Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability - LGBT

Longmore Institute Receives Important Gift to Support SF State Students at the Intersection of LGBTQ and Disability Worlds

Visitor — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 22:22:50 +0000

A seventeen-year friendship between two campus administrators has blossomed into a significant gift to the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University. Al Alston, Norma Siani-Alston, and Eugene Chelberg

Norma Siani-Alston, recently retired from her position as Director of Special Events for the Office of the President, announced the $10,000 gift on September 16 to honor her dear friend Eugene R. Chelberg, Associate Vice President for Student Affairs. The terms of her charitable gift annuity stipulate that "The Eugene R. Chelberg Fellowship will provide undergraduate and graduate students with an opportunity to gain valuable internship experience with the Longmore Institute on Disability. Preference in the award of the fellowship will be given to students active in both the LGBTQ and disability communities."

"This is an exciting breakthrough gift for many reasons," says Longmore Institute Director Catherine Kudlick. "It's the first in the country — and indeed the world — to openly tap students at this intersection; scholarships and opportunities tend to highlight one or the other of these identities, when in fact a significant number of people inhabit both." Kudlick points out that some of the most exciting scholarship in disability studies explores the intersections between queerness and disability.

Siani first met Gene in 2001 when he, as she put it, “was always haranguing me about ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) issues regarding the commencement ceremony and … was a pain in the butt!” One day Gene invited Norma to lunch to pick her brain regarding his upcoming wedding plans. “When Gene asked me for recommendations for where to hold their ceremony, for some reason, I said ‘let me be your wedding planner.’ He said ‘yes,’ and from then on we became the closest of friends.”

Siani also had a friendly teasing relationship with Paul Longmore who used a wheelchair. “We met when I worked for then-SF State President Corrigan. We always said hello to one another with Paul waving his foot at me and my waving mine right back at him.”

“When Paul passed, I was devastated, I lost a dear friend. I decided in his memory to donate to the Paul Longmore Institute. And now with this gift to Gene, I get to give to two dear friends at once!”

Siani’s husband Al Alston passed away in 2013 but his memory lives on through her generosity.

“And now thanks to her gift,” director Kudlick stated, “we’re well on our way to making sure a future Gene Pool keeps pushing for LGBTQ and disability rights.”

On Recent Heartaches

Visitor — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 17:39:46 +0000

When Media Representations Aren’t Good Enough to Let Us Live By: Robyn Ollodort I want to begin by expressing my feelings of shock and grief over the acts of violence leveraged against the queer of color community this weekend. As so many have already expressed such beautiful words to describe their sadness over the loss of lives and hurt for those injured, I can only repeat those sentiments: while marriage equality felt like progress, these moments remind us of what is left to overcome. When violent acts of this scale occur, every body is impacted, and I find it necessary to question the structures that put bodies, whether they are gay, disabled, racialized, gendered, etc., in harms way in the first place.

Like many folks in my generation, I use the internet when big things happen, from so-called reputable news sources to the opinions of those I trust, like bloggers and popular culture commentators.This post reflects this process, as I jump from blog posts and quotes that have informed my thinking and feeling over the last few days.

This Tumblr post, which popped up in my feed and seems to be quite popular right now, has a particularly emotional draw, a relatable sentiment right now; in it, the author expresses emotional exhaustion over the shooting in Orlando, a fatigue derived from grief, media misrepresentation, and taking for granted the hard-won ‘safe spaces’ afforded by gay rights and liberation movements, which have been preyed on by corporate sponsors. The author points to a common media trope, referred to as ‘bury your gays’, where gay (usually fan favorite) television characters are routinely sacrificed in order to further heteronormative plot narratives – the cited article notes the series The 100, but many other examples are readily available (*cough* Tara in Buffy *cough*).

This trope of queer characters serving merely as storyline fodder, reminds me – like I can forget! – of the recent backlash by the disability community against the film Me Before You, which precariously places a heteronormative relationship within the context of a man who is paralyzed from injury and his quirky female caregiver. And, as you have hopefully already read (and hopefully not seen), the dude ends up dying, because although his heteronormative love enriched his live, it wasn’t enough to save him from his disability, and thus… death??? Just as ‘bury your gays’ gives us, as viewers, a broader range of characters to identify with, only to off them, I want to argue that ‘bury your crips’ works the same way; viewers get characters with disabilities, characters they can identify with and relate to, until they are killed off (Million Dollar Baby, The Sea Inside, etc.).

As a phase 1 judge for Superfest: International Disability Film Festival 2016, I saw enough films to counter that narrative (119 to be exact!); films with complex, leading roles written with or for (or both) people with disabilities. I saw characters that looked like me, and had similar experiences to me, and characters that were nothing like me with whom I also fell in love. And none of them had to die in order for their films to be supremely excellent. The sentiment I am getting at here is that when nobody looks like you in the media you watch, that’s devastating; but, when you finally see ONE character who looks like you, whether that character is gay, or Muslim, or in a wheelchair, or transgender, or black, Latina, Asian, whatever you are, ad then that character is killed? It’s a tragedy. And it makes those real life tragedies even more plausible, because, as the bad trope goes, people like that die on TV or in the movies all the time.

"Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through…"

— Claudia Rankine, from Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014)

A body has memory. Our bodies, however they are marked in society, carry the weight of the legacies of that mark. We remember all the traumas, we feel all the pain. We need to do our best now to make space for those wounds to heal; to make futures we can see ourselves in, futures that have people who look like us in them. This means telling stories of people who are gay, who are transgender, who have disabilities, who have dark skin. This means making characters who are different, who survive, who thrive and love. This means making real and good representations, and allowing the people you are representing to tell their stories, too.

In thinking about how to incorporate diversity into representations in the media, I really appreciate this article by Australian athlete, advocate, and blogger Robyn Lambird, expressing the necessity for better representations of people with disabilities. “Through accurate and expansive media representation, we can normalise disability, shift the negative attitude surrounding it, and highlight the issues that the disabled community face. Through this, we can create a more understanding society that is open to beneficial change.” This call is applicable to more than just disability, but to all non-normative identities as well; when we are better represented, we are better understood, and it is harder to justify violences, big or small, against us. To conclude, here is a statement of solidarity from the late visionary, Mark Aguhar:

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Superfest: International Disability Film Festival

tropes in media

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A Queer Reading of John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars

Visitor — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 17:22:21 +0000

By: Catherine Kudlick

Ok, I'm probably one of the last people to hear of what is now the smash-hit book and movie, about the love between two teenagers struggling with cancer. Facing a long flight home from the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians in Toronto, I downloaded the novel from the amazing bookshare.org, a service that offers those with medically-certified print-reading disabilities instant access to hundreds of thousands of scanned books that we can read using text-to-speech software. A colleague at the conference mentioned the bestseller as a good read that has a great take on disability. “It’s not at all what you’d expect,” she said. “The students love it, and it’s not what they expect either.”

I was thrilled. It’s still a recent phenomenon for those of us who rely on alternative formats to have immediate access to such a wide variety of books, including popular ones that I might teach in a disability studies class. I settled into my seat and considered which voice I wanted to have read it to me. Synthetic voices have improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years, and I’m one of those folks who likes them to sound somewhat human but not too human because I like to read fast. Still, I appreciate having a choice between a male and a female voice. When I don’t know anything about a book - as was the case with The Fault in Our Stars, I opt for the gender identity of the author, so my narrator would be “James” because the author was John Green.

James’s voice meshed well with the snarky, knowing voice of the book’s narrator. He had the right blend of detachment and teen-engagement, and I quickly got absorbed in the story. Male voice. Male character. Then I got to the scene where the main love interest shows up at the cancer support group. “Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy…well." James reported. My ears perked up. Interesting! My colleague had said that it wasn’t what I’d expect, and indeed it wasn’t: a gay love interest in a best-selling young adult novel. Now I was really paying attention. Sure, I quickly learned he was named “Hazel,” but maybe it was one of those name like Marion or Andrea or Robin that sound like female names but guys can have them too. Or maybe Hazel was transgender? Unexpected indeed, I thought, especially since the cancer support group was undeniably religious; the characters clearly had some ambivalence about the group leader and even the room where they met, and yet religion was deeply central there too. Besides, several of my closest friends are gay guys who still talk about their Christian groups from when they were teens.

I got sucked into the story, but because of trying to figure out the queer angle and how far America seemed to be coming so fast, I was paying unusually close attention to every detail without quite knowing what to do with them. Somewhere over Illinois, enough of them added up, including at first the use of a pronoun or two: Hazel was a girl!

My world shifted on its axis. Did Hazel’s gender really matter? Maybe we should write more books where someone can read whatever gender they want into the story, give them lots of conflicting details like James was doing as he talked about dresses and such. Whether Hazel was male or female or neither or any or all, I still would have cried all the way home, completely absorbed in a love rooted in honest, complex depictions of cancer and hope and parents and friends and nurses and betrayers and denial and pain and exhaustion and loss — all of it. I’m not sure if it’s a good or a bad thing, but by the time I got off the plane, Hazel had no gender for me. She was just Hazel, a sexual, feeling person who loved another briefly and deeply.

Fast forward to this morning when I read about a study in the Chronicle of Higher Education where they discovered that often students learn better when they’re confused. “You need something dramatic to sort of shake them up and make them pay much more attention,” the author of the study says. “That’s what emotions do—they direct attention. They tell you something is wrong with your world.”

I don’t think “wrong” quite fits, but still I applaud the lesson. Here is one of those great moments where disability teaches something other than pathos and the technology catapults us beyond accommodating a disability to shake things up in truly beneficial ways. Perhaps all readers should activate the text-to-speech functions built into our favorite devices and read a cherished text to get a new perspective. Surely my assistive tech gave me unique access to the inner workings in The Fault in Our Stars. At the very least, it gave me an additional something "unexpected" to contemplate for a long time.

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disability rights movement

The Fault of Our Stars

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