Body of Pride

agree to not wear perfume so people
with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities
could safely attend. And in what
should become standard at queer
events, bathrooms were designated
“gender free,” enabling transgender
and genderqueer attendees to have a ’
place to safely pee and shower.

And with all these access
considerations, there were clashing
needs as well. Blind participants
were frustrated when furniture was
moved by wheelchair users so they
could get by. People with ADD com-
plained that sign language inter-
preters or real time captioning made
it difficult for them to focus. Some of
these clashes, these physical realities,
had some humor. Lesbian cartoonist
Alison Bechdel donated a signed
Dykes to Watch Out For book for the
raffle and it was won by a blind gay
man whose first language is not
English.

Queer Crips

Crip. like fag, dyke or queer, can be
hurled with cruelty by outsiders, or
reclaimed as statement of pride by
insiders. Crip is used matter-of-fact-
Iy, proudly, to claim identity. I first
learned it back when I was active
with ACT UP/New York, by a queer
crip who also eschewed the term
“differently-abled.”

“I ’m not ‘differently-
abled’” she’d say. “It’s not like you
can walk and I can fly. I am dis-
abled.” Sugarcoating works to make
disabled people and their real lives
invisible, while reinforcing the
ableist dichotomy that views disabled
people as either pitiful or heroic.
There’s pity for the poor kid in a
wheelchair, but isn’t it inspirational
when she or he actually performs
some act of everyday life while in it!

Pity is encountered on a
daily basis by disabled people, one
woman noted in a workshop on mak-
ing art. It was one of the barriers for
her creating work by denying her
personal dimensions. And along with
pity is the thought on the part of
able-bodied people that every crip
wants to be cured.

“On the list of things I
want, a cure for my disability is pret-
ty low,” wrote Laura Hershey, a con-

continued from page 6

ference organizer and long-time dis-
ability rights activist, inher essay
“From Poster Child to Protester.”
“Higher up on the list would be
achievement of my personal, profes-
sional, and social goals, and these are
not in any way dependent on a cure.
“Our culture considers it

shameful to be physically unable to

"dress oneself, or to need assistance in

going to the bathroom,” she contin-
ued. “When so many of us feel so
negative about our disabilities and
our needs, it’s difficult to develop a
political agenda to get our basic
needs met. The cure is a simple,
magical, non-political solution to all
the problems in a disabled person’s
life. That’s why it’s so appealing, and
so disempowering. The other solu-
tions we have to work for, even fight
for; we only have to dream about the
cure.”

It was a relief to many who
came that they didn’t have to explain
their queemess or their disabled
selves to attend — there was no need
for a Disability 101 or Homophobia
101. But expand queemess by 300
definitions and disability maybe even
more so, and you get something that
is not only quite powerful, but also
quite messy. You have an exhilarat-
ing, eye-opening, enlightening week-
end.

And you have a tangled,
frustrating, things-are-missing and
much-too-short weekend. Activists
wanted more strategy sessions, artists
wanted more time to talk about their
own work and not just other peo-
ple’s, academics wanted more theory.
I wanted an opportunity to think
about ideas and finish a conversation
and not just run off to the next emer-
gency.

The immediate aftermath
was like leaving a beautiful day at
the beach — sunburned, happy,
exhausted — many things all at once
and not quite being able to explain it.
New Yorker Becca Widom said after
the conference, “When I first got
home from the conference, I was
telling all my friends ‘I laughed, I
cried, I came out dancing!’ It
changed my life, but I don’t have _
much more specific than that to say.”
V

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