Mean Little deaf Queer: A Memoir
by Terry Galloway
Beacon Press. 248 pages, $23.95
DEAFENED by mycin antibiotics administered in utero, Terry Galloway hallucinated and had out-of-body experiences as a child before her disability was discovered. Once diagnosed, she and her parents refused to let her be marginalized. A tough tomboy, she tumbled right along with neighborhood kids.
Galloway’s new memoir tells her story from the inside out, creating a bridge to hearing audiences. An actress, writer, and performance artist, she is dexterous in her use of words and devastating with a sense of black humor that brings numerous laugh-out-loud delights. There is no political correctness here, only a poignant life journey of unexpected challenges.
At a summer camp for “crippled children,” Terry feels superior to the “floaters” in the shallow end who are too disabled to swim alone. Her real competition, hilarious in exquisitely petty detail, is with “Blind Girl, One Leg, and me, Deafie.” Desperate to be named best swimmer, she fakes her own drowning when she falls behind. Her high school guidance counselor suggests factory work. She gets a scholarship to study theatre at the University of Texas instead. Here she’s told that she might wish to concentrate on costuming. She becomes a bawdy Shakespearian and a writer-performer in an alternative cabaret, all the while balancing myriad part-time jobs as dishwasher, busgirl, prep cook, children’s TV series writer, housepainter, and unorthodox Santa.
As an aspiring actress, she moves to New York. Lost and isolated, she has a nervous breakdown and spends six weeks in a psychiatric hospital. She immediately sets about organizing a talent show on the ward, harvesting rich performance material for later monologues. Eventually, she finds a sense of artistic community at the legendary WOW café, P.S. 122, and the Woman’s Project at American Place Theatre.
Her polysexual exploits during this phase are meticulously recorded: “the threesomes, the foursomes, the sixsomes with the tinker, the tailor, the mescaline maker.” Her joy is infectious when she meets her life partner Donna. Immediately she knew that “we were going to be together for years on end. We’d live in a modest cottage in a pretty little college town where she would teach and I would piddle and we’d make art together with all our friends.” Twenty years later, they live and work together in Tallahassee.
As an artist with a disability, Galloway was often asked to do community workshops for other disabled people. Initially she was completely inadequate: “If you can’t get out of your chair or lift your hand higher than your waist, you can’t do physical games I’d been taught to think essential to theater practice.” In due course, she co-founded Actual Lives, a writing and performance program for people with disabilities. Comments Galloway about her journey: “I feel the presence of something still unspoken or as yet unheard, and I feel it as an emptiness akin to hope. There are so many of us out here who don’t know how to tell our own stories or make our own small triumphs compelling or simply convince others that we have souls as complex (or perhaps more so) as any movie star, politico, or prince of the realm.”
John R. Killacky is the program officer for arts and culture at the San Francisco Foundation.
