Accommodation/Adaptation Can Be Sexy
Secrets of the Disabled Flirt
Being disabled means you’ll be touched far more often than other people by far more people than you’ll actually want touching you: doctors will treat your body like a machine and lift up your leg to find the defective part to fix, nurses will, in one traumatic childhood case of my post-surgery life, roll your body-casted self over to prevent bedsores in the middle of the night without any audible or feel-able regard for your howling in pain, GOOD DAMN TIMES (when I hear nurses described as heroes I always have to take a breath and remember they’re not talking about these particular Albuquerque professionals), and, most enjoyably, complete strangers will grab your arm on public transportation without a word. (My default response to said strangers is always a stinging takedown, and if I don’t have it in me to say anything I know I’m in a bad way.)
But the nice thing about having a body that screams MY BOUNDARIES ARE NOT THE BOUNDARIES OF OTHERS IS—okay, never mind, there’s literally nothing appealing about that, I’ll rephrase—
The nice thing about the fact that not everyone is a head-up-ass arrogant ableist-but-they-think-that-means-nice fucker is that some people are cool! and a lot of cool people are really hot! and no cool person will grab your arm without consent, but they might ask if you need anything, and this one time, at a party in Austin, this laughably attractive guy asked if I needed his hand to get down some stairs, and actually I didn’t, but I said I did, and it’s now been enough years that I don’t remember anything else about that party, just the coat I wore, which was vintage and weird and looked nothing like anyone else’s coat (a fact often remarked on at the end of the party when people went to get their coats) and the moment that I took his hand and felt exactly like Cinderella, a childhood dream come true.
I actually just remembered this dude’s name after writing that. I might google it after I post and see if his good looks have held up and if he’s doing anything interesting. I’m not proud to say I remember nothing whatsoever about his personality so I can’t recall if he actually had a sharp wit and good sense of humor or if our capacity for staring enhanced the effectiveness of his jokes. (I do know he told a lot of jokes, because in the particular sub-scene I knew him in that was all anyone did.)
Anyway, as I was saying, or beginning to say, maybe I side-tracked because I’m afraid to say it: needing assistance can be a sexy thing. I had a friend in Iowa City who had spina bifida and was ridiculously gorgeous, and I remember her telling me that when she went to bars, she often didn’t use her cane to walk to the bathroom but needed to hold on to the backs of chairs as she walked (I often do this too). Her friend pointed out that there was flirt-potential in this necessarily physical act and she said, “after that, I started deliberately doing this on the chair-backs where hot guys were sitting.”
I often say that being bisexual doesn’t “double your chances” for anything but heartbreak. In this case, however, I do have one slight advantage. Privilege? That depends. There definitely existed Disability Privilege last time I visited Disneyland in the mid-90’s and got to take everyone I was with on every ride without waiting in line, but I hear they’ve since retracted this policy, which is evil. (My uncle once joked that I could sell my services to rich families who will pay me to help them skip the line, and I never got to embark on what might’ve been a lucrative freelance gig.)
I got to thinking about these things because, while I boast with tearful relief that I’ve never used any dating apps or dating websites (my single days were always in very friendly cities where conversations with strangers at coffeehouses simply went there, none of us did a damn thing!), I’m hearing tell from young millenials that hiking has become a trendy first-date activity among their set, and I am furious about this.
Not because no one should hike, OF COURSE YOU SHOULD, but because for me? That’s one of the most intimate things I can do with someone. Swept off my feet as I intensely was by those aforementioned coffeehouse encounters (two of which became week-long flings, if you must know [no one must know]), I can’t imagine having hiked with any of them.
You’re in the middle of nowhere, and shit might get dangerous, even if you don’t have a body like mine. Hiking is bound to take teamwork at points, and if those are only a couple of points then maybe that’s where this potential-chemistry comes in for all of you rule-followers who were born exactly when the doctors said you would be and didn’t jump out rebelliously early like I did. Maybe all of you (god, how would I know?) travel in isolated bubbles where physical contact with people you aren’t already intimate-in-some-form with comes rarely enough as to be exciting in itself because you’ve never had to tell SEVERAL DIFFERENT OLD WHITE DUDES IN DIFFERENT REGIONS OF OUR NATION not to grab your arm. People don’t grab your arm(s), because no one looks at you and assumes you need their hands to accomplish your own goals. What’s that like? LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS I AM SERIOUS.
Have you ever gone out hiking thinking, “It rained two days ago so we should be fine out there,” only to remember once you’re in the middle of a Pacific Northwestern nowhere that nothing ever dries, and the only way to get across a deep and flowing river surrounded by dangerously wet mud is to cross a single plank, no one’s idea of an actual bridge, and it doesn’t even comfortably accomidate a single foot at a time, and normally you take up more space than most because you’ve got these two metal sticks on either side of you, and you will not be able to walk across that “bridge” without plummeting to, if not your death, a deeply unpleasant experience, here’s what you do:
You get on your stomach and you army-crawl across that plank. It starts raining. Thankfully you’re all REI’d up in your rain gear because you live in Seattle and you’re as prepared as anyone can have expected you to be for this moment. On the other side of the plank, you feel like a badass, but you never want to repeat this experience or anything like it ever again.
What if you’re hiking Couger Mountain and deathly afraid of hairpin turns and you dissociate dangerously as a trauma-based coping mechanism for deep primal fear and the person you’re with has to shake you back to consciousness while navigating their own fear? You wanna go through that with someone you just met? Definitely not sexy, but not a product of disability either, let’s make sure we’re clear on that (I wasn’t until well into adulthood, which is it’s own seperate thing I likely have no business talking about here, really).
What if you’re in the middle of nowhere and you don’t own a car because you’re city folk and Seattle, where you live, has decent enough public transit that this works out for you, and after hiking miles, many miles, lots of it uphill, you finally get to what we dubiously call civilization and because you’re not in the city the one bus that is approaching will be your ONE BUS back to food and water for the next water, and you’re out of water, you drank it all, and you’re starving, because you’ve basically gone past calories and burned organs at this point and obviously you’ve eaten your energy bars, and the difference between getting on that bus and not getting on that bus is the difference between something you don’t even want to think about and feeling fine about existing in a body, so the person you’re with has to RUN to the bus, I mean like Gold Metal run, which of course you can’t do, and beg the bus driver to please please please wait for your exhausted-beyond-atomic-cohesion self to get to the bus and collapse into the seats?
You want someone you don’t really know to do that?
I thought not.
Of course, as with literally everything, nothing that “everyone” should go do for anything, first dates or otherwise, ever has my body in mind, and no one is expected to because “people like me” are “rare.”
I don’t even know what to with that assumption after 39 years of trying to contest it. I am far past eloquence. I’m past primal vocalization. I’m just here.
Fitting that there’s no end to this one, because I have no idea where this hiking-culture or their dating-culture or any of it plans to go.
