Name: How does an illness become an identity?
Uploaded: 2018-03-13T09:54:44.000Z
Duration: 23 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

homosexuality represents a misuse of the sexual faculty.

It is a pathetic little secondary substitute for reality,

it deserves no treatment, as minority martyrdom,

and it deserves not to be deemed anything but a pernicious sickness."

That's from Time Magazine in 1966, when I was three years old.

And last year, the President of the United States

And my question is, How did we get from there to here?

I went to a shoe store with my mother and my brother,

the salesman said to us that we could each have a balloon to take home.

My mother said that she thought I'd really rather have a blue balloon,

but I said that I definitely wanted the pink one.

And she reminded me that my favorite color was blue.

The fact that my favorite color now is blue,

is evidence of both my mother's influence and its limits.

When I was little, my mother used to say,

"The love you have for your children is like no other feeling in the world,

and until you have children, you don't know what it's like."

And when I was little, I took it as the greatest compliment in the world

that she would say that about parenting my brother and me.

"But I'm gay, and so I probably can't have a family,"

and when she said it, it made me anxious.

And after I came out of the closet, when she continued to say it,

I said, "I'm gay. That's not the direction that I'm headed in,

About twenty years ago, I was asked by my editors at The New York Times Magazine

I had thought of deafness entirely as an illness.

they lacked hearing, and what can we do for them?"

I even went to the Miss Deaf America Contest in Nashville, Tennessee,

where people complained about that slurry Southern signing.

And as I plunged deeper and deeper into the Deaf world,

I became convinced that deafness was a culture,

and that the people in the deaf world who said,

"We don't lack hearing; we have membership in a culture,"

It wasn't my culture, and I didn't particularly want to rush off and join it,

and that for the people who were members of it,

it felt as valuable as Latino culture or gay culture or Jewish culture.

It felt as valid, perhaps, even as American culture.

Then a friend of a friend of mine had a daughter who was a dwarf.

And when her daughter was born, she suddenly found herself confronting questions

that now began to seem quite resonant to me.

She was facing the question of what to do with this child.

Should she say,  "You're just like everyone else, but a little bit shorter?"

Or should she try to construct some kind of dwarf identity?

Get involved in the Little People of America?

Become aware of what was happening for dwarfs?

And I suddenly thought, most Deaf children are born to hearing parents.

Those hearing parents tend to try to cure them.

Those Deaf people discover community somehow in adolescence.

Most gay people are born to straight parents.

Those straight parents often want them to function

in what they think of as the mainstream world,

and those gay people have to discover identity later on.

And here was this friend of mine looking at these questions of identity with her dwarf daughter.

a family that perceives itself to be normal,

with a child who seems to be extraordinary.

And I hatched the idea that there are really two kinds of identity.

There are vertical identities which are passed down generationally from parent to child.

Those are things like ethnicity, frequently nationality, language, often religion.

Those are things you have in common with your parents, and with your children,

and while some of them can be difficult, there's no attempt to cure them.

You could argue that it's harder in the United States

— our current presidency notwithstanding — to be a person of color.

And yet, we have nobody who is trying to ensure

that the next generation of children born to African-Americans and Asians

come out with creamy skin and yellow hair.

There are these other identities which you have to learn from a peer group,

and I called them "horizontal identities"

because the peer group is the horizontal experience.

These are identities that are alien to your parents,

and that you have to discover when you get to see them in peers.

And those identities, those horizontal identities,

And I wanted to look at what the process is through which

people who have those identities come to a good relationship with them.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How does an illness become an identity?

ultimately

recognize

eliminate

deserve