“Laura, you wrote the following in a poem called ‘Telling’:

‘Those with power can afford
to tell their story
or not.
Those without power
risk everything to tell their story
and must.
Someone, somewhere
will hear your story and decide to fight,
to live and refuse compromise.
Someone else will tell
her own story,
risking everything.’

“Laura, I still don’t believe that you’re dead, that you won’t write another poem; take another grand adventure; post another lovely and important essay to your blog; rabble rouse, advocate, and publish that first necessary book of poems; go on loving as a disabled dyke mother poet activist. Laura, I just don’t believe it.

“When the news of your sudden passing came down through the community, I heard a lot of stories about how and when folks first met you, read your work. But me, I don’t know. I try to trace it back, when first you entered my world. Were you there in 1985 when I caught my first glimmer of disability politics in the anthology The Power of Each Breath? Or when I lived with a disabled dyke, sat on the front stoop with her, never even whispering the word disability? Or in 1993 when I wrote my first torrent of disability poems after hearing the gay disabled Jewish poet Kenny Fries read? All I know is somewhere in that decade as I came into my queer crip self, you entered my world, long before we ever met. But I don’t know when. Tracing the years back, I struggle to find that moment.  But every time I end with the sense, feeling, truth that, even though you were only months older than me, you came before me, made my life as a white queer crip poet rabble-rouser more possible. Your telling has always cradled, nurtured, fed mine.

“And so I want to send to you, wherever you are now, a fragment of writing queer poet to queer poet. One day as Laura and I and many others were organizing the Queer Disability Conference in 2002 we were emailing back and forth about designing  the conference t-shirt. Laura wrote, ‘Let’s use a quote.’ And then wrote, ‘I vote for a quote of Eli’s from ‘Gawking, Gaping, Staring’.’ I wrote back with a resounding, ‘No friggin way. We’re not putting the words of one of the core organizers on the conference t-shirt.’ And we moved on. But now I want to send these words out to you, Laura:

‘I am looking for friends and allies, communities where gawking, gaping, staring finally turns to something else, something true to the bone. Places where strength is softened and tempered, love honed and stretched. Where gender is more than a simple binary. Places where we encourage each other to swish and swagger, limp and roll, and learn the language of pride. Places where our bodies become home.’

‘Laura, thank you.”

At the same time I kept expecting some queerness to appear in the art, the circus, the politics. I mean, it was all so resistant of capitalism, war, consumerism, greed with such an ethic of outlandish/outrageous creativity, all so bent, so queer in the general sense of the word, that I kept being surprised by the lack of specific queerness. I know white Vermont hippie culture, out of which B&P grows, is quite heterosexual; but probably because of my time with the radical faeries, where queerness, drag, outdoor community, and theater merge in a myriad of ways; I really did expect some flavor of queerness to rise to the surface. It didn’t.

On the other hand, I’ve come to practically expect racism and ableism at these kinds of events, and unfortunately my expectations were met in this regard. One of the performers in the circus yesterday was a woman of color and manual wheelchair user. Her roles–passive, limited, using her so clearly as a token woc–had me just shaking my head in disgust. For one, there were no attempts at creating any access in the performing space–a bumpy, slightly soggy pasture–leaving her to wheel over the lumps and softness and perform all at the same time. For two, she was totally not present in the big group song and dance numbers. (Has no one from B&P heard of or seen integrated dance?) For three, in one number she rolled out, followed by a white guy who held a sign saying “Ethiopia” over her head, while other white people in masks performed a dance about how the U.S. gives much more military aid than food aid to Ethiopia, and then at the end when she spoke about this disproportionate aid, the sign holder repeated her, as if the audience might not have understood or heard her. Arg! It was simply a big tangled wad of ableism and racism. And I was dismayed but not surprised.

I’m struck by the contrast between the ways I was surprised by the lack of queerness and the ways I was not surprised by the racism and ableism.

Early in the book in the form of a personal ad, Neil describes himself as a “handsome romantic 53 yr old spastic revolutionary with vision.” The pairing of the words spastic and revolutionary has made me catch my breath and hold it, letting it out ever so slowly, as I roll those words around. Spastic is one of those one word metaphors: the phrases “spazing out” or “he’s such a spaz”–meaning uncoordinated, incompetent, foolish, to be discounted–have currency because of cultural and institutional assumptions about bodies that are spastic, bodies that move in uncontrolled, jerky ways, muscles tense, constricted, spasming. If those bodies were appreciated as sexy, beautiful, desirable, then “she’s so spastic” would be a compliment rather than a put down.

The words lame, black, crazy, gay, retarded, fag function in the same way. They have become generalized put downs or associations with badness/negativity precisely because the bodies they describe are pitied, marginalized, and/or hated. Of course many of these words are also used as slurs in primary ways: fag used to bully/harass gay and bi men/boys specifically, crazy used specifically to shame people who have psych disabilities.

A slogan like “Lame is sexy” or “Black is beautiful” takes much of its power from not only an affirmation of identity but also from reversing the metaphor. This is the context and function of “handsome spastic revolutionary” and has struck me so because it strikes so close. Even with all my politics about using the ugly words as insider language (LGBT peoples using queer, disabled people using crip, Black people using nigga, however ambivalently with a lot of community disagreement in all these examples), I have always ducked spastic. I’ve tried not to pay attention to it; I’ve not challenged its metaphoric use; I’ve always felt raw in its presence. And so the identity affirmation and the metaphor reversal feel particularly potent to me who lives in a body full of tremors, tics, spasms, tension: spastic revolutionary.

For next time, more about Cripple Poetics and the word cripple itself and what it means for a white person to think about race and ugly language (I certainly paused long and hard before I wrote the n-word).

Recently The Ann Arbor News, in an announcement of a book reading I did at the Common Language Bookstore, described me as follows: “Self-identified as a gay, transsexual man with cerebral palsy, Clare has long been a poet and activist both under that name as well as his birth name of Elizabeth Clare. His 1999 book Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation has been heralded as a landmark text in queer/disability studies.” None of these supposed self-identifiers (they never asked me) are quite accurate–not gay nor transsexual nor man. Rather if the blurb had been interested in self-identity, particularly as it plays out in the book, rather than sensationalism, it would have used the words queer, transgender, and genderqueer. And yes, I have cerebral palsy–that’s no secret in my work–but I never lead who I am with a medical diagnosis. And then to use my given name–again no secret, it’s on the back cover of Exile and Pride and easily found on the Web–is to establish so clearly which kind of freak I am.

Of course you could reasonably ask why I am spreading this mainstream media drivel by quoting it in my blog. And the answer is because this drivel has followed me and my work around in one way or another for a long time, and the way for me to deal isn’t to try to hide it away. And it’s not only mainstream media.

Burlington’s alternative weekly Seven Days recently wrote, “…the book [The Marrow's Telling] tells a harrowing life story, taking the poet in stutter-steps from childhood abuse to adult activism. Clare’s language grounds itself in vibrant evocations of the natural landscape. In a prose piece called ‘Gaping, Gawking, Staring,’ he demonstrates what he’s learned about people’s reactions to ‘difference’ and disability from a lifetime with cerebral palsy. But he offers advice to those who’ve suffered for such differences: ‘Resist the urge to ignore your body.’” I know this blurb is overall complimentary, but let me point out the spelling out of cerebral palsy and the predictable use of the words suffering and harrowing.

I don’t object to being a queer poet, trans poet, disabled poet. That is, after all, who I am. I just hate the sensationalizing. It makes me appreciate even more the folks who read and respond to my poems as poems.