Stares and Stairs
The Perspective of being Queer in a Wheelchair
Most strive to stand out in a crowd. To be a shining beacon of exceptionality. To be praised for what you do, and respected for who you are.
But it's hard not to feel the chill of isolation when you can’t help but stand out.
You’d think being different from everyone else from the get-go would make growing up queer easy. My love for pretty dresses and skirts. My religious rewatching of every Barbie film I could get my tiny hands on. The fact that I always had to be the girl characters from TV whenever I’d play pretend with my friends. It all felt right and natural.
But then I noticed I was the only ‘boy’ that did this.
It turns out that already being different from everyone else in one way doesn’t make it easier to be different in another. It just makes every difference from what’s normal a terrifying beast that threatens to leave you desolate.
So, I hid it all away, my love for all things pretty and girlish. It became my secret. My shame dressed in pink. It’s amazing what the fear of being an outcast can do to a child. The pit of repression and denial you’ll bury yourself in. How depressing it is when all that burying does nothing when compared to a painfully visible disability. The horror when you get used to it.
The passing stares that cut into your skin as you go about your day. They’ll call you an inspiration for living a mundane life when you move in a chair that moves on its own. As if you’ve performed a miracle of God.
Art by Jess Skudder
The swarms of invasive questions about your life, your body. You’ll eventually stop feeling them crawl across your flesh and burrow into your surgery scars when they seek to understand you as if you are an alien.
The constant assumption that you are helpless. That you need help with everything. Teacher aids to keep up with the rest of the class. Constant offers to help carry things or open doors. It doesn’t matter how much you fight for the scraps of fragile independence you can get. They always offer to help with a concerned tone and a smile.
It’s enough to make you scream and shatter.
They never warn you how isolating it can be, being the only one of your kind growing up. Boys who weren’t into the proper ‘manly’ things were considered weak by the media. The only ‘heroes’ I could look up to as a kid were either stars at the Paralympics or mind-controlling professors in chairs who send children to fight for them (and get ‘cured’ through sci-fi bullshit a lot). When the only example of people like you are either pinnacles of exceptionalism or waiting to be cured, it festers and grows like an infection inside you. The need to be extraordinary lest you be nothing.
It all becomes your fault, and your flesh will constantly remind you of your ‘failings.’ You are the reason you become so easily out of breath. You didn’t try hard enough to relearn to walk after that surgery. You didn’t try hard enough to be a man.
I let that poison seep into me.
But I have come to see the bullshit of it all.
I am not required to teach and inspire the straight, abled-bodied masses through the ‘tragedy’ of my life. Let them quake as I strive in my best black dress with messy eyeliner. My trauma will be made into art. My creations will be made out of pure love for myself and everything that I am, and pure spite against their way of viewing me. And... their stupid fucking stairs.
To anyone who sincerely thinks I’m complaining about nothing, may your feet be crushed by a stampede of wheelchairs.