Special People
Disability in the GLBTQI Community
By PePe A.C.

Carlomar M., 28, is used to keeping his right hand in his pocket, “mainly because I don’t like how people react when they see (it),” he says, recalling one time, when he was in Sydney, Australia, a guy he liked “bugged and bugged me to take my hand out of my pocket – he seemed so nice, too, so I did.  But as soon as I did, he just (seemed to) lose interest in me.  He was still nice, yes, but he (passed) me over to his friend, who was, at least, nicer, and couldn’t care less about my (malformed) hand.”

SEARCHING FOR AN ANSWER? The search for the gay gene continues, though the bigger question may be why such an interest in finding what makes every one different from each other?

Carlomar M. inherited ectrodactyly, better known as split hand/foot malformation (SHFM), a “human limb malformation characterised by underdevelopment or absence of the central digital rays and variable fusion of the remaining digits,” according to the Journal of Medical Genetics (http://jmg.bmj.com).  A condition afflicting one in 8,500 to 25,000 newborns, “I, unfortunately, am one of the (unfortunate) one in many,” Carlomar A. says.

The rejection, however, is “nothing new to me; it happens most time.  The issue, it seems, is more on how much (disgust) is felt (before and after my hand is seen).  Not that its regularity makes it any better (since it’s hurtful every time it happens,” he says.

This is how it is for differently-abled people (traditionally called handicapped or people with disability), experiencing a mixture of awa (pity) and diri (disgust) for their being different – “bad, as it is, but even more so when you’re gay, with the feelings seemingly more than doubled, trebled even, an ironic twist, considering that (gays shouldn’t be discriminatory, what with gays knowing exactly how it is to be discriminated against.”

The disabilities may be the result of genetics, medical disorders, accident, assault, or the aging process; though blindness, deafness, and paraplegia are also grouped within the umbrella term of disability, just as HIV and AIDS, chronic fatigue immune disorder syndrome, cerebral palsy, limb amputations, and mental illnesses are, among many other cases.

According to Anna Quon, writing Pride and Prejudice for enablelink.org (originally appearing in Abilities, issue 57), “Needless to say, gay people with disabilities struggle to find a place for themselves, to break out of social isolation, to find intimate partners, and even to learn to accept their own bodies and sexual orientation.”

This is because, she adds, quoting Gerald Hannon in The Body Politic (1980), the gay community has, when it came out of its closet, just “built another one, and into it we have shoved our gay deaf and our gay blind, and our gay wheelchair cases.”
A sad development, indeed.

INTERNAL DISCRIMINATION

Growing up, Carlomar A. “never liked my body,” he says, noting how the community is “extremely fascinated with everything superficial – after all, as they say in the scene, here, when you turn 30, you’re as good as dead.  For differently-abled people, you’re born as good as dead, it seems.”

No wonder, obviously, the absence of gay people with disability out in the open – particularly so in a developing country like the Philippines, where even the general population has yet to mainstreamize serviced for Filipinos with disabilities.  Except for the blind commonly seen singing carols for donations during the Christmas season, “Filipinos with disability are, for all intents and purposes, invisible – a case especially true among the poor (or even the middle class), which basically makes up most of the country’s population,” Carlomar A. Laments.

Source: NSO, 2000 Census of Population and Housing

Gays with disability face the same issue as other people with disability, including accessibility (“Give me an MRT/LRT station that actually is friendly to us – and not just because it has an elevator with the Braille!” Carlomar A. says); lack of adaptation of facilities/equipment/et cetera in public spaces (e.g. drinking water faucets in public, whenever there are any, are not friendly to people using wheelchairs); and the general lack of organizations to service the needs of differently-abled people.

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