Nov. 21, 2000
Seen but seldom heard
The murder of Gallaudet University
student Eric Plunkett enlightens many to the concerns of the
deaf and gay
By Steve Friess
There's really no good sign for it. In American
Sign Language, where simple hand motions convey complex concepts,
it's always a pickle for right-minded folks to figure out how
to say "gay" without being offensive.
The commonly used shorthands regarding homosexuality
immediately betray a historic bias among the deaf that is only
now starting to fade. It could be the letter "f" against the
chin, signifying "faggot." Or touching the middle finger to
the tip of the nose, then swooping it dramatically up over the
head, for "fairy."
Or, perhaps most offensive of all, to describe
a lesbian one might make a gun formation with the thumb and
index finger, then put the crux of that formation to the edge
of the mouth to indicate "cunnilingus."
Thus, in a rare inconvenience for a mode of
communication that's all about shortcuts, more progressive folks
literally spell it out. Some deaf youths and activists have
embraced those offensive signs to remove their sting, using
them among themselves much the same way many of the non-deaf
have modernized the term "queer" from a slur to a salute. And
some have taken to holding the letter "g" (for "gay") next to
the chin as a recent linguistic innovation.
But most are reduced, at that crucial and frightening
moment of coming out to someone, to letting their fingers do
the cumbersome talking. If hearing people find the words "I
am gay" to be the three hardest words to utter, just picture
a deaf person with not only three tough words but three even
harder letters: "I am G-A-Y."
As it happens, though, the gay world isn't a
whole lot more enlightened on how to embrace and interact with
its deaf and hard-of-hearing populations. The organizers of
April's Millennium March on Washington, for instance, failed
to provide sign language interpreters or closed captioning on
the video screens, a particularly large-scale example of a rather
common problem deaf gay people run into with local pride event
committees and conferences across the nation.
And until the gruesome September 28 slaying
of openly gay deaf freshman Eric Plunkett at Washington, D.C.'s
Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf and hard-of-hearing,
even leaders of the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay
and Lesbian Task Force were largely unaware of the surprisingly
sizable, fairly developed deaf gay culture sprawling throughout
the mainstream gay circuit.
HRC, for instance, didn't realize its need for
a TTY (teletypewriter)--a special device that allows deaf people
to communicate over regular telephones--until deaf gay students
started contacting HRC through an interpreter to seek advocacy
assistance because they believed police and officials at Gallaudet
were ignoring the possible hate-crime element of Plunkett's
murder. NGLTF did have a TTY, but nobody would answer it because
no one on staff really knew how it worked, spokesman David Elliot
says.
"This experience has given me a new level of
understanding about the problems of lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgendered people who are deaf because it does provide
communication challenges," HRC spokesman David Smith says of
the Plunkett slaying, in which the 19-year-old was found clubbed
to death, most likely with a chair, in his dorm room. "On top
of the challenges of being a GLBT person, [being deaf] is an
added challenge to deal with."
What Smith and others discover when they look
is an extensive, largely unnoticed deaf gay scene complete with
22 chapters of the Rainbow Alliance for the Deaf, a social and
political club of more than 500 deaf GLBT folks that hosts a
popular biannual convention. They also see the Deaf Queer Resource
Center, the more than 10,000 subscribers to a deaf gay E-mail
listserve called FLASH, and the Deaf Gay and Lesbian Center
in San Francisco. They realize there's a World Deaf AIDS Day
observance on December 4, an annual Mr. International Deaf Leather
competition, and a fast-proliferating list of Internet sites
devoted to all things deaf and queer.
"We have a lot happening that most people don't
know about," says Scot A. Pott, president of the Rainbow Alliance
and a long-time deaf gay activist. "It's our own world."
Perhaps it's surprising that the two cultures
aren't more intertwined and better informed about each other,
considering how similar they are. More than 90% of deaf children
are born to hearing parents, setting up striking parallels to
the way many gay children grow up in heterosexual families as
outsiders. In many cases, as in that of Danielle Waschler of
Hackensack, N.J., parents go to great lengths to force their
kids to be "normal," insisting they learn to speak and cutting
them off from any deaf culture.
Waschler, now 34, recalls noticing groups of
deaf people smiling and carrying on at the local shopping mall
when she was growing up, but her mother would catch her glancing
at them, then shackle her arm with her grip and drag her away.
"Mama wanted me to be mainstream, more like her and Daddy,"
says Waschler, a computer technician who eventually did learn
to sign as a teenager. "It made me feel they didn't love me
as much as they love my sister. I felt there was something wrong
with me, and I was cut off too."
Many deaf gay people actually find it easier
than hearing people to recognize and accept their sexuality,
a fact that may explain the impression that a disproportionate
number of deaf people are gay. Everybody has a theory on this
one: Gallaudet French and Spanish instructor Buck Rogers believes
deaf gay children are sheltered from much of the mainstream
culture's verbal homophobia by not hearing it. Others say homoerotic
feelings are more easily manifested and acted on because many
deaf children are educated in group homes and seek comfort because
they feel abandoned by their parents. Still others suspect the
process of coping with being deaf makes acceptance of yet another
difference more natural.
Yet once many deaf gay people do make it out
into the hearing world, many once again encounter bias and ignorance
that reduces them to second-class citizens within their own
minority. John Krueger, 36, of Cleveland, stopped going to gay
bars and began withdrawing from many gay activities because
he became fed up with commonly being regarded as less intelligent
and less capable than hearing people. "I am continuously amazed
how others perceive my handicap," Krueger says. "I am in a relationship
with a hearing lover for 5 1/2 years now. When he first met
me, he knew I would have a difficult time finding a good job
due to my deafness. I make $30,000 more a year than he does!
"I also love country dancing," adds Krueger,
who picks up the beat of country music by feeling the vibrations
of the sound system through the floorboards, "but nobody would
ask me to dance, so I had to be aggressive. I was a member of
a country dance club that does many wonderful things, such as
fund-raising for HIV/AIDS, but they never asked me to be on
a committee. I had to ask them if they needed my help."
Dating is an obvious challenge, made a bit easier
by the advent of the Internet and online chat rooms. Bars can
be dark and tumultuous places, so sign language gestures are
hard to see, and many hearing gay men and lesbians become impatient
with trying to convey information to the deaf. Even if a connection
is made, hearing gays without a TTY must phone their deaf lovers
via telephone relay, a system by which an intermediary translates
the speech to text for the deaf person's TTY and the text typed
by the deaf person into speech for the hearing person. That
can become awkward for gay people who are unaccustomed to it
since a deaf man could be talking to his hearing lover through
the voice of a middle-aged woman and shy away from more intimate
sorts of chatter.
While the relay services require operators to
relay conversations verbatim without judgment, some operators
do occasionally turn discomfiting calls over to other operators,
says Mike Krajnak, 36, of Providence, R.I., the 1999-2001 Mr.
Philadelphia Deaf Bear who worked at the Ohio Relay Service.
"I even had to help [operators] with clarifications [on sexually
explicit calls], it's embarrassing to say," he explains.
What embarrasses--and alarms--many deaf gay
activists much more is a suspected disproportionate spread of
HIV among the deaf, which they say is a direct result of a failure
by AIDS organizations and the gay culture to recognize the different
communication needs of people who cannot hear. Statistics are
sketchy, with estimates of HIV infection rates that range from
7,000 to 26,000 among the 2 million deaf Americans, but it is
clear that a great number of deaf people have an poor understanding
of HIV and unsafe sexual behaviors.
American Sign, not English, is the first language
of most deaf Americans, and researchers say that reading skills
tests of 17- and 18-year-old deaf students show that half read
at or below a fourth-grade level. Deaf people rely heavily on
visual explanations, not the complex scientific information
offered by most AIDS pamphlets. Some deaf groups have created
more rudimentary booklets that utilize crude, sexually explicit
stick figures and hokey graphics to illustrate the differences
between safe and unsafe sex, and interactive Web sites are now
starting to offer videos showing in a basic way how HIV is transmitted.
Still, the groups that create these booklets
don't have the money to blanket the deaf world with the information,
and the Internet is more a province of the English-literate.
"There is a heavy need to launch literature for the deaf and
hard-of-hearing who do not have access to the Internet," says
Chad Ludwig, senior supervisor for TTY service at the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention's National STD and AIDS Hotlines
and the chairman of the National Coalition in Deaf Community
and HIV/ AIDS. The hotlines received 577 TTY calls in 1999,
and a study of the 1998 TTY calls showed that more than 30%
of callers acknowledged having had unsafe sex.
Pott says the gay hearing establishment is catching
up--slowly. And NGLTF, while neglecting its phone services for
the deaf in recent years, will host a panel titled "Signs of
Change: Incorporating Deaf and Disabled Brothers and Sisters"
at its upcoming Creating Change conference. NGLTF spokesman
Elliot says each preregistered deaf attendee will be assigned
a per sonal sign language interpreter for the conference. "This
isn't a dollar issue for us," he insists. "When someone decides
there's no reason to spend the extra dollars to hire an ASL
interpreter, they are deciding for other people that an event
is not for them. That's a very serious transgression. It's the
same thing as having segregated rest rooms."
That's the kind of rhetoric deaf gay people
want to hear, the sort of action that encourages deaf gay folks
to revel in their own culture while participating in the mainstream.
"Being deaf comes to me first, because it is something I am
constantly aware of, and I don't have sex every minute of my
life," Rogers says. "The unique thing about us is that the deaf
world is much smaller than the hearing world, so the deaf gay
world is even smaller. So when one comes out and enters this
world, everybody learns about it, and making friends is easy.
Sure, some people don't get along, but mostly it's like a big
family all the same."
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