Interview by Tim Miller
Terry Galloway is a national treasure and her new memoir Mean Little Deaf Queer is a book we can all cherish. For 30 years in her performances she has explored with wild humor and theatricality the stories and shifting layers of gender, disability and being a lesbian—or as she raucously puts it in the title of her new book—being a "Mean Little Deaf Queer." Her work has delighted and emboldened audiences all over the U.S. The memoir is fearless in its reach-diving boldly into our most private, pained and incredibly funny corners of being queer and embodied.
Becoming deaf as a child, and especially as a queer girl, she is launched into a haunted house hall of mirrors that would have challenged any of us. Galloway is fearless in her spelunking—okay, that's cave-exploring in case you didn't know—into the kinky and instantly recognizable corners of the human heart and desire. There is nowhere she won't go with great humor and sizzle. As Galloway explained to me:
"There are people who have the exact same kind of deafness I do—profound, chemically induced—who have pictures on their fridges of kittens frolicking in the grass. They'd be appalled to read the memoir, appalled to read that as a little nine-year-old, I liked to cross—dress and smoke cigars!"
She has such an insightful take on how gender and sexuality has shimmered through her, that we can't help deepen our own memories. I caught up with Terry Galloway while on her home turf of Tallahassee, Fla., to talk about Mean Little Deaf Queer and how we can make the world safer for them!
Tim Miller: Your work is so on target and deep-digging in how you get at where queer desire takes form and resides, where sexuality is birthed and berthed! Your story of those early desire feelings you had as a child at camp for the "Deep End Swimming Instructor" and how you long for her is some of the finest writing about sexuality ever. How important was sex, gender and desire as you wrote the book?
Terry Galloway: Tim, you give me too much credit. But I am glad you didn't shy away from the sexuality of that chapter of the book. It isn't particularly explicit but it is as charged with desire as my little ten-year old body was. The same can be said of the rest of the book, too, I think. Not much explicit sex but filled with desire, every kind of desire imaginable. Especially thwarted, comic desire.
Now, about sex ... my longtime love, Donna Marie, and I have talked more about what I didn't write than what I did. The complexity of a long-term shared sex life, the affairs, the unanswered and answered longings. The other people we loved, longed for, had sex with even as we were loving, longing for and having sex with each other. I kind of wish I'd written more about those things. But that's stuff for another book—the sequel, the one my sister Tenley calls,"Meaner! Deafer! Queerer!"
As for gender. All my life I've slipped in and out of gender. Kind of like Bugs Bunny—batting eyelashes in one frame, and waggling a carrot suggestively in the next. Gender is more of a performance for me than a solid reality. That's why I can feel perfectly manly even though I have nice-sized boobs.
TM: By asking about sex, gender and desire, I might as well been asking about theater! Your memoir is also an amazing book of how creativity and performance inform your life and deepen community. Is MLdQ as much about performance as anything else?
TG: Theater! There's desire for you. With sex, drugs and community thrown in for good measure. I'm a sucker for a good performance, Tim. On-stage and off. It's why I've had some serious crushes on drag queens or the kinds of women drag queens seem to want to emulate—the ones with high color, towering shoes, who exude exotic perfumes. I may have to go lie down and just fantasize for a minute or two.
Anyway, I think desire and performance go hand in hand. Performance is nothing if not a seductive act. There's a passage in the memoir about having sex with a woman known for, among other things, her high color, towering shoes and exotic scent. One night after the heady thrill of playing to a roaring SRO crowd, we somehow ended up back at her apartment. We got stoned, laid down on her carpet and we both came without either of us having laid a finger on the other. That's the power of performance, Tim. We were both playing at being the little stars above the firmament of our city. The energy of that shared daydream, fantasy-come-true was so enormous, all we could do with that pent-up intensity was come.
It's that same the kind of intensity of shared desire a lot of us theater people find on stage, isn't it? What we talk about when we talk about epiphany. That same shared sense of taking part in something that feels thrilling and inevitable. And the sheer joy in feeling it. As if we were re-shaping the world somehow, making reality conform to our own desires, reshaping what is into what we prefer it to be.
TM: Your book is one of the most amazing books about disability I have read. Funny—the wonderful story of how you tried to get your sisters to play Helen Keller with you!—but also unflinching. You are quite forthright in wading into some of the complicated issues and battles in disabled communities. How much did feeling a responsibility to these communities sit with you as you wrote?
TG: Well, I tried not to feel a responsibility to anyone. I didn't want anyone looking over my shoulder telling me to quit being snarky. That said, I have a lot of friends out there who are disabled and there are certain "life experiences," shall we say, that we have in common—things like oh, the more religious members of the general public feeling the need to pray over us and heal us of our afflictions. Or the cruel, practical eye that was often fixed on our bodies and always seemed to be asking of us, "Oh what use are you?"
But we are friends not only because we have some shared experiences, but because we share a certain bleak sense of humor that characterizes how we responded to those experiences. Some of that bleakness comes from our disabilities. But the sense of humor would be there with or without the disability.
So I guess I saw my only responsibility as making sure that people saw the complexity of disability, that I rubbed their noses in it. But kindly, just so they'd get a good smelly, new sense of it.
TM: Your work, as well as this book, again and again comes back to overlapping communities and how we can encourage each other to listen to and tell our stories. You are also one of the prime movers of the amazing arts center in Tallahassee the Mickee Faust Clubhouse. Do you see yourself as a community-based artist?
TG: Yeah, but somewhat reluctantly and against my own worse ( better? ) instincts. I am a very selfish, self-involved person. I like what I like and like to do what I want to do when I want to do it. So in some ways I find "community" to be a very restraining, inhibiting concept. But I'm a friendly little animal as well. I like to play games and have fun and feel a part of some snug universal. Theater—or at least the kinds of alternative theaters in which I've involved myself —can be a very loose, uninhibited form of community in which I can say and do what the hell I want to say and do without a lot of censorship or bitchy comment.
So I like being a part of those kinds of communities—the ones that allow me to be utterly myself. And find myself being tightly, even fiercely bound to them. And wanting more of them in the world, so I can be myself wherever in the world I am.
TM: Toward the end of the book you describe the amazing opening up of new soundscapes that come with the latest technology digital hearing aids. I actually felt your book did the same thing for me, whole new vistas of what it is like to be human were on every page. What do you hope readers take from your memoir?
TG: I want them overwhelmed with the desire to buy many more copies of the memoir and convinced that by distributing those copies far and wide they will, indeed, be making the world safer for mean little deaf queers.
Tim Miller is a solo performer and the author of the books Shirts & Skin, Body Blows and 1001 Beds. He can be reached at his Web site, www.TimMillerPerformer.com .
