shapes and colors— my, how one can miss this love/hate relationship with the South is surprising

Like this weekend, I sometimes feel invisible

Like this weekend, I sometimes feel like I talk about disability too much, but this is hard to balance when I feel like I am brought somewhere to only talk about disability

Like this weekend, I am unsure what the future holds or what community actually looks like for me

Here’s to friends that remind me why I am in this, the spirit of community, and those disabled people and allies who through all this, made the sessions and trip worthwhile.

For the last two years, performers and activists have been organizing a show on disability, invisibility, and sexuality in San Francisco, titled Sins Invalid [link isn't work safe]. This past November, I watched the clips on youtube and pretended I was there. Must figure out a way to get there next year. : )

Here is an interview with one performer, Soledad Decosta who describes herself as “an uppity Portuguese woman who isn’t afraid to claim her black latina maternal ancestry”. In her interview, she describes her experience as a disabled intersex person.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Odi1Y7EIU&rel=1]

“It’s not just like just let’s get it on. It’s like “…no, let’s have a discussion.”
It’s not everybody that always wants to have a discussion—people want to have sex, you know— and it’s not that simple when you’re in a position like mine and that’s true for a lot of pwds if not all all pwds, especially if you’re dealing with something that’s, you know, rendered as somehow visibly otherizing in the context of negotiating sex, having sex, and being a sexual human being. It’s not like there’s some guidebook. It’s not like you go to Barnes and Noble and there’s like a hundred books on hot crip sex with intersex person. There’s just not. It’s like I’m the book— hello, I’m the book— ask me, open me up.” —Soledad (this segment starts at 2:08 part of the clip)

What stood out to me were the two lines below, largely because although Soledad is a queer disabled person, both situations could easily apply to a disabled OR queer person, particularly those with bodies that aren’t considered the norm. The two communities have a lot of commonalities. (distrust for doctors or the medical industrial complex, body issues, defying labels, the list goes on and on…):

“For example, if I get into an accident, what’s going to happen to me? There are people whose bodies are similar to mine, you get in an accident and they don’t know how to categorize you. They may deny you treatment while you’re dying there on the sidewalk.”

“They—that is those doctors— they didn’t get things quite right. Instead of praising my birth, they cut. …They held me down and did things to me that no one should have to go through without their consent.”

You can find more Sins Invalid interviews by clicking here. And it’s HOT!! (oh and again not work safe). : D