cripchick's blog

today is national coming out day. as i think about what this means for me as someone who is so out, yet so so closeted, friends and i are on a conference call going over notes from a recent summit where self advocates with developmental disabilities worked to create policy recommendations on community living. (sadly this is needed because too many providers use gov’t dollars set aside for community living to do things that are really hurtful to disabled people).

we asked people to talk about what group homes and other residential facilities for disabled people often look like. this is what the notes reflected:

• “You have to share a room or home with someone you don’t want to or know”
• “No freedom to leave or have company over”
• “It is literally outside the community, without transportation, cut off, hidden away”
• “You are called a “consumer” instead of by your name”

we also asked what community living should look like. this is what folks said:

• “You have your own keys for home, access to a telephone, and the right to lock your door”
• “People are allowed to marry if they wish, or cohabitate with a partner or friend(s) if they wish, and there is private space for intimacy between someone in the program and that person’s mutually chosen partner(s) or even just to be completely alone”
• “Freedom to hang out with friends that I choose”
• “Freedom to make my own schedule”
• “People (at church or at the place you volunteer, etc) come to visit you if you are in the hospital.. because they care about you”
• “People support you in deciding what to do with money, instead of deciding for you”

reading these notes while sitting with all the recent suicides and hate crimes has me thinking about community visibility and coming out day. with violence taking place on the bodies of beautiful queer people every day, i understand the importance of community visibility. it’s why i wonder if there are better coming out strategies we could be using or what our work could look like if we acknowledged that so many people do not have the money, safety, access, and support to go to parades, bookstores, and clubs or wear rainbow stickers and leave facebook statuses about being out and proud, let alone come out to others.

i’m not against national coming out day or projects like it gets better – i just want us to talk about what we understand “out” and how this is shaped by privilege. for example, i want a “better” and an “out” that doesn’t require queer folks to leave their communities (which i am in the process of doing, to be out). i want a visibility that understands ice raids, the murder of transgender women of color, and state violence.  i want a queer movement that celebrates queer resiliency instead of insisting on a certain type of visibility that is impossible for so many of us.

most of all, i want a national coming out day that is relevant to the queer people in the room that came up with the recommendations above, and to all the other queers trapped in group homes, psychiatric hospitals, institutions, state guardianship, and the prison industrial complex. i want a national coming out day that means something to more of us.

don’t feel the way white supremacy creeps into your life and plops itself in the center?

in the last wk, white ppl have:

• told me how to rearrange my words as to be more approachable.
• made my need to have ppl of color time about them.
• asked me invasive medical questions about my body.
• dominated conversations.
• engaged in passive aggressive communication.
• told me about long lost family who share ancestry with me.
• not noticed that there were practically no youth of color present.
• said wanting to centralize youth of color comes off as “exclusionary”.
• gotten mad when i didn’t have time to instantly call or email them back.
• not even known what i was doing this wk, even though the last eight months of my life has been prep for it.
• offered advice when i didn’t ask it.
• put me in the asian woman role of taking care of everybody’s feelings.

just documenting. for myself. so i remember why i’m so emotionally exhausted. that it wasn’t just hosting two back to back conferences or handling access needs or facilitating or being a good hostess 14 hours a day or figuring out who can clean up the shit, puke and pee, it was also whiteness.

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.

sister, i am angry
furious at your death
upset with my own foolishness in celebrating him
while you die in the streets

with beatings, with violence left on your beautiful brown skin
with the names, the silence, the mainstream media lies
they refuse to let us ever forget that
guns penetrating our backs, we are always standing at the cliff of our own mortality

sister, i am in mourning
lighting a candle, i read this poem into the glimmering light
my poem is a prayer for you,
for the others i will never have the opportunity of knowing, and for the friends who mourn your death today
we will not forget. we will speak your name.

you said no!, you would not let police brutality and violence against transgender women of color fade into an invisible cloud of silence
you said no…
and now you are gone.

you are gone
but we will not forget.
the anger, the connection, the injustice just cuts too deep.
instead we will carry your name on our tongue
your bravery in our own ribcage
your memory in our work
we will wear red everyday
remembering you
and countless of others

we will not forget, sister.