It’s Disability Pride Month & these social media gays are leading the way
July is Disability Pride Month.
Mark
July is Disability Pride Month, and this year’s iteration marks two milestone anniversaries: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became law 35 years ago, on July 26, 1990, and Disability Pride Month became officially established 10 years ago, in 2015.
Disability, of course, comes in many forms and affects many people. In fact, one in four Americans will develop a disability in their lifetime, as Patrick Cokley, senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told CBS News last year.
“If we pretend that it’s a small group we’ve never heard of, or a tiny population, then we do ourselves a disservice,” Cokley, who has low vision, explained. “We’re then also leaving out all of the other myriad of people that might have hidden disabilities, have aging disabilities, or have acquired disabilities.”
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Marisa Hamamoto, a spinal stroke survivor and the founder of the disability-inclusive dance company Infinite Flow Dance, added that Disability Pride Month helps give the disabled population a collective power.
“For some of us, we were born with a disability. For others, disability was acquired in the middle of life,” she said. “Disability is a big part of how we live our lives, and disability can be a strength.”
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Queerty and INTO have amplified queer disabled voices over the years. Actor and advocate Joseph Kibler told Queerty his disability has given him a new outlook on life. “I was forced to slow down and smell the roses,” he said. “I think it is being able to take things, to be very grateful for everything, and to be kind of patient.”
Playwright Ryan J. Haddad told INTO about working to “access the joys and pleasures of [one’s] own body, along with combating the fear and, at times, discrimination that the external world places [on or toward one’s] body” and working to sexualize disabled bodies in his plays.
Writer and actor Ryan O’Connell talked to us along similar lines, spotlighting the “lack of dialogue surrounding disability and queerness” and his discussing his goal of making the recent Queer as Folk reboot “really disabled, gay, and horny.”
And disability advocate Belo Cipirani told Queerty, “People with disabilities, at the end of the day, are just like everybody else. We have desires, dreams, and goals. We also have fears. The only difference is, we negotiate life differently, but that doesn’t mean that our lives are any less valid.”
Meanwhile, social media users are showing off their queerness and disability for all to see. Check out posts with a combination of gay and disabled hashtags to see that kind of Pride in action.
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