Disabilarchy?

I've noticed that some portrayals of the disability experience in fiction are pretty much diametrically opposed to the disability experience in real life.

In fiction:

• Employers have no choice but to hire disabled applicants even when they are not qualified, because they could be sued for not hiring a disabled person
• Disabled people's work is disproportionately rewarded even when it's bad, because people feel sorry for us or are just positively biased toward us
• It's easy and profitable to fake a disability in order to get disability benefits from the government
• Professors have to provide ridiculous accommodations for students who say they are disabled, when in fact those students are lazy or not smart enough to be in college
• People with mental disabilities are the perpetrators of violent crimes
• A "black transgender disabled lesbian" has a big advantage in life because people want to give her jobs and other opportunities

In reality:

• Employers often do not want to hire disabled applicants because of their mistaken ideas about what our disability means.  It's easy for them to discriminate against us because they can just say "We didn't think you'd be a good fit for the job" or something like that.  They also can fire someone for being disabled if they just pretend to fire them for a different reason.  Even if an employer admits that they are not hiring someone or firing them because they are disabled, suing someone is expensive.
• Some disabled people are legally allowed to be paid a fraction of minimum wage if their employer says they cannot work as fast as a non-disabled person. For example, Goodwill does this, and plenty of people think it is acceptable. (Articles about Goodwill: here and here, and many comments asserting that disabled people are not good enough workers to deserve minimum wage: here, here, and here; and saying that people who need accommodations do not deserve minimum wage, even though accommodations are their legal right: here).
• In the US and the UK, it is a lot of work to even apply for disability benefits (more work than some disabled people can do); many disabled people are denied benefits for stupid reasons; and the benefits are not very much.  You also then can't save money, or you will lose your benefits.
• It's a lot of work to get accommodations in college (again, more work than some disabled people can do; my post about that here); and even if you do all the work to get accommodations, a professor might refuse to give them to you if they feel like it.  This happened to someone I knew whose professor thought it was stupid for her to get a note-taker, so he dragged his feet on arranging it and then tried to arrange it in a way that revealed the disabled student's identity, which he was not allowed to do.  Many disabled students in college are struggling due to lack of support, and about half the (smart, hardworking) disabled kids I met in college had to drop out.  Still, some people imagine that disabled students are coasting through life on a fluffy cloud of accommodations (here).
• People with mental disabilities are disproportionately the victims of violent crimes and society often makes excuses for the criminals, causing this type of crime to seem more and more acceptable for potential murderers and abusers.
• A black transgender disabled lesbian has to deal with racism, transphobia, ableism, homophobia, and sexism; the intersections thereof; and feeling like an outsider even in minority communities.  Plus, she's constantly invoked as a joke to show how bad "political correctness" supposedly is.

So, you have to ask: why is being disabled portrayed as being so easy and coming with so many opportunities, when in fact it comes with a lot of disadvantages?  Watching TV (and hearing some people talk), you would think that we live in a society ruled by disabled people.

surprise sanity!

I've written about this before a bit. but does it make anyone else really sad when you're reading a book or watching a movie, and a character who originally seems really stereotypically disabled (this especially happens with mentally ill characters) starts to get more complex and less stereotypical and turn into a cool character, and then it's like, surprise...they actually weren't really disabled. or they weren't, like, organically disabled, if it's a mental thing. they acted like that because of something wrong that someone else did to them and/or because society is messed up.

I'm leery of saying this because it kind of sounds like I'm saying PTSD and other stuff that comes from trauma isn't a real disability. I don't think that but I do think there's this weird division in fiction between people who are "really" mentally disabled (usually: depression, psychosis, autism, social anxiety, sometimes intellectual disability) and people who appear that way, but actually it's someone else's fault, making them actually at their core non-disabled.

obvious example: lisbeth salander!!

I'm not saying some of these characters are proven beyond a shadow a doubt to have entered the world non-disabled. but there is a revelation that at least some of their disability is related to trauma, and they are "sensible" at their core even if they are eccentric. and it's like, other people think that they don't know what they're talking about, and think that they don't know what really happened to them and/or what's really wrong with the state of the world, because they're disabled--but surprise, because they aren't innately disabled, they actually DO know what's going on and what they're saying is actually true.

I read a book recently that didn't exactly make clear whether it was doing this or not. it was a great book but I felt disappointed, I guess, by the one element.

early on a (now absent) character is referred to and described for the first time. she's kind of a typical mentally ill/depressed character, there's a big focus on the strange things she did and how difficult it was to live with her and take care of her. as the book goes on she is described/flashbacked to again and again, and seems more complex, human, nice, and interesting each time. in the second half of the book we learn that she was abused, and that the way her family treated her when she was depressed actually kept her from recovering at least as much as her actual depression did. when she finally appears at the end of the book, she is a heroic character.

I thought this was really cool, but I guess I felt a little sad too, because I knew that most people would perceive the book in the ordinary model of mental illness--i.e. this apparently mentally ill character turned out to be a smart and heroic person who was wronged by other people, therefore she wasn't REALLY mentally ill, it was just because of her family, and by defeating them, she can stop being ill. the book doesn't really assert this but it also doesn't assert the opposite--that she would have had mental health problems anyway and they were exacerbated and used as an excuse by her family. it just doesn't really say.

so I've read lots of reviews of the book that are like, "IT TURNS OUT THAT HER 'MENTAL ILLNESS' WAS ACTUALLY BECAUSE OF HER FAMILY!" wah wah. this may seem nitpicky of me, especially because the author may not even have meant for people to have that reaction--but I just find it disappointing because it would be cool to see an inarguably mentally ill character who's also smart and a hero. also a portrayal of interaction between mental illness and life experience, instead of the idea that you can only have one or the other.

Fallacy Week: The Harder Fallacy & The Uncomfortable Fallacy

Hi guys it's FALLACY WEEK! Every day you get some fallacy action from a post I made a super long time ago at LOVE-NOS.

A lot of the time, when you are having a conversation about disability and/or ableism, the person you are arguing with will make a fallacious argument. Most of the fallacies I’m describing in this post are fallacies of relevance. Wikipedia describes fallacies of relevance as “presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question.”

Fallacies of relevance can be very difficult to respond to for several reasons.

1. They involve an abrupt change of subject, which can confuse and distract you, causing you to lose your train of thought. Depending on your disability, this can have the effect of making you have to quit the conversation altogether.
2. Often the change of subject isn’t obvious–it may even be unintentional on the part of the person who’s using the fallacy, if they are responding emotionally rather than logically. You may end up feeling that something isn’t right about what they said, but unable to identify exactly what it is.
3. A lot of these fallacies involve stating something irrelevant that is true. You may become confused and think you are wrong because the other person said something true.
4. A lot of these fallacies involve stating something irrelevant that is related to violence, the speaker’s personal feelings, or other emotionally powerful themes. You may become uncomfortable and think that it would be wrong to disagree, because you might be implying that you don’t care about violence, people’s feelings, etc.

I have experienced 1, 2, 3, and 4 in real-life and online conversations, and as a result I’ve become super interested in sitting around by myself and deconstructing what happened–why did I feel like I was wrong even as I sensed that the other person wasn’t being fair?

In these examples, John is a disabled self-advocate, while Mary is using various fallacies to oppose him. From example to example John and Mary are different people and have different relationships with each other. I tried to give John a few different disabilities, since most of these fallacies are fairly universal. But I felt awkward doing this, because I was mostly writing from my own experience; I hope I haven’t stuck in disabilities that don’t fit the example.

The Harder Fallacy

JOHN: I didn’t like the story we read in class. It was told from everyone’s point of view but the son with CP, and whenever it talked about the disabled son, it would just list everything he couldn’t do. We never learned about his personality or how he felt about anything. I thought it was an offensive portrayal of a disabled character.
MARY: Come on! Are you saying it’s not harder to have a kid with cerebral palsy? That’s a ridiculous thing to say.

Rebuttal:
John wasn’t talking about whether it’s harder to have a disabled kid than a non-disabled kid. He just wanted the disabled kid to have a point of view and a personality, like the other characters. If someone wanted, they could easily write a story that portrayed a family having a very hard time coping with their son’s disability, while still portraying the son as a well-rounded character and not a plot device.
Mary was responding to a totally different statement, which she made up in her head and is pretending (or actually thinks) is what John was saying. The way the harder fallacy works is that when someone makes any comment about disability being portrayed offensively or inaccurately, you respond to the following imaginary statement: “It isn’t harder to be disabled and it isn’t harder to live or work with a disabled person.”

(Fun fact: some people use a form of the harder fallacy to defend statements like, “This weather is retarded.” Their argument is that having an intellectual disability is harder than not having one, so therefore intellectual disabilities are bad, and words relating to them can be used to mean “bad.” I guess this is a legit argument, except that most people who make the argument don’t apply their “harder life=synonym for ‘bad’” rule consistently, and only apply it to stigmatized groups.)

The Uncomfortable Fallacy

MARY: Wow John, it’s so nice of you that you do that program where you go bowling with people who have special needs. I really admire you because I’m not the kind of person who can talk to special needs people.
JOHN: Well, they’re just people. I’m sure you could come bowling with us and it would be fine.
MARY: No I can’t. When I’m around special needs people, I feel really uncomfortable and don’t know what to say.

Rebuttal:
This is a less classic fallacy, and not quite an argument; but I think it’s worth exposing. Mary is confusing a feeling with a fact. She interprets her discomfort with “special needs people” to mean that they are a homogeneous group which one needs certain skills to interact with–skills which, she concludes, she must not have.
If Mary always feels uncomfortable around an entire minority group, it’s probably because she hasn’t been around people from that group very much, or has heard a lot of bad things about them. There is no way an entire group of people could be so similar that one person possesses the ability to either get along, or not get along, with all of them. The uncomfortable fallacy is when you think that being uncomfortable around another person necessarily indicates something about the person.

(Fun fact: You may be wondering why John considers this an argument, when Mary just told him he has admirable skills and is nice. Remember, John is disabled. From Mary’s attitude towards disability, we can guess that she probably doesn’t know John is disabled. But John knows that John is disabled, so he’s probably thinking, “I wonder how Mary would feel about me if she knew I was disabled. Or if she does know, why is she talking to me and why did she tell me she’s uncomfortable around other disabled people? Does she think I’m not really disabled?” And so on. Although Mary meant to compliment John, she simultaneously insulted him which makes him feel, well, uncomfortable.)

notes on my awesome book

Maybe you recall I am writing a book where I attempt to parody and reclaim a certain horror/pulp/gothic fiction trope where some or all of the following qualities:
breaking gender norms
same-sex-attraction
oddness, illness, and/or disability
childhood trauma
evil
depression
obsessive, unhealthy love
are treated as being related to each other and causing each other.

EG's mom killed EG's dad when EG was very little and was never caught. EG grew up with her mom in a very cold and isolated unit. Everything was super gothic, down to their house and their town, so EG's experience of life is very gothic as well. (I'm using initials because I don't like EG's current name.)

EG sits in her dad's study all the time and reads all her dad's favorite books and does all the things he liked to do and wear his clothes. When she is about 11, she begins to be sexually attracted to girls, which she sees as a manifestation of her father's spirit inside her. EG feels the way about her dad's ghost that some people feel about the Holy Spirit--it is working in her and changing her to make her more like him so she can stay close to him her whole life. So being attracted to girls is kind of like being able to speak in tongues.

Of course it's also a difficult and frustrating gift because EG still looks like EG and is treated as a girl when she goes out into the world, but she is her dad.

One reason I like this idea is because the narrative of lesbians and masculine women is always a narrative about hate--lesbians hate men, hate society, hate femininity. It's always an escape and rejection. Whereas EG resembles the most cliched lesbian characters but her narrative is one of love and seeking home. The difference between wearing men's clothes and wearing a particular man's clothes.

My Fierce Cords

(this is like 4 years old, I just found it)

Once I fell in love with a girl who had a tape recorder for a head. In high school kids made fun of her because she didn't have a nose or a mouth. Even now that she was grown up she couldn't escape it. She'd be walking down the street and "Hey Tape Recorder!" some asshole would yell. "Where's your face?" She couldn't even say anything back because, like I said, she didn't have a mouth. Sometimes if the guy said "Go kill yourself" she could play it back to him: "Go kill yourself. (whirr) Go kill yourself." But that wasn't very satisfying since she didn't think it up herself.

*Why couldn't I be a CD player or something,* she wrote on a whiteboard that she then passed to me. *Or, like, an iPod? Something not as embarrassing and obsolete as a tape recorder.*

"That would be weird," I said, "because when you were born iPods weren't even invented. No one would know what you were. Also, your head would be really tiny. People would think you had no head at all."

*Better no head at all than a tape recorder*, she said.

"Don't say that," I said.

We were friends all our lives. We grew up together. I was middling popular because I'm good at sports, so I was able to protect her somewhat from the other kids. They used to threaten to eject her tapes and stomp on them, but then I told the principal and they got suspended. My girlfriend--I mean, she wasn't my girlfriend then--accepted my help gracefully. She wasn't embarrassed or awkward like some people might have been.

My parents were surprised when we started dating the summer after we graduated. "But you have your whole life ahead of you," they fretted, "and she has a tape recorder for a head." I blew up at them, although it wasn't that strange a concern. My girlfriend couldn't even keep a job at the video store because customers were scared by her appearance. "I came here to rent a movie about freakish creatures, not see one!" one woman complained to the manager. My girlfriend was planning to study writing and computer programming in college, since those were two careers where no one saw you and you didn't have to talk. I had gotten into a good college and was planning to be a doctor. My parents meant well; they didn't want me to spend my life with someone who was going to have such a difficult time. But that didn't stop me from being mad as hell and telling them They Didn't Understand The Love I Had For Her, Which Made Sense Because They Clearly Didn't Love Each Other At All. I was normally a quiet, unassuming kid so my parents were stunned by how angry I got. Which made the whole tirade much more effective.

I was just as vitriolic with my friends. Not eveyrone, but some people, people who knew me as me and her as that weird Tape Recorder Head Girl I always defending, though it was weird. "Look, no offense, but is it because you feel bad for her?" they'd ask. "Because really, I thought Sarah or Kirsten would be more your type."

"I love her in a way no one will ever love you because you're a bigot," I'd say. "Why don't you go run over some gay people and Muslims in your Hummer."

I was full of self-righteousness when I spoke to my girlfriend later, my words like fire engines parading down the street. We were on the street and I wanted everyone nearby to hear how truly tough and noble I was. Like a dalmation. "I can't believe people treat you so badly," I declared. "You're the smartest most beautiful person I know, and all the world can see is your Tape Recorder Head. Well, never fear. I'll always protect you."

I was full of bravado like the dalmation, sauntering down the street after the successful rescue of some nuns. Then I saw my girlfriend's shoulders were shaking and the dalmation me whimpered and put his head down between his paws. "Oh man I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean it like that. I don't go out with you to be heroic or anything. I love you." This was true. "I just sometimes get carried away."
My girlfriend shook her Tape Recorder Head. As I looked on guiltily, murmuring I love yous and I'm sorrys like a ridiculous doll, she rummaged in her pocket and took out a small scrap of graph paper. She took a pen out of her jacket pocket, scribbled three words, and handed it to me.

*I was laughing.*

"Oh," I said. Was she okay? Was the stress of her life finally getting to her?

"(Whirr)," said my grilfriend, and she played back the whole conversation. The second time around I could hear other things in my voice besides confidence and badassness. I mean, I could hear them most of all, but they sounded so fierce they didn't sound real. Underneath them I could hear a little kid pretending that he could run fast and play football. I hadn't known it, but I had been faking strength and power my whole life. I hadn't known it, and no one else had noticed probably, but my girlfriend had heard it in my voice. Hearing my useless words, these big lies that she had seen through for such a long time, I was so embarrassed I couldn't even look at her.

yeah so I want to use the r-word in a story I'm writing

and I'm going to use it in this post so be warned.

I'm not actually going to use it in the story I turn in to my workshop, because last time I turned in a draft of this story it was the most awful experience ever. Basically I wrote a story about a 12-year-old boy who goes to a behaviorist school for kids with autism (but no disability-related words are used in the story, because no one has outright told him he's disabled). The boy is obsessed with lions and with the idea that he's slowly turning into a lion and will grow up to be one; his parents and teachers try to discourage his interest. He also has a lot of meltdowns and the story ends with him having a violent, swearing meltdown at school and having all his lion paraphernalia taken away as punishment.

So, everyone in my class got exactly that out of the story. A disabled kid doesn't understand he's disabled and can't control himself. (Some of them also made comments that outright assumed I wasn't disabled.) What I turned in was a really rough draft but I felt really positive about the germ of the story, and I felt depressed because almost no one reacted to it or related to it at all.

I sent the story to some of my friends who are good on disability stuff and asked them what they made of it. They got out a lot of the things I was putting in: the main character is faced with adults who try to control him, while his non-disabled twin is more wholly nurtured and accepted; identifying with lions is a way of feeling powerful and dealing with the fact that he feels like he's not human. My friend Laura wrote, "it seemed like he loved this thing/lions and nobody understands that it's something to just love and so they try to make it out to be a problem and to use it to get him to behave how they want him to... i think it seemed like a lot of it was about behavior modification and the loneliness of being told to act a certain way when you're just not naturally inclined to."

Which made me love her so much. I know it's only a workshop, but I've been in workshops for years, you know, and I've never had one hurt before.

I'm trying to write a more clear-to-my-class version of the story and the way I'm doing that is by having most of the story take place when the main character, S., is 17. The point of doing this is that by this age he would be aware of his diagnosis and stuff (in the original draft, I was trying to show that he hadn't been told about his diagnosis, but still sensed how he was being treated; but I think people just took it as typical "disabled person doesn't understand" stuff). It is also cool though because I get to address some issues of passing as ethics and passing as cure. I'm having trouble writing the story because I want S. to express his resentment of the way he was treated when he was a kid, but he's very isolated and doesn't have a lot of people he can talk about those things to. And he's also not quite sure how he feels about a lot of it.

But anyway, S. has been in a mainstream school for four or five years, and his main activity is selling his medication and making drugs for people. (The story has some magic realism elements so he's invented his own drug.) He finds this comforting, probably because he has something that other people want; he frequently accepts little or no payment even when he could ask for a lot of money. It's just what he does.

S.'s parents don't know about this and see him as a success. S. realizes that his mom has started referring to him and his sister as "the twins" when she never referred to them as a unit before. There is some anxiety about how S. is going to apply to college because his years in special ed may make him look "unstable" or like he's not capable of doing college work. But overall he has a sense of finally being someone his parents can be proud of. He goes to a normal school, he looks normal, he acts normal (with the kids he gives drugs to, he's intentionally weird and cold, and they see him as a creep; but he sort of likes that, because he's controlling their view of him).

But he is, you know, pretty masochistic with the whole throwing away opportunities to make money thing. And he doesn't really have any friends.

He desperately misses his best friend from special ed, but his friend is on a completely different life trajectory; he's still quite visibly disabled and needs help doing things. S. has no idea of what a friendship between them would look like now that one of them is supposedly normal. When he runs into his old friend, he lies to his friend's staff about how they know each other.

S. meets up with the head of his old school, and is overwhelmed by memories of trying to bite her, having her analyze and remake the way he walked, having her snap at him and take away his lions--but she's completely friendly, as if they are family members or old neighbors. S. falls into compliance, finds himself following her lead, trying to make himself sound even more successful than she already thinks he is. Wants to ask her why she cared how he walked or what was wrong with lions, but those kinds of questions don't belong in her world. He feels stupid even thinking them.

S.'s twin R., who is in boarding school and isn't around much, is the only person he's really close to. She's always known him roughly the way he is and when she comes home for Christmas he manages to tell her some of the things he's thinking about.

Anyway, for some reason I have this scene in my head: S. makes some comment about how he now looks normal. R. says, thinking nothing of it, that he doesn't. S. is really offended and scared. R. says that S. doesn't look normal to her because he's her brother, he just looks like her brother. And besides, he always says he doesn't want people to like him anyway, so it doesn't matter if he looks normal, right?

"That's retarded," S. says. "That's a retarded thing to say."

Now, the reason I won't really put this in my story is because I think people in my class may just throw this word around in their lives without thinking of it as hate speech. And I want S. to use it as hate speech. I will explain.

I feel a very intense urge sometimes to use the word about myself. Usually in some kind of school or work situation where someone is patronizing me or has failed to understand the nature of what I can and can't do. The sentence I want to say comes in two forms:

"I'm not retarded," when someone is explaining something they think I don't understand. And, more commonly:

"Yeah, I'm retarded, sorry" (little laugh)

because when things are really hard and someone is obviously kind of annoyed with you or thinks you're lazy or lacking insight/knowledge about basic things, you just...hate yourself. And them. And you're supposed to say, "yeah, I'm sort of slow, sorry," "oh yeah I'm kind of a space cadet." Like it's something small, and cute.

But it's not fucking small.

The word retarded is the most vicious word I can think of to quietly and passively explain myself. The reason I find myself wanting to use it is because it feels almost on the level of physically hurting myself or the other person, which are things I do not believe in doing (well the first one happens sometimes). And it doesn't seem like such a big deal to most people to say that word. But to me it feels like punching myself in the head, and sometimes I want to feel that way.

self-centered fiction fun

(I had some ideas about "minority experience writing" but I just got excited and started describing everything I'm writing now. Sorry. I like writing because you don't have to feel bad because people can just ignore the parts that are boring.)

I think writing that sets out to "make a point" is bad. however, I generally write with the intention of feeling less alone or, yeah, let's be honest, sometimes making a point. But when I am making a point I develop love for the characters, or else I might as well just be writing on my blog.

I generally write about queer and/or disabled characters. I actually was thinking about stuff I wrote in high school and I realized that even during periods when I buried my disabled identity (11th-12th grade and some of my first year of college) almost everything I wrote had characters who could be read as having disabilities (a limp, an eating disorder, intense anxiety, kleptomania, and of course ocular albinism). I sometimes don't like to identify characters as having autism and other fairly newly recognized disabilities, because I write stuff that is somewhat stylized and I think it breaks the style--but at this point I certainly am personally aware of my characters' disabilities.

I've been kind of distractedly working on a novel for almost two years (hoping to work much more consistently on it next term, as an independent project) that is kind of a parody of 19th- and 20th-century fiction about "inverted," traumatized ssa people. The main character is a female-assigned teenager who's attracted to girls and had a very gory, gothic childhood. She starts going to boarding school after being homeschooled and isolated for years, and has a sense of passing as female, and heterosexual, but really just passing for everything because she's so nonstandard. She has a frame for thinking about her difference which is constructed out of basically every possible ssa and gender-variant horror/gothic trope, which isn't exactly overturned in the story, but isn't really supported as being anything more than a coping mechanism.

The secondary characters are a twin brother and sister and the main character is torn between her intense friendship with the brother, the only person to whom she doesn't pass, and her crush on the sister (who for most of the story she doesn't relate to as a whole person because her idea of romance is literary to the point of being medieval). Anyway, I originally had the brother being in love with his sister because that's a trope too, but then I didn't want that anymore but I wanted a different kind of attachment that would function in the same awkward/possessive way.

So, then I made up a whole backstory for them, which is basically that the brother is disabled and was stigmatized for it in their family, and that even though he's not obviously disabled by the time he is a teenager, he has an almost crushlike distance from his sister--he loves her and wants to be close to her, but he also feels extremely inferior to her. He resents his "invert" best friend's crush on his sister, because he thinks anyone he can relate to isn't good enough for his sister to be with. I liked this backstory so much that I got off track and have spent the past year writing completely non-gothic stories about this kid at the age of ten or twelve, growing up with an "invisible" disability and a non-disabled twin.

Last week I wrote my favorite version of this story so far, which I liked because it was the first version that was funny and angry instead of emo. It was just a story about this kid with a lot of weird obsessions and a feeling that he isn't human. I turned this story in to my fiction workshop and got like...surprisingly devastated by the results. For one thing I really liked the story and no one in my class seemed to like it. For another, everyone seemed to be talking about his thought processes and his obsessions and his anger in this really pathologizing way, which was kind of stressful...I don't know.

I didn't want the story to have an "agenda" exactly but I did feel political about it. Basically, I just wanted the reader to be on the character's side and see his meltdowns as not just a symptom of his disability, but a reaction to the way he's pathologized/othered at home and at school. The story was very restrained in a way because it mostly just described the character's interests and ideas, and didn't really explain why he had meltdowns--but I guess I was surprised it wasn't obvious to most of the people in my class. I guess I shouldn't turn in disability-heavy stories to workshops, because I'm a senior creative writing major and this was the only time I've ever cried and not been able to sleep because of a fucking workshop. So weird. I feel like a loser.

I was complaining to Noah about it, almost a full week later, and I said something like, "I want to normalize the experience of oppression." What I mean by that is that I don't want to write stories that are like "LOOK AT THIS OPPRESSION SOMEONE IS DOING TO SOMEONE ELSE." No one experiences life that way. I want to write stories that are good stories, with good characters, and when the characters are queer/disabled sometimes they are affected by that. And sometimes it's funny and sometimes it's annoying and sometimes it's sad and sometimes it's all of those things, but is not explicit and obvious or the "main idea" of the story, because oppression is the main idea of no one's life (except this guy).

It kind of reminds me of True Blood. It always annoys me when people are like "Alan Ball is trying to make vampires an analogy for gay people." Fucking no! (As Clayton put it, "Apparently gay people can only eat one kind of food, and as soon as we synthesized it they all appeared.") The aspects of True Blood that are references to a particular kind of gay American experience--having to go to another state to get married, "God hates fangs"--are actually the sign of Alan Ball's refusal to a)produce some really basic second-grade narrative of gay rights, or b)produce fiction that is exactly like the fiction produced by straight people. He just kind of throws it in there because it's a part of our life and it's kind of funny to apply it to vampires. People who try to interpret the gay=vampire analogy literally are just people who think that any reference to minority experience has to be super heavy and super sincere. That's not true, and it's othering; and more importantly, it's just boring.