Patricia Highsmash
Queer Disability And My Productivity
Travis Hedge Coke
Every morning, if I remember to, I take ten pills. Each night, if I remember to, and if I do not suddenly become concerned about addiction or overuse, I take six to eight. In the course of the day, there are others. This keeps me alive, and relatively mobile, and less cranky.
The medications – some of them – take the urgency out of my thoughts, and slur my typing.
I used to type so quickly and accurately, despite my twitches and tremors and arthritis, to be barred from certain dictation tasks at work because there was concern I could be making additional notes or transcribing parts I was not meant to while still making the official record. I could imagine the keystrokes leaving smoke like a speedster in a comics panel.
After, I would let my hands hurt. I would admit it to myself. But, when working, I was working. You can put things like pain aside. It is hubris, but it is a self-hating hubris, not self-confident.
I needed to get everything done that I could before I could not. Before I was stopped by pain or death.
Some time ago, in this column, we ran eight hundred and eleven words on whether I do not mind spoilers because I have neurological and processing disabilities; because I have physical disabilities; is it cultural; is it as a queer, intersex enby, I can never stomach the people who think spoiling entertainment is worse than genocide; personal trauma; because I grew up poor? After just over eight hundred words, I basically deflect. I genuflect to deflection. Because, I do not know.
Now, I cannot walk more than the length of a room, unaided, and I worry people doing it. I cannot write and rewrite and rewrite for hours on end. I cannot get particularly angry or agitated. Doctors have told me, for the sake of my heart, especially, this last part is a benefit, planned or not.
I make jokes that I made it less than three issues into a particular writer’s run on some major Marvel characters before I had a cardiac event and received a pink slip noting for anyone concerned that I should be excused from writing on or researching his work ever again.
I kind of want to still write that piece. I think, politically, the piece is more of use than ever. But, the piece would require an angry person, someone annoyed and tired and excited and mad who can write like lightning and type thunder.
During the height of the toilet paper hoarding part of the Covid pandemic, I was solicited for motivational poetry, which has been piped into workplace radio, asked to explain my hardship and to lighten the burden on others as they prove productive for the company employing them. I said things which felt necessary to say and I made sure to say things that were not too necessary to say.
Being queer is not a disability. It is not a psychiatric disability, and if there were ever found a gay gene or a trans brain pattern – there will not be; not wholly or significantly, ever – but is the physical and hormonal intersex state or the resultant damage or wear and tear from involuntary surgical practices enacted on some intersex persons (me), resultant in disability? Is disability a legal or social fiction?
A medical condition, a physical status, is not the disability. The consequences of treatment and of treatment are not disabilities. Disabilities are not in the physical, even if they are physically rooted; they are sociological.
Whether Attention Deficit Disorder is a disability or a para-ability, what the standard emotiveness or standardized jump height and navigation of a running path is, it is social. Whether or not you take a knife to a baby’s genitals or a baby’s face, for instance, is social. If a foreskin or clitoris are not cut away, they will not fall off the baby after a few more days.
Being intersex and how I have been treated, as an intersex person, impacts on me economically, socially, professionally, and it carries with it physical and medical complications, including surgeries I have aged beyond the tensile viability of, so that it can take me ages, now, to pee, and then I have to sit, and wait, and pee more.
I can have them go in, julienne me some new equipment with which to urinate, but it puts me at bleeding risks, and at further immunocompromised risks, especially in these times, and if my insurance, base line publicly available poor people’s insurance, if they turn down the procedure or reject it right before the dates assigned, I am going to be depressed, and I am already on medication to curb that and its pain-encouraged cousin.
Even if I knew what disability poetics was, as a concept, as a subgenre, as a small slot on a small shelf on a university bookstore stand near the back, with the batteries and cheap earbuds, who would I be to insist on my definition or to use the term? Could I drop it on someone else?
Do I know what it means to critique comics or ramble about them as a disabled person? In a profession or semi-pro sense?
I am at once and in intervals too queer and not enough, too disabled to countenance and not disabled enough for some to admit, too ethnic and not ethnic, too into comics and not enough into comics, too much a poet, not a poet, too productive and unproductive, too much and much too much too little.
Have I ever written or have I never not written queer criticism? Queer fiction Is a gay love song a song by someone gay or about something explicitly gay? What is explicitly gay?
Being gay, being a particular ethnicity, being from a particular family, being in an economic range or a geographic location is not a disability, but all carry with them social, societal, medical consequences. In the United States, these will carry with them hindrances on access and accessibility.
There is an acting technique whereby a small reminder is embedded in the scene, a pebble in the shoe, a tattoo on the hand, rock salt in your pocket. The audience may never notice it, but the performer will, and they will at uncontrolled intervals. They will see the tattoo or feel the rock salt and remember their father hated them. They might rock their foot onto the pebble and recollect the old war wound that gives them trouble in that leg.
A magazine has solicited me to write for them, twice, and both times I turned it down, reluctant but conflicted, knotted in my stomach and mind. Once was a request to write about a Native author they had selected, a friend of mine who I have interviewed elsewhere, for Native American History Month. The next was a request to promote one of the handful of disability texts, poetry and fiction books, they had preselected, and there, too, I stopped myself. I could use the money, but I stopped myself.
Everything we do comes from our range and how socialization has corralled it. Corrals can be good, let us not forget. But, corrals, too, are there to be used.
Having to take an age and a half to pee means you can sit with a comic on the toilet longer, if you so like. If you cannot stand to bring reading material into the bathroom, into a stall, you are denied your reading time. Time only comes once. Meds make your vision jump or give you geometric hallucinations and minor hypnagogic skits? Maybe that improves your entertainment, and maybe, baby, it gets in the way.
A selfish part of me wants to claim being queerly unable to parse the ostensibly non-queer content of a comic the same as (ostensibly) non-queer people, but make that one round a track! (That’s not even an expression.)
It is, now, difficult for me to hold a thick trade paperback for long. A “treasury edition” or “Absolute,” any of the big oversized the are so glorious to look upon are practical impossibilities unless they can be laid flat on a lectern. What am I going to do with that, though, except avoid them?
I sing all the time. I used to dance, more, before my legs gave up on me this much. But, I will not be the all-singing, all-dancing revue on demand to promote a label during Label Month. Who the hell am I, to?
I cannot speak for you, or for the broad scheme of people. I barely talk good for myself.
Between neurological damage, pain, medicine, and hang ups, I stutter more or my words become mixed around.
Which my my disabilities are queer – queer-adjacent – and what is not? What part of me is or is not queer is like which parts of me are this ethnicity or this other, this me and this me. We are more of a whole than we even expect of ourselves, day to day.
There are those better equipped than me, to do anything. Sometimes I am even a poor mimic of myself.
Who do I know?
Nobody knows nothing and everybody knows everything. We are born to be difficult, and it is difficulty we bear.
So, I find myself dialing back from what might be too necessary, doing what I think is necessary. Not worrying about spoilers, even in my own story, not worrying about authority, even in my own life.
I can’t get angry anymore. I am tired.