I don't feel sorry for Schlitzie Surtees

I mean: I feel sorry for him because his only options in life were to be a sideshow performer or live in an institution. Even though he liked performing, it should have been a choice. But I don't feel sorry for him because he had microcephaly.

A few weeks ago, Mike D'Angelo at the Onion AV Club wrote a piece on Freaks that makes me think he didn't get much out of the movie. Basically, he says it could never be made today (why not?) and that the presence of Schlitzie and other people with disabilities "gives the film an unavoidable skeeviness." Before a clip of the "one of us" sequence, D'Angelo announces, "If you can watch this sequence without experiencing conflicting emotions, you worry me."

That's right. I have something wrong with me because I think Schlitzie, Johnny Eck, et al. are really fantastic, and don't have a problem with Tod Browning including them in a movie.

This is a placeholder for a longer post about Freaks and the general idea that it's inappropriate to be interested in and/or pleased by disabled people, especially intellectually disabled people. Apparently D'Angelo thinks that the appropriate way to treat someone like Schlitzie is to avert your eyes as fast as possible. Except, he can't do that, because Schlitzie is awesome--but he takes care to emphasize that the way he feels, and the way Browning apparently felt, is REALLY FUCKED UP AND MYSTERIOUS. It's just one of those weird fucked-up things that people feel.

But it's not fucked up at all! What's wrong with liking Schlitzie?

I'm going to quit and come back to this later, but for the time being, this is a really brilliant and beautiful post by Shiva, another ASD person who likes Freaks: Freaks, Hercules, and the Hydra.

And another thing: it's a privilege to know Joe and Zach. They are interesting kids and I feel fond of them. If I hadn't, in movies and in real life, been exposed to people with microcephaly and other different-looking disabilities, I wouldn't be able to get to know Joe and Zach the way I am; the way they look would have been a distraction, instead of just a part of who they are.

At age twelve I became terrified when I was sitting near a very different-looking, very loud disabled kid in church. My reaction to her was horror and sadness. I started crying. I don't think this says anything about unusual-looking people. I think it says something about the idea that it's inappropriate for unusual-looking people to be in public or to be portrayed in art, and how dangerous that idea is.

catching signals that sound in the dark

Like most people, I love the Hensel twins, and have since I was little. I remember my dad bringing home the Life magazine cover for me. I just spent a lot of time looking at videos and pictures of them online. It's awesome to watch the way they move around. But it's also awesome to watch them asking questions in class and joking around with their friends, because this isn't a life that would have been available for them a hundred years ago.

One of the most obtuse passages I've ever read comes from the Wikipedia page for Schlitzie, my favorite circus freak:

Under the care of Surtees, Schlitzie continued performing the sideshow circuit until Surtees' death in the early 1960s, after which Surtees' daughter, who was not in show business, committed Schlitzie to a Los Angeles county hospital.

Schlitzie remained hospitalized for some time until he was recognized by sword swallower Bill Unks, who happened to be working at the hospital during the off-season. According to Unks, Schlitzie seemed to miss the carnival dearly, and being away from the public eye had made him very sad and depressed. Hospital authorities determined that the best care for Schlitzie would be to make him a ward of Unks' employer, showman Sam Kortes, and return him to the sideshow.

Okay, dude--I really like Schlitzie and would like to think that he lived a happy life. And from the way he comes across in Freaks, he seems like a sweet person who liked attention, so I'll totally buy that he was into being a sideshow performer, and that he felt sad when he stopped doing it.

BUT DON'T YOU THINK HE WAS ALSO SAD BECAUSE HE WAS LIVING IN A HOSPITAL? I mean, if I was living in a hospital for no reason, and someone encountered me there, I'd think it was really fucking weird if they were like, "Amanda seems really sad, she must want to be a sideshow performer." Maybe he just didn't like living in an institutional setting. You know, like almost every person who ever lived.

I am really into the show Carnivale, and one of my favorite things is a very minor aspect of the show. Ben's crush, Ruthie, is a middle-aged woman with an adult son, Gabriel, who is a pretty minor character. But we know that Gabe is intellectually disabled and performs in the carnival as a strongman, as well as helping set up rides and tents with the other young guys in the carnival. Ruthie used to be a snake charmer when she was younger, but now she's mostly the "barker" for Gabe's act. Since I am interested in the history of disabled people (especially intellectually disabled people) who worked as a sideshow performers, Ruthie and Gabe's story seems especially moving to me. I imagine Ruthie realizing that her child was intellectually disabled, and that he didn't have a disability that affected his appearance and could therefore be the basis of his act. I imagine her thinking about Gabe's options outside of the hospital--probably being locked away somewhere. But in the carnival, he could travel and be part of a community. As he got older, he turned out to be really big, and that turned into an act, which was great. And Ruthie doesn't have to worry about what will happen to Gabe when she dies, because he has things he's good at, and he's surrounded by people who have known him his whole life.

But obviously not every carnival was as friendly as the one portrayed in Carnivale. The only good thing that happened in the class I dropped was that we read a piece by Eli Clare, who is a queer trans guy with cerebral palsy. Part of the piece was about his interest in particular historical figures--disabled sideshow performers, and XX people who lived as men. But he admits that he doesn't know exactly why certain XX people lived as men, and that it isn't necessarily accurate for him to claim them as trans. And he admits that some of the sideshow performers may have been manipulated and abused, and felt that they had no choice but to be "freaks." I am interested in the same two groups of people, although I'm a lesbian instead of a trans guy, which proves how hard it is to identify who inverts "belong" to. The Well of Loneliness seems to me to be a story about deviant sexuality, but in the 1940s Michael Dillon, a trans man, identified Stephen Gordon as someone like him.

But I'm getting off topic. I was thinking about Amanda Palmer, who has been criticized at FWD/Forward for starting a band with her friend where they pretend to be a pair of conjoined twins. I don't think Amanda Palmer is coming from a typical ableist perspective, even though she is being ableist. I think she thinks of the idea of conjoined twins as just another part of the whole circus/carnival genre that she's always drawn from. I'm not super offended by Evelyn Evelyn, I don't think, but it does make me kind of uncomfortable. It just seems stupid (although I generally love AFP, don't freak out). However, I feel like if I think that this is really bad, then I have to think Neutral Milk Hotel is really bad, too. Although Jeff Mangum didn't pretend to be conjoined twins, he just wrote a song about them.

I mean, is it ever okay to view people with certain physical conditions as part of a genre? I don't think it's okay to go as far as Palmer has gone but is it okay to be into conjoined twins and make art about them when you aren't actually conjoined and don't know any people who are?

eta: I just deleted a little bit about whether ASD people are circus freaks in modern society, and whether Jeff Mangum can be considered a circus freak because of his mental illness and nonstandard body language--I need more time to write that than I have, because I was too brief and it came off like I was saying "Jeff Mangum and I can have circus freaks but Amanda Palmer can't" or something equally oversimplified and self-serving.

I was just thinking about Carnivale

because I love it so much and everything, and I always seem to briefly mention it in posts where I'm complaining about Glee. Although other people might disagree, I think Carnivale is an example of a show with disabled characters made by someone who actually respects people with disabilities.

The show is sort of hard to explain; it's ridiculous and I love it. It's a really slow-moving soap opera about a traveling carnival in the 1930s, and by the way two of the main characters are superpowered beings who are fated to enact a battle between God and the devil. Dan Knauf, the creator of the show, described the idea as, "What if you wake up in the morning and you're the Antichrist?" IT'S HARD TO EXPLAIN OKAY? I just think it's neat because it takes all this supernatural stuff and puts in a painfully ordinary context. The "hero" of the show, Ben, is a monosyllabic, spacey guy who's embarrassed by his powers and tries to stay awake as much as possible so he doesn't have prophetic dreams. And so on. The period stuff is also astonishingly good, as far as I can tell.

Now that I actually run through the characters in my head, I'm not sure what I was thinking saying that most of the disabled characters are played by disabled actors. A blind character, a paralyzed character, an intellectually disabled character, and a character with a limp are all played by nondisabled actors--there are plot reasons for most of these casting choices, although the scenes where they appear without their disabilities are brief. Also, understandably I think because it's hard to find Siamese twins, the Siamese twins and some other minor circus freak characters are played by actors who don't have those conditions. And the character with a limp is presented as being really torn up about it. And there are a few heartswelling moments where Ben cures physically disabled people by laying on of hands. Wow, what the fuck am I talking about? Why do I think this show is so great on disability stuff?

Well, if I recall correctly, there are several episodes where guest actors with actual "circus freak" conditions were cast. And that's something. There's also a physically disabled actor who plays an important role in several episodes (to say more would be a massive spoiler). But the main thing is MICHAEL J. ANDERSON, an actor with dwarfism who plays one of the main characters on the show! Now that I'm thinking about the show really critically, I guess I can see how Anderson's character, Samson, might be a "magical disabled person" character; he's quirky, wise, doesn't have much of a backstory, and delivers the exposition-y speeches at the beginning of the episodes just because it looks cool (in the context of the show, Samson doesn't know the information he says in the speeches). However, I think that it would be unfair to frame the character as simply "magical" because many other Carnivale characters have "magical" qualities. Also, as I think I mentioned when I was talking about Kurt on Glee, I think that what's important is not whether characters are stereotypical, but whether they come off as real humans. Samson is given tons of screentime and lines and does, to me, come off as a real human. He isn't the protagonist of the show, and there is a particular role that he usually plays in the plots, but he sometimes makes decisions that reveal surprising aspects of his character. He's just really cool.

And also, I just can't understate the importance of casting a really talented actor with a disability as a regular in the show and making him one of the major characters (the show has a lot of regulars, some of whom aren't featured very much). Actors with dwarfism often appear in movies and TV shows, but don't often get to stick around once the novelty has worn off. Michael J. Anderson was really given a chance to show how awesome he is for a long period of time, instead of being used as a tool to show how surreal and wacky something is.

And then, the coolest thing! This woman, Bree Walker, has fingers and toes that are fused together. She is (was?) a news anchor who, after wearing prosthetic hands for several years, decided to openly display her real hands. She now appears in movies and television shows playing people with her genetic condition; she also has a reality show, I think. She contacted the makers of Carnivale, pointing out that a lot of people with her condition used to be circus freaks, and telling them her ideas for a recurring character she could play on the show.

And yeah. She got it. She was on three episodes of the show playing Samson's ex-wife who joins the carnival with her new husband. The makers of the show actually thought it was legitimate for someone with a disability to be like "hey, I have this condition, and there's no one with my condition on the show, and I'm a good actor, so can I be on it?" They didn't think their vision of what the show should be like was so massively important that they couldn't listen to a disabled person's point of view, and accept her suggestion. Cool!

Dan Knauf has said that his interest in circus freaks stemmed from watching his father, a wheelchair user, be discriminated against when Knauf was growing up. Now that I've written this whole rundown of the show, I can see that there are potentially problematic elements, but I can't bring myself to be too bothered by them; I think, overall, Knauf's respect for disabled people is very obvious in the decisions he made with the show.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

I need to read more, and now that this ordeal of a novel is over, I'm sure I will. I've been reading it since mid-July and it's been hard to get anywhere with it.

John told me he read the first two-thirds and cut his losses. He said, "It's a bad book." I disagree. It's well-composed. It's just that the author's whole intention in writing the book seems to be create something massively disgusting and depressing, and as a result I never wanted to pick it up.

It's probably my fault; I can't remember the last time I read a book without checking ahead to see how it ended. And Geek Love ends horribly. Actually, horrible things are happening from pretty much the first page; if I remember correctly, the book starts with the main character's parents explaining how they intentionally caused their kids to be born with birth defects so they could be sideshows in the family carnival. And this is the most pleasant scene in the novel, since the parents and all their deformed kids are still getting along.

I like carnivals. I like Carnivale. I like Freaks. But the people in Carnivale are regular people, and the people in Freaks are better than regular people. The people in Geek Love all have screwed-up morals, and some of them are downright evil. The most evil character is Arty, who is brilliant and charismatic and has no limbs. He starts a cult based on the idea that having your limbs removed will make you happier. The main character, Oly, is in love with Arty (even though he's evil and her brother). The story is mostly about how Arty destroyed the family, but this is a flashback from the present when Oly is observing the daughter she was forced to give up. Oly's daughter has a tail and Oly will do anything to keep her daughter from getting the tail removed and becoming a "norm," including befriending and murdering the person who's offered to arrange the operation. But it's hard to go undercover when you're an albino hunchback dwarf!

If that sounds like a good book, well, good for you, I guess. Maybe it sounded like a good book to me, at some point--I mean, I like stories about outsiders, the nature of abnormality, and weird love. But I guess I want those stories to have a moral core like Carnivale and Freaks do. Most of the people in Geek Love are the farthest thing from moral, and their motivations are so hard to relate to that it kept me from caring most of the time.

Also, I can't help but be bothered by the way Dunn equates physical disability and difference with evil and repulsiveness. It's all the same to her--luxuriously gross passages about characters' hanging breasts and mildew-infested balls; murder and necrophilia; people who don't have any pigment in their skin or can't walk. Using albinos and people with phocomelia as a metaphor for the darker side of human nature is problematic because disabled people aren't unicorns. It's wrong to write disabled characters for shock value, because real people have to deal with the attitudes you're contributing to.