Jun 25, 2004  |  By: KATHI WOLFE  | COMMENTS     

IN A RECENT night in San Francisco, John Killacky, a 51-year-old writer and video artist, attended an AIDS benefit with his partner, Larry. During the reception, Killacky, who became a paraplegic eight years ago after doctors removed a benign tumor from his spinal cord, says he felt invisible.

“People leaned over me in my wheelchair and asked Larry, ‘How is he feeling?’” he says. “It’s as if my mind wasn’t there.”

As a gay man with a disability, Killacky’s experience isn’t unique. He and other gay disabled people say they frequently encounter discrimination within both the gay and disability communities.

To bring this discrimination to light, Killacky and Bob Guter co-edited “Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories,” which was published earlier this year by Haworth Press and recently won a Lambda Literary Award in the Non-fiction Anthology category.

Guter says disabled people appropriated the negative word “crip” in the same way that gay people adopt “queer.” “We use it to retain our identity with pride rather than shame,” he says, noting that crip is used generically, to refer to people with all types of disabilities.

“‘Disability’ is more of a medical or public policy term,” Guter says. “‘Crip’ is more in-your-face.”

BEING PROUD OF ONESELF isn’t always easy if one is gay and disabled, various gay people with disabilities told the Blade.

Before Killacky became disabled at age 43, he was athletic. “The night before my surgery, I went running,” he says. After the operation, his body froze. “I got a whole new perspective [from having a disability].”

Killacky says gay men no longer felt comfortable around him, and he ran up against homophobia among other disabled people. “In rehab, all of the material on sexuality was for heterosexuals,” he says.

At a conference for artists with disabilities, there were no openly gay men or lesbians. “A paraplegic comedienne made homophobic jokes at the event,” Killacky says.

Guter’s disability is the result of malformation birth defects. When he was six, his legs were amputated below his knees.

Guter, 58, says that he has known that he is gay since he was a little boy. Coming out was hard, he says, but coming out to himself as a person with a disability was far more difficult. “When I’d see other disabled people, I’d be reminded of what I hated about myself,” he says, noting that the non-disabled world confirmed his negative self-image.

In college, he fell in love with his male roommate.

He asked me, ‘Do you think you’ll ever find a man who’ll sleep with you,’” Guter recalls.

He describes that as “the challenge that mysteriously engendered hope.” Somehow, Guter says he had the self-possession to tell his roommate: “Yes. If I can find the right man.”

Guter began to identify with other disabled people eight years ago. “It was a slow process,” he says.

Today, he edits a Web zine — “Bent:A Journal of Crip Gay Voices” at www.Bentvoices.org.

“The male gay sub-culture is about looks,” Guter says. “Gay men with disabilities don’t fit into the queer image of beauty. In places where gay men congregate … for erotic connection — like bars — we quickly get the impression that we aren’t welcome.”

D.C. RESIDENT BERRITA “RENEE” Parker, 57, has pulmonary hypertension and degenerative arthritis and uses bottled oxygen and an electric wheelchair. “A lot of social events aren’t accessible or smoke free,” she says. “If there’s smoke I’m up a creek.”

Roberta Goldberg, a 38-year-old lesbian who is an interpreter for deaf people in Danbury, Conn., says lesbian groups sometimes have interpreters or wheelchair ramps at community events such as meetings or music festivals.

“They feel that they’re ‘sensitive,’” she says. “But it’s really, ‘We’ll keep you at arms length. We won’t date you.’”

Susan McDaniel Stanley a lesbian who lives in Bowie, Md.,finds the dating world to be an unwelcoming place. Stanley’s disability, spinal cerrellbum degeneration, was diagnosed in 1986.

Stanley, 44, uses a rollator — a walker with four wheels and handbrakes — to get around. She says lesbians seem frightened of dating women with disabilities.

“They think, ‘I can’t be together with a disabled woman because I’d have to take care of her,’” Stanley says, adding that this fear is misguided.

“Having a disability doesn’t make us incompetent,” she says. “We’re not going to ask a partner to be our nurse.”

Disabled gay women or “crips” don’t fit “the lesbian model,” says Corbett O’Toole, who operates a Web site at www.disabledwomen.net in Albany, Calif.

“The lesbian image is of a woman who ...