- Bay Time Reporter
- Sins Invalid & The Other
- November 8th, 2007
- by P. Joseph Potocki
Ancient Spartans placed "unfit" newborns out to die on Mount Taygetos' "Place of Rejection." Of course we all know how Spartan culture obsessed and enshrined physical perfection. Yet thousands of years after Sparta disappeared forever an obscure and overlooked provision in a U.S congressional spending bill came rolling into the very heart of civil rights legislation. Out from this Section 504 Trojan Horse emerged hundreds of fierce ably-disabled warriors overwhelming self satisfied politicians who'd denied them their rights. Just goes to show that world history is, ahem, handicapped with irony.
On April 5, 1977 hundreds of disabled folks assembled outside federal offices of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in eight cities across the country. They protested unfair and inequitable treatment of persons with disabilities (PWD). Issues included access to buildings, restrooms and sidewalks, living arrangements, and academic and career opportunities. The Rehabilitation Act, civil rights legislation embedded with language inferring equal access to all this, and more, had become law in 1973. But it had yet to be implemented. Jimmy Carter campaigned vowing to right past discrimination and to implement the legislation, but now the newly elected Carter seemed to have bigger domestic fish to fry. That said, the PWD community had its own notion of how to hold Carter's feet to the fire.
Orders simply needed signing by the current HEW chief for Section 504 to get moving. Resulting actions would, however, cost money. Spending these resources on a fractured and politically marginal community wasn't something high on Joseph Califano, the new HEW chief's, agenda. Califano probably figured the protests were no big deal. They'd get little media play. And as for Califano himself, well, what can you say about someone with a Bohemian Grove Lakeside Chat entitled "Who lives, Who dies, Who pays"? Considering compassionate lectures like that, the cynic might expect Califano to hold a jaundiced view of cripples demanding civil rights. So imagine Califano's shock when hundreds of these folks, rather than simply protesting outside and moping home, instead poured through HEW doorways across the country-and refused leave.
Well, actually most of the protesters did soon leave. In Seattle and Denver, Los Angeles, New York and Washington D.C. the demonstrators did leave. But, in keeping with the Bay Area's contrarian nature, protesters refused to vacate San Francisco's offices of Health, Education and Welfare. They would not budge-not even when threatened with arrest. Nor did they leave when denied food, water and access to restrooms. In fact, as per normal here in Weirdsville, U.S.A., City government under Mayor George Moscone, together with a motley and unorganized defacto coalition of supporters, rallied to aid them. Imagine, in your wildest dreams the American Legion teaming up with the Communist Party, the NAACP, a gay self protection patrol, the State Health Department, Safeway, both the Black & the Gray Panthers, a lesbian cafe, McDonald's and a drug rehab center-not to mention labor unions, farm workers and robed seminarians.
Only in San Francisco.
The siege lasted almost four weeks. Califano faced enormous growing pressure. Finally, he was forced to sign on. Though full implementation of this legislation is still worlds from perfect many of the crucial PWD considerations, like wheelchair ramps to buildings-things we take for granted today-were finally begun at that time. Had there been no month-long sit-in it's doubtful any of these changes would have occurred.
Which lead us to Sins Invalid.Last Saturday night close to a dozen performing artists gathered before a packed house at the Brava Theatre in San Francisco's Mission District. It was "Sins Invalid, An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility." Their literature states "Sins Invalid is social and economic justice for all people with disabilities-in lockdowns, in shelters, on the streets, visibly disabled, sensory minority, environmentally injured, psychiatric survivors-moving beyond individual legal right to collective human rights."
Participant artists came from Canada and New York, from Houston, Oakland, San Francisco and Berkeley. They included a college professor, a doctoral student, a Project Director on Race, Disability and Eugenics, a filmmaker, poets, published authors, activists and a musician or two. They were here to claim turf on perhaps their community's most hidden taboo-the sensuality and sexuality of the disabled. I will not describe the nature of these performances, but I will say that some of you might well have been shocked, though no performance was pornographic; they enlightened and educated, though in ways I had not expected-and they were revolutionary art in the highest and often most conventionally unacceptable sense of that word.
In fact, I would go so far as to say Sins Invalid was, in an entirely different context, as revolutionary as was the month-long HEW building occupation thirty years before. While Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act gave legal standing to begin leveling the playing field for PWD in the public sphere, Sins Invalid 2007 celebrated this oft hidden community's most hidden secret, thrusting it out of the closet for the world to see. Sins Invalid addressed their rights, needs and desires to be and openly live as entirely whole individuals-as whole, independent and, yes, as emotionally complex and functionally sexual as any of us. These disabled artists spoke to, acted out, sang, danced and demonstrated their own personal sexuality-a societal taboo if there ever was one.
From humanities' beginnings they've suffered pity, been condemned as evil, murdered, warehoused and dispised; the disabled have been experimented on, condescended to, misunderstood, discriminated against, ignored and looked down on as less than equal. Yet we often say they inspire us, despite, or because of what we perceive as their limitations. Mostly, though, they are The Other-and we have always feared The Other.
While we celebrate presidents, industrialists, stars of cinema and world renowned artists, scientists and notables of every stripe-those many we now know were or are disabled; and while the sheer breadth of this designation makes any pat definition worthless, still we have always feared The Other. And as with the ancient Spartans, The Other never leaves us. No matter what we do to kill them, no matter that we turn from them, just glance deep into any mirror and somewhere they are there.
Return to Sins Invalid 2007.