Powerlifter

On CBS Sunday Morning today they previewed a story about a guy with Down syndrome who lifts weights.  It was promoted as an "inspirational story," so of course I felt a little queasy, thinking here comes another one:  somebody with a developmental disability being represented as a "superhero," probably in the midst of a very special program helping him to get to where he can be "just like everybody else." 

And of course the story starts with that "superhero" trope, the reporter Steve Hartman beginning the whole thing with, "Unlike most superheroes, Jonathan Stoklosa lives with his parents," etcetera, but what happens in the 2:44 spot is pretty beautiful.  Jon the weightlifter is shown in his home being a little cranky waking up, then corralling carts in the parking lot of the grocery store where he works, and then working out in the gym where he trains as a power-lifter.

Hartman reports that Jon is an "incredible competitor" who is "not just an incredible Special Olympics powerlifter, but an incredible powerlifter period."  It turns out Jon can bench-press over 400 pounds, and competes and wins routinely in a regular old power-lifting contests. The story ends with an examination of Jon's work ethic, and the final image is of him unloading an old lady's groceries into the trunk of her car.

"Ever crush any eggs when you're bagging people's groceries?" Hartman asks.

Jon just looks at him and shrugs, "Oh please."

What happens in this little segment is metaphor and hyperbole being matched by reality and common sense.  Jon's identity both as a weight-lifter and a person with Down syndrome creates a territory where meaning and symbol crash into one another, and what's left in the aftermath is a guy who works at a grocery store, works out a lot, lives with his parents, and is just a regular human being.  The power-lifting/Down-syndrome representation melts in the presence of telling his simple non-nonsense bio.  The "superhero" trope gets erased by an almost accidental focus on Jon's true personhood.  We see him just doing what he does.  There's not a lot of celebration in the piece, not a lot of jabber.  Just everydayness.

Of course without the disability, Jon probably would not be depicted in the media at all.  A story has to have a reason to exist, and unfortunately the disability thing was it for him.  However, once you have that out of the way, and you just watch the piece you understand that Hartman is trying to critique the structure that imposes that disability rule; he is trying to give us a portrait of Jon that isn't steeped in obstacles he had to overcome, all the "special" people and programs who helped him, and the "miracle" of his accomplishments.   It's pretty blunt and articulated clearly:  this is Jon.  He works at the grocery store.  He's a really good power-lifter.  His parents are proud.  Move on.

When you think about how you yourself would want to be depicted, that seems like one of the best ways.  Without heroics or maudlin violins or teary eyes.  Just you out in the parking lot, helping some lady with her groceries.  It's one of the best ways to rid the world of condescension and sentimentality. 

Go on with your bad self Jon.

Here's a link to the story:  Jon the Weightlifter on CBS This Morning.

About Last Night

Last night we had an opening at Thunder-Sky, Inc. for a show Bill curated called, "Glory Be!  (a Historical Romance):  Works by Britni Bicknaver, Paul McGurl and Matthew Waldeck."  It felt like old times somehow.  Like 12 years ago in fact.  Bill and I first curated a show of "outsider" art back in 2001, at a place called Base Gallery.  That show featured Antonio Adams, Raymond Thunder-Sky, Paul Rowland and Richard Brown, all artists we had met doing our regular jobs helping people with developmental disabilities.  That gig was titled "Art Thing," and it truly was a groundbreaking moment for me because I realized how art can allow you intense moments of grace and happiness that can sometimes push you forward to do bigger things.  Without "Art Thing," we would not have started Visionaries and Voices, and without Visionaries and Voices we would not have opened Thunder-Sky, Inc. 

 

What has changed in the last 12 years for me, though, is an evolution of trying to figure out how to do shows and projects and events featuring great art by artists often consigned to the background without having to frame their work with their diagnostic biographies:  without having to say what they've accomplished is a product of what a doctor says they have, or has happened "in spite of" this or that diagnosis.  So in "Glory Be" and in every show we do now, the idea of "disability" and "outsider" gets critiqued through stone-cold silence.  That stuff just does not get mentioned because you don't need to know how "outsider" the artist is in order to enjoy the beauty and peculiarity of the art.  Major case in point is "Glory Be," a show featuring three artists whose works have a lot of things in common, but whose demographics aren't really in sync.  Matthew's intimate, playful drawings of famous presidents, Paul's text-infused drawings of the names of presidents and other historical figures, and Britni's sly, sleek, blithe sculptural inventions cracking the code of historical gloss and pomp -- all these works belong together, and we can relish the way they fit and knock into each other, creating both mystery and meaning.  And we don't need to know who went to art school and who didn't, and we don't need to know IQ numbers or socioeconomic indicators.  We just need the work to be here, pulled together succinctly, given room to expand.

 

Last night, too, I felt a weird, beautiful reconnection with the idea of congregating around art.  I have a major fear of groups of people, but at the opening reception last night the groups of people felt organically okay somehow, as if they had come together to feel better about being people, not so they could feel charitable or sympathetic.  Matthew's family brought enough food for a huge family reunion.  Britni had a sweet soulful crowd of her own.  It all just came together.   And I got it:  this is what we're supposed to do, what Thunder-Sky, Inc. is.  Gatherings of people with lots of food and art and that's enough. 

 

Like "Art Thing" back in the day.  We did a full-color catalog for that show, back in 2001, and below is the back-cover, our mission statement at that time.  I wish I would have known then what I know now:  I would have taken out "disability" and "outsider" from the get-go.   As in:  "The Art Thing Project Is...  ART and helping artists gain access and credibility and success on their own terms."  Why do you need "outsider" or "disability" slapped onto any of these concepts and ideas?  Is it the idea that first you need to assess/label/diagnose people prior to helping them?  Like a doctor?  Bill and I are not doctors.  I don't really know what we are.  But I truly understand, I think, what we're supposed to do here on out, and it has nothing to do with systems or charity, and it has everything to do with what happened last night, and what happened 12 years ago:  finding ways to allow everyone to leave all the bull-shit behind, and proceed accordingly...

 

 

 

 

Below are photos of last night's opening of "Glory Be! (a Historical Romance):  Work by Britni Bicknaver, Paul McGurl and Matthew Waldeck," and from March, 2001's opening night of "Art Thing:  Drawings, Objects, Paintings and Words by Antonio Adams, Paul Rowland, Raymond Thunder-Sky and Richard Brown." 

 

 

"Glory Be!"



 

 

 

 

 

 "Art Thing"

 

 

Us and Them

I'm teaching a Disability Studies class at Miami University this semester titled "Allies and Activists."  It's been great so far, as we delve into the meanings and absurdities around the way people with disabilities often have been relegated and erased, and how we might counteract the erasure and relegation through thoughtfully considering how to create "alliances" and forms of "acitivism" that actually matter.  This post is a combination of a lot of the stuff we've been doing and talking about... 

Image from Lest We Forget:  Silent Voices, a documentary about Ohio's institutions for people with developmental disabilities.  The film includes interviews with "disability professionals," parents and other family members, and people who lived in the institutions when they were open.   

Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized:  "The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity.  They are this.  They are all the same."

In the classes we've had so far we've discussed how representations and ideas about people with disabilities are often about Us and Them, "Us" being people who consider themselves "able," and "Them" being the colonized other, a mass of people separated from civilization often in order to "fix" them, or to protect us from them.  This historical vantage point allows us to understand why, even in a contemporary society that prides itself on the integration of people with disabilities into the mainstream, actual inclusion hardly ever happens.  When a group of people are colonized and then decolonized, the apparatus and attitudes that created the colonization in the first place still exist -- only now in a still pervasive yet more hidden form.

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization:   "Modern man no longer communicates with the madman [...] There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence."      

Without a "common language" (outside of the language imposed by medical professionals), the colonized (people with disabilities) and the colonizer (everybody else) don't have to speak to one another.  The colonizer can maintain a "silence" for the rest of time, comfortable in the fact that a language isn't necessary unless someone needs to be diagnosed or told what their IQ is.  We've done a lot of in-class writing about what "power" means in the lives of people with disabilities, and how people not labeled with a disability often participate unknowingly in a power structure that keeps Us away from Them.  The power of  Us comes from that lack of a language spoken by both sides:  whoever controls the one-sided mechanism to speak and label, to assign and diagnose, wins. 

We read and discussed Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, as well as watched Lest We Forget: Silent Voices, a documentary paying witness to the historical horrors of some of Ohio's large institutions for people with developmental disabilities.  Both Kesey's novel and the documentary try to create a language for the other side of colonization.  In Cuckoo's Next, this language is created and spoken by a Native American who is labeled "deaf and mute."  Chief Bromden is the storyteller within the colony of "insane people," and as he tells us about McMurphy's struggles with Nurse Ratched (whom the Chief calls "Big Nurse"), we begin to understand how devastatingly and existentially vast the inside of the insane ward truly is, so immense that the Chief nicknames it "the Combine," defining the institution, and therefore the culture that operates and adminstrates it, as a machine so anonymously huge no one recognizes it as a machine except those who are being processed into it and eventually consumed by it.  "Big Nurse" is at the controls of this Combine, overseeing a strategy of rewarding and punishing that allows for no critique and no escape.  

Lest We Forget creates a language and a dialogue from the actual voices and images of the inhabitants of large institutions for people with developmental disabilities, showing us how groups of people when housed together in order to be "fixed" are actually massed together so we can forget about them.   In Lest We Forget, we pointed out the alliances among the "inmates" of the institutions and the "professionals" in charge of "fixing" them.  All of these alliances are complicated by the fact that they take place within the confines created by the dominant class, in the shadow of the Combine.  In Lest We Forget, people who lived through abuse narrate what happened to them, while professionals apologize and seem mystified as to how it could have occurred.  These alliances between the colonized and the colonizer both nurture the need to be free from confinement while also maintaining that confinement, eliminating the possibility of making a difference though activism.  "Freedom" is not possible within the Combine.  The voices, both fictional and not, in Cuckoo's Nest and Lest We Forget, attest to the need for alliances outside of the colony, while also showing us how ineffective these alliances are unless they help to dismantle the Combine, allowing actual freedom to occur. 

Jack Nicholson as McMurphy in the film version of One Flew over the Cucko's Nest.

Last week we talked about Million Dollar Baby, and how its narrative about euthanasia is a direct result of how "Us and Them"can become a death sentence.  This quote from Ragged Edge, a disability rights magazine, is from the essay we read in Representing Disability in an Ableist World:  Essays on Mass Media, by Beth A. Haller:

"Life with a disability is so devalued, society is so bigoted against the idea that life with a severe disability can have quality, that in such a climate the 'right to die' becomes a 'duty to die.' Activists fear that people who become disabled will choose suicide over living with disability. They fear that people whose disabilities make them burdens on family members will be pressured -- subtly or not so subtly -- to end their lives."

Million Dollar Baby is about that "duty to die," a narrative constructed around "dependence" and "independence," in which once you find yourself dependent on help all hope is lost.  Hillary Swank's character is a boxer who has spent most of her life on a quest to be great, but at the end of the film when she is injured and has to reassess who she is and what she wants to do there are no choices except being snuffed out.   When you consider how over-praised the film was upon its release (winning lots  of Academy Awards, including Best Picture), you get the idea: in America at least being dependent on support = being a pariah. 

Eastwood and Swank in Million Dollar Baby.

We then looked at Mitt Romney's statement from the previous day.  Romney was secretly videotaped by someone with a camera-phone at a fundraising event.  Romney was talking about people who are "dependent" and "victims," relying on the government for their "food and healthcare and housing."  While Romney was not explicitly talking about people with disabilities, the dichotomy he was using to tap into the collective unconscious (and the deep pockets) of his audience is pretty clear:  "Us," the independent and healthy masses versus "Them," the dependent and not-so healthy Other. 

So where's the hope?

Since this class is about understanding how to form sane and productive alliances with people with disabilities in order to affect some kind of overarching change in the way we both support and relegate them, we found some hope, I think, when we looked at another recent incident that was captured by a cell-phone camera.  Bede Vanderhorst, a 16-year-old boy with Down syndrome, was kicked out of First Class on an American Airlines flight by the pilot because, as the pilot states, Bede seemed "agitated" while sitting in the waiting area before boarding the plane.  Robert and Joan, Bede's parents, tried to stand up for their kid, but the American Airlines staff seemed very adamant.  The cell-phone footage showed Bede sitting in the waiting area doing really nothing, and they also videotaped airplane staff being discriminatory.  "Us" versus "Them" in this instance got redefined through the use of a common language:  mass media.  Bede's mom and dad went to CNN and other outlets and told their story, backed up by the footage they had shot.  The alliance they have made with their son, in the capacity of standing up for him, is one way in which the power structure gets redefined.  In the news-story we watched, they showed pictures of Bede playing in a rock band, going to school, being a part of the world -- in effect pulling him away from the colony we often assign him to.  He was no longer in the Colony of Down Syndrome:  he was now a teenaged boy being discriminated against.        

We also watched a movie called Lars and the Real Girl.  Lars and the Real Girl was released in 2007 to not a lot of acclaim. The premise sounds like a bad joke, which is probably why the movie did not get as much notice as it should have. Lars is a functional recluse who lives in the garage behind the house where he grew up. His brother and sister-in-law live in the house-proper. The sister-in-law, Karen, is trying desperately to include Lars in their domesticity, even at one time tackling him out in the snow to ensure he makes it to dinner. As played by Emily Mortimer, Karen is the beating, beautiful heart of the movie: someone so guileless and sweet that she feels the need to enforce kindness, not just give it. An example of an alliance transforming into advocacy and activism.

And that's also the way many of the townspeople in Lars and the Real Girl come across throughout the rest of the film. When Lars orders a fake girl through the Internet (and it's a salacious website he gets it from, advertising poor lost lonely orphan-girls to be adopted by poor lost lonely old men), and the girl arrives, you expect the movie to lurch into simpleminded, mean-spirited comedy.  But the triumph of the film is that it takes that low-grade concept (lonely loser purchases a fake doll to make love to) and elevates it by paying attention to what the fake girl means.  In order to move Bianca (the fake girl) around Lars imagines a disability for her, so he has to get a wheelchair for her. Bianca, his first love, is a woman with a disability, and yet the townspeople, when asked to help Lars through his delusion by believing in it along with him by the local family doctor, take Bianca into their midst as one of their own. They provide her with a job at the mall as a model, and eventually she is even voted onto the schoolboard. In her vacantness and in her pliability, Bianca becomes a perfect symbol for human kindness.

Ryan Gosling and Bianca in church:  "Us versus Them" gets turned inside out.

Lars is as well a person with a disability: loneliness manifesting itself into a delusion, some kind of mental illness, I'm sure, but what the movie does is dramatize not the internal aspects of "being diagnosed and fixed," but the external ones many movies about people with disabilities miss. When Lars goes to a party with Bianca, there are stares and comments, but there's also this feeling that somehow Lars is using Bianca to let people know how human he is too, and how much he needs. He could never tell them that upfront, so Bianca becomes his visual cue, and we see him and what is "wrong with him" through innocent eyes. His attention to Bianca, his devotion to her, becomes as natural and real as any romance in movies can be.

"Disability" gets deconstructed because the secrecy and shame usually connected to a story like Lars' are not there. He is openly courting a fake girl he ordered over the Internet, and guess what? Everyone in town is in on it. The "disabilities" inherent in both Bianca and Lars' bodies and persona are somehow "owned" by everyone, and in the end a sort of catharsis happens. Us becomes Them; Them becomes Us. 

Tom + Tom = Bliss



About ten years ago I wrote a short story that was published on the website Nerve.com.  It was about two guys with developmental disabilities who happen to be in love with one another, and the dedication of one support person working in their group-home who helps them to get married.  The title was:  "The Wedding of Tom to Tom."  It's also in my book of short stories, The Smallest People Alive. 

Ten years.  Damn.  I'm not famous.  And God knows I'm not a genius.  But what's amazing to me is that this story seems to have a life beyond most of the other things I've written.  I guess it has something to do with the fact that when I wrote it I was trying to merge all aspects of my life together:  people with developmental disabilties, gayness, social work, fiction, and a philosophy honed on reading Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners, in which Flannery writes, “It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”  I've always taken these words to heart in everything I've written, but in this story I think it may have yielded some of the greatest moments I could come up with.

Anyway, a student named Amanda Grace Gorman in the ENGL 375A2 DISABILITY AND LITERATURE class at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia wrote a paper about my story.  (I copied it and pasted it below.)  I read it yesterday and burst into tears.  I've been writing now for 25 years or so, and have had reviews in the New York Times, Village Voice, Boston Globe, Publisher's Weekly, and blurbs from famous writers and editors who say my stuff is great, etc., but this was the first time I cried reading something somebody wrote about my fiction.  I think it has something to do with the no-nonsense connections Amanda has made with what I write and the way people with developmental disabilities are perceived and relegated.  It also has something to do with her sympathetic yet strategic way of reading my story.  There's a moral code Amanda is targeting and she finds it in my work:  what an incredible gift to me as a writer.

A true example of 2 + 2 = 5:  me the writer writing something wholeheartedly dedicated to reinventing the way people view characters with developmental disabilities in literature, and ten years later a writer takes what I did and gives it back to me fully reinvigorated.  Wow.  Another example on the same blog is four students in the class creating monologues based on some of the characters in my story that I did not give a lot of voice and agency to.  Reading those monologues made me cry too.

Maybe I'm just some overemotional freak (well wait a minute:  yes I am that), but also I think that this is probably a pretty normal thing that happens to writers all the time.  This is just my first time.  It was Amanda and the other students' thoroughness that got me.

Thanks to ENGL 375A2 at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia...

Link to the story I wrote:  "The Wedding of Tom to Tom"
Link to the ENGL 375A2 blog:  Dislit blog

Here's Amanda's wonderful paper:

Disability and Representation in Keith Banner’s “The Wedding of Tom to Tom”

by Amanda Grace Gorman

Disabled characters, perhaps because of their inherent mystery to nondisabled writers and readers alike, have always been well utilized in literature. These characters often become walking talking embodiments of their disabilities, and help to further the plotlines of the main nondisabled characters. The paradigmatic example of a disabled character in literature is Tiny Tim, the helpless, pitiable disabled boy who acts as a moral compass for Scrooge’s change of heart in A Christmas Carol. We seem to be comfortable encountering disabled characters in literature insofar as they act the part: innocent, desexualized, childlike, bent on overcoming their limitations. In “The Wedding of Tom to Tom”, Keith Banner seems to be challenging this literary stereotype to the utmost degree. He opens the story by confronting the reader with two intellectually disabled characters engaging in gay sex, an act that many people are barely comfortable reading about nondisabled characters engaging in. Banner continues his incredibly progressive representation of disabled characters in “The Wedding of Tom to Tom” by granting legitimacy to their sexualities, asking the reader to reject an infantilized view of them, and by re-imagining the kind of impact that they might have on nondisabled persons.

The fact that Banner’s representation of the intersection of sexuality and disability is a positive one is first evidenced in the text by the fact that he clearly depicts the sexual acts between Tom and Tom as intentional. Anita, after walking in on the couple mid-blowjob and forgetting to turn the lights off as she left says that she “ was getting ready to open the door and turn them off when [she] saw that one of the Toms had already got it. Almost as soon as it was dark in there again, they were making that same crazy silly sex music” (51). This shows that Tom and Tom had not only a physical understanding of what they were doing but also a social understanding, as it is common practice that lights are dimmed during intimate sexual interaction. Anita as the main narrator also makes reference to Tom and Tom’s sexual practices within terms of normal discourse: “Tom A. and Tom B. were trying to sneak off for a quickie right then, and I saw” (59). This shows that not only do the disabled characters view what they are doing as legitimate, but one of the nondisabled characters does too. Though this perhaps should not need to be the case, the fact that a nondisabled character shares this viewpoint does seem to help encourage the reading of Tom and Tom’s behavior as worthy of being understood as mature, intentional sexual behavior.

But it is also made clear in the text that Tom and Tom are not merely mimicking nondisabled sexual behavior. As Tom B. sneaks back to his room, Anita describes him as

“half-demonic, half-angelic, but dramatic, like he had gone off and now he was returning from his journey filled with beautiful new things to tell” (52). This description portrays Tom B. as seeming to understand and to have personalized the complexities of sexual life, rather than merely engaging in acts prearranged by a framework of nondisabled sexual meanings. Though their pleasure itself is described as genuine, for example Anita imagines a fantasy in which a lot of people are coming towards her all “smiling the way Tom A. does during a blow-job session”, Banner does not portray their shared sexuality as functioning merely for physical gratification (73). The love between Tom A. and Tom B. is conveyed to the reader in poignant subtle detail. For example, after the two men are split apart during group time, Anita describes Tom B., smiling, “but his eyes were afraid at the same time. He blew out a sigh and let go of Tom A’s hand…” (58). The fact that the men are constantly split up ends up being read not as a necessary precaution, but rather a tragic element of their love story. The “stack of old-timey bridal magazines, worn out from looking at them”, that Tom A. has stacked in his room, clearly is meant to evoke a kind of sympathy from the reader that differs from the kind of pity one might have for two adults with mental retardation engaging in sexual acts devoid of an understanding of their meaning (65). When Tom B. talks about his relationship with Tom A. Anita describes his face as “sincere and stupid and scary and beautiful”, the kind of face she cannot say no to (66). By the time in the text wherein Anita plans a wedding for the two men, the reader understands why she would want to do something nice for these two men who are unquestionably in love.

It is because of the tender details of their love that Banner includes in the story that the reader ends up having such an adverse reaction to Anita’s boss Kate’s viewpoint on the relationship of Tom A. and Tom B. which is that it is a problematic one, characterized by a strange obsession with each other’s presences. Her view of the two men only makes sense within an infantilizing, paternalistic view of disability that denies disabled persons their own agencies to make informed decisions for themselves. In a meeting for workers at the home, Kate expresses her concerns about the two Toms: “I mean, what I’m afraid of is that they are gonna end up hurting each other. Physically. There’s all kinds of issues here. I mean when I walked in on them the other morning, Tom A., excuse me, but Tom A. was anally penetrating Tom B.” (63). It is clear that this is not a rational concern, proof being that it is indicated that the men have been together for many years without much incident, but rather Kate’s “concern” seems to be a matter of attempting to rationalize her paternalistic motives. Kate’s assumption that the two men cannot make their own decisions despite their apparent competence may be related to a belief that their choosing to be in a homosexual relationship is indicative of an impaired ability to choose appropriate partners due to their mental

disabilities*.

However, Kate is emphatically not a sympathetic character, which reveals that Banner wants the reader to reject Kate’s infantilizing view of the intellectually disabled characters. The reader is not supposed to like Kate, who is first described as “smiling like a whack-o” (51). But furthermore, her way of demeaning others and undervaluing their capabilities is shown not to be caused by real necessity insofar as she works with needy disabled individuals, but rather a manifestation of an undesirable personality trait. After the meeting Kate has with the (nondisabled) workers at the home Anita relates that it “…got quiet, like we were all suddenly little kids and Kate Anderson-Malloy was the teacher” (64). The fact that Anita constantly refers to Kate with all three of her names, Kate Anderson-Malloy, helps locate more specifically what Kate’s undesirable personality trait is: pretension. In fact, throughout the story Anita expresses her frustration with Kate’s assumed superiority. For example, she says at one point, “I mean, she’s a bitch…but also there’s this weird, loud, lovingness in her face as she pronounces her proclamations, like against her compassionate instincts she’s always having to tell us these things” (63). As Anita has trouble pinpointing just what is so terrible about Kate’s opinion that the two men need to be separated, all the while she does not doubt that the two men should have “permission” to be together. Banner seems to be saying that of course love between two adults should be allowed, this should be an unquestionable fact, one that should not need arguing for.

As progressive as the narrative is in representing the intersection of disability and sexuality and rejecting the appropriateness of infantilizing mindsets, it runs its biggest risk of falling back into the conventions of the archetypal disability narrative in making the disabled characters somewhat auxiliary to the dynamic narrative of the main character. Not only this, but it does seem to be the implication that the protagonist Anita, a nondisabled character, is looking to learn something from the disabled persons at the group home. In fact, she describes her job there as her “antidote” to what she had been through with her ex-boyfriend. She explains that she feels like she is “paying penance too but just for being a total fucking fool” (57). But Banner now departs from the typical nondisabled character learning from disabled characters structure. The familiar storyline might include disabled characters overcoming their limitations in some way or learning to cope with their disabling conditions and a main nondisabled character that finds that inspiring. In “The Wedding of Tom to Tom” there is no talk whatsoever of overcoming disability, and what the nondisabled Anita finds inspiring about Tom and Tom is their love story and the endurance of their love through hard times.

Banner makes it very obvious at certain points in the text that Anita draws analogy between her relationship with Archie and Tom and Tom’s relationship. For example, she admits that when picking up the Toms before their impromptu wedding that she is “thinking: well it’s me and Archie in my head, if you want to know the truth” (69). Later on, Anita imagines within her prophetic fantasy of Tom A. and Tom B.’s happy life together, “Love-light. Lava-lamp light” (73). She then immediately connects this to a memory of Archie: “Archie has a lava lamp in his bedroom, or used to. He would turn it on in the dark while we made love. “Real cheesy,” he would say (73). There are also more subtle comparisons in the text that truly bring to light the resonance for Anita of Tom and Tom’s love. In the car with the Toms in the back seat, Anita remembers a moment with Archie: “…and this was love, without crack and without any lies and without his petty-assed, trashy ways. Maybe, maybe not. I see them back there in the rearview. Tom A. and Tom B. Looking straight ahead” (70). Here Anita is looking back to the past to recall a pleasant memory of Archie before they began to have problems and questioning whether or not she loves him. This stands in stark contrast to the reflection in her mirror of the two Toms sitting in her backseat, looking straight ahead, unflinchingly, resolutely, in love and looking towards the future. In addition, Banner even seems to evoke the blowjob motif first encountered in the opening lines of the story when Anita decrees to the reader in a moment of unbridled passion for Archie, “if he had a crack-pipe I would let him stick it into my mouth” (75).

Ultimately, though, it ends up being not just the inspiration of Tom and Tom’s relationship that leads to Anita’s epiphany of her love for Archie at the end of the story. It seems rather to be the fact that he on some level grasps the fact that Tom and Tom are in love, and would never think to question it. This almost seems to conjure the archetypal image of the disabled character acting as a moral compass, but I argue, differs in a fundamental way. Archie can in no way be seen as a moral hero for the way he treats disabled characters, for in fact he does not even interact with the disabled characters. He merely hears the crazy sex music of the Toms through the wall separating their hotel room from his and Anita’s and “isn’t disgusted” or “even perturbed” (76). It is this, instead –his attitude towards love, that it cannot and should not be denied no matter how difficult or unusual the circumstances, which is evidenced by his seemingly natural acceptance of Tom and Tom, that makes Anita realize that she loves him.

By representing the disabled characters as sexual, adult individuals capable of making decisions for themselves, and capable of inspiring people in ways other than attempting to overcome their impairments, Banner breaks from traditional uses of disabled characters in literature. Instead he comes closer to representing people with disabilities as they actually might appear in the world, as nuanced, complicated individuals with their own ideas, goals, and values. Banner’s story might be read as an argument for the transcendent quality of love, for its ability to reach beyond the socially sanctioned places it is supposed to be confined to and manifest itself in anyone. By including disabled characters in this argument, Banner in a small way begins to right the wrongs of his predecessors. He gives disabled characters back their humanity.

* I am indebted to my peer, Helen Alston, for this insight. Her complete explication of this passage through the joint lens of sexuality and disability is available at our Disability in Literature course blog at http://dislit.umwblogs.org/2010/11/03/he…