What does coming out as LGBQ or trans mean for disabled people?

Oct 112015
 

It’s National Coming Out Day, and I’m thinking about people with disabilities who are queer, gender nonconforming, or both.

Queer and trans* people around the United States and Canada will celebrate this weekend. Some will come out for the first time ever. Some have been out for years. Some will never be or feel safe to tell people who they really are.

Because of assumptions and attitudes about disability, deciding when and whether to come out is almost never simple for most people with disabilities.

People with disabilities are thought of as nonsexual, as having complicated lives that revolve around our disabilities. People are surprised to know that we work, that we have relationships, desires, interests, human foibles. Often, people don’t imagine that we could be sexual. Or, they’re inappropriately interested in our sexualities. Bluntly put, we’re often seen as genderless and sexless..

Our world is still so dependent on the assumption that most people are the gender they were assigned at birth, and most people want heterosexual relationships. Take someone who is already seen as different, and the reaction to them coming out can be anything from dismissive to dangerous.

Take all of this and multiply it a few dozen times and you’ll have a rough outlines of the attitudes towards LGBTQ+ folks with intellectual disabilities.

People with intellectual disabilities are thought of as not being able to understand sex, sexuality, or relationships, let alone want or think about any of those things. (As if any of us get to say what anybody’s sexuality, or how they feel about another person, should look like!)

A person with an intellectual disability who comes out (on Coming Out Day, or any other time) might hear:

“They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“Oh, isn’t that sweet.”

“They’re just repeating what they hear other people saying.”

These words are often used to dismiss what a person with an intellectual disability wants other people to know.
When this happens, a boy or man saying he wants to have a boyfriend might be told that he doesn’t need to have one, or that he has lots of friends who are boys, or that only girls have boyfriends.
Dave Hingsburger has written a lot about the barriers people with intellectual disabilities have faced, just for expressing who they truly are, about the difficult history around love and relationships especially.

The stories he tells are sometimes funny, sometimes touching, and usually heartbreaking. When other people have authority over where you live, who you se, what you do with your days (which happens for a lot of people with developmental and intellectual disabilities) disapproval of how and who you love, of who you are, is way more than disapproval. It’s interference, people exerting their will and making you be who you want to be. I recommend taking time to go through his blog archive. What you knew bout the world will be flipped on its head.

As a gay and disabled man himself, Dave’s perspective is especially sharp.

In the following story, Dave gives support to a person with an intellectual disability who is sharing that he’s gay and in love.

I told someone I was gay the other day.

…

I don’t do this often because I don’t have to – pretty much everyone knows. So it felt odd, pushing the closet door open and letting it bang shut after me again. This time, though, I came out strategically. I was just in conversation with a man with Down Syndrome who was talking with me, struggling with the fact that he was attracted to, and had kissed, another man. He thought he was in love. He was aching with pain, it was all wrong, he was dirty and sinful.

I couldn’t bear watching him. I couldn’t bear remembering the pain of feeling shamed for feeling loved.

I couldn’t bear watching him hurt.

So, I said, “You know I’m gay, right?”

read what happened next.

Book Review: Hot, Wet, and Shaking by Kaleigh Trace

Aug 122015
 

Honesty, self-awareness, a wicked sense of humour, an unflinching sense of the ridiculous. You generally need all of these to be able to talk as candidly about your sex life as Kaleigh Trace has done in Hot, Wet, and Shaking: How I Learned to Talk About Sex.

These essays are about a lot more than talking about sex, though. They’re about love, and laughter, and what Kaleigh’s Grandma thought about the explicit language on her blog, and how to prepare for an interview at a sex toy shop (hint: you don’t need to be a sexual superstar), and first sexual experiences…

And through all of these stories, there’s pure, playful honesty about being disabled in a world that doesn’t easily accept people who are visibly diferent.

Hot, Wet, and Shaking is full of delicious details that made me feel like I was right there with the author. I feel like I could be right there with her when she’s talking about that time she pulled a sex ed prop out of her purse – in the middle of the grocery store (A Bag Full of Dicks). Reading Looking For Blood,I feel right along with her the fear and frustration of needing reproductive healthcare in a world that wants to make that hard to get, and wants you to keep it a secret. I nod knowingly as she describes her first crush on a woman: “My attraction was so painfully visceral that for a short time I was truly convinced not that I was gay, but that I had the stomach flu.”

Other stories share some of Kaleigh’s sexual misadventures (And The Warmth Spread Over Us), her awesome-sounding bike and it’s wobbly rider (How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Tricycle), a delicious (in my humble opinion) piece of erotica written in a fit of frustration that there are almost no sexy stories about disabled people.

The Lady and the Butch is a contender for one of my favourite stories. It’s so delightful, I wish it were true – 100% all the way true. Really, an older lady coming in to buy her first vibrator ever, because her “queer lesbian” granddaughter told her to? It doesn’t get much more novel, and amusing, and ultimately touching than that.

But Kaleigh, while she wants to share with us the awesome experiences she’s had and self-discoveries she’s made since starting to work for Venus Envy takes her customers’ privacy seriously, so all store-related stories are fiction based on real-life people and events.

Where this book really shines is in the stories in which Kaleigh is being unfailingly vulnerable with us – not just because she’s usually talking about sex – though that’s great too – but because she shares parts of herself that make her uniquely her, and she sheds light on sexual stories and scripts we don’t usually get to hear but which are a part of a lot of people’s lives.

Fresh-Faced and Orgasm Free is some of the best writing in this book. It’s so much more than a “how I learned to masturbate” story. Kaleigh shares what it’s like to grow up with physical disabilities, to grow up interacting with her body in mostly medical ways. She describes lerning how to drain her urine through a catheter, how she became familiar with her genitals as a place she needed to manage.

As an adult she realizes: Touching myself was so common that it was hard to imagine it as a sexual experience. It was functional,
not hot. Necessary, not fun.”

Trying to learn about masturbation through the sex guides she sells at work, she realizes that none of them really speak to her experience. They all assumed that bodies work in certain ways…that all people can use their fingers to circle their clits, that everyone’s nerve endings fire in pretty much the same ways. “It occurred to me that perhaps I had yet to learn my way of coming because all the step-by-step methods I was reading, all the porn I had watched, and all the sex I had had thus far had not considered my disability.”

There’s so much more I’d like to tell you about this book, about the lyrical ways Kaleigh describes her body, about her observations of and fears around fitting into queer culture, about just how complex and unexpected the piece of erotica was.

But I’m not allowed to copy the book out here, so I’ll just encourage you to get it for yourself.

Thanks so much to Invisible Publishing for giving me an electronic copy of this terrific book.

Click here to hear the author reading from her work.

Film Friday: Disability and Sexuality Pride

Jul 172015
 

Highlighting the many different voices of and experiences with sexualities, relationships, and disabilities – that’s our main goal here at Ready, Sexy, Able.

So, every Friday we’ll post a video or podcast that explores a different aspect of the connections between sexualities and disabilities. We’ll keep it accessible, with links to alternate formats when available, and written summaries when they’re not.

***

First up: Andrew Morrison-Gurza talking about one of the most “sex positive experiences” he’s ever had, with a disability-related comedy of errors on the side.

Read the story here, or watch Andrew’s dramatic re-telling.

Love doesn’t always win for people with disabilities.

Jul 052015
 

June 26 was a history-changing day. Marriage laws in the U.S. finally caught up with reality – many people’s reality, anyway.

This ruling opens up a whole new world of fredoms. It solves some of the problems that transgender people wishing to marry have faced up until now and gives same-gender couples the option to marry if they wish.

But the work, the struggle, the heartbreak isn’t over yet. more than half of the states still allow LGBQ and transgender people to be discriminated against by current or potential employers. Incidents of violence against LGBQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual queer) and transgender people is still frighteningly
high.

The legal battle aroud marriage equality has been about making sure that same-sex couples have the same rights and protections as mixed gender couples.

But, for many people with disabilities, no matter what either partner’s gender is or isn’t, marriage can mean the end of the same kind of safety and security other married couples count on. Not only do these couples have to contend with bias against, and disbelief of their relationships, but their financial security and access to health insurance is often removed or limited when they marry.

Love doesn’t always win either for folks with disabilities, especially for folks with intellectual or developmental disabilities. The love of and between disabled people is often discounted.

Love doesn’t win when people don’t take your desire to get married seriously. Love doesn’t win when you marry, but the housing that’s supposed to help you be as much a part of the community as possible doesn’t let you live together. Love doesn’t win when your wish to spend time with the person you love is seen as “cute,” or childlike. Love doesn’t win when you want to be recognized as a couple and do the things other couples do, whether you can legally marry or not, but the people around you, the people who are supposed to be supporting you, won’t let you do that.

Paul and Hava Forziano got married in 2013. Finding a place where they could live together proved to be a challenge.

It’s worth taking a good look at why the group homes where Mr. and Mrs. Forziano lived before marrying thought that helping them live together was “unprecedented,” “impossible” and “fraught with difficulties”.

IN defending these organizations, the legal team cited Mr. and Mrs. Forziano’s Individualized Service Plans (ISPs) as reasons why the couple could not live together and be adequately served by either group home. They label these plans as “complex treatment plans.”

An ISP is actually a “written personal plan, or blueprint, for a person with developmental disabilities that summarizes the help he or she wants and needs to achieve his or her own aspirations in life.”. Meeting residents’ medical and supervision needs is only part of the picture here. Actually meeting the requirements of Mr. and Mrs. Forziano’s ISPs would mean finding a way to help them live together, even if that meant referring them to another agency.

Not meeting Mr. and Mrs. Forziano’s “aspirations in life” – to live together as most married couples in North America traditionally do – is, I believe, backwards thinking. This is not what the community living movement is all about.

The wonderful part of this story is how supportive Paul and Hava’s families have been of their relationship, and of their desire to live together. Disabled people, especially developmentally disabled people, don’t often get that kind of support from their families.

Bill Ott and Shelley Belgard also have lots of family support. They’re not married legally, as doing so would reduce Shelley’s access to needed health insurance, but they had a commitment ceremony and live together. They live in a different part of the country, and their living support needs are different, so getting to live together after their marriage wasn’t the same sort of ordeal it was for Paul and Hava Forziano. Bill and Shelley had a tonne of support for being together, but still, when Shelley’s mother heard about their engagement, , her internal response was: “This, too, shall pass.”Bill and Shelley proved her wrong, and the couples therapist they worked with also went to bat for them. So, in addition to everything else Mr. Ott and Ms. Belgard had working for them, they had someone from the healthcare field willing to see that their disabilities didn’t diminish their love or their capacity to be together. Read the rest of their heartening and smile-inducing story here.

And one more story, among the thousands out there, most of which haven’t been told:

I won’t tell you much about the two men in this story – the two men who loved each other. You need to read this for yourself. It’s a capsule of discrimination against gay people, dismissal of disabled people’s wants and desires – and of love – and a reminder of this countrys history of cruelty and violence towards disabled people, especially by the folks tasked with supporting and helping them.

Here’s the story. I recommend having tissues handy.

Love did finally winfor these men.

Further Reading

Author’s Note

Referring to the couples mentioned in this post As Mr. and Mrs. Forziano and Mr. Ott and Ms. Belgard was intentional. I wanted to show respect for their relationships – their unions. Using more formal titles, and more formal language in telling their stories, was also a way to show that their stories are important, that we shouldn’t take them lightly. Since I don’t know them, consistently using their first names would have been overly familiar, and would have made them sound like children, not the adults they are.