A Not So Brief, Incomplete Personal History
of Some Disabled QTPOC Cultural Activism
in Toronto, 1997–2015
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Toronto has a rich history of disabled organizing and community making by and for sick, disabled, Crazy, and Deaf queer and trans Black/Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC). That organizing has happened in a million ways—from meetings to Facebook fights, from friend-made care collectives to envisioning what accessible sex parties would look like to throwing sick and disabled queer and trans people of colour (SDQTPOC1) cultural events.
And this is happening now, and it happened twenty years ago. When I moved to Toronto in the 1990s, I was schooled and healed by local psychiatric survivor organizing and coalition building with disability, poor people’s, and First Nations/people of colour movements. On my wall hangs a flyer for a Desh Pardesh–sponsored queer South Asian event on community-based healing offering childcare, free tokens, and a wheelchair accessible space held in the year 2000—putting to rest the notion that caring about disability or ableism is a new thing in our communities.
I wanted to begin to write down the stories I remember, inspired by the working-class femme historianship of the writer Joan Nestle, who recorded working-class femme, sex worker and queer and trans histories in her writing, blending her personal experience and community-based research. I am proud to ground myself in a tradition of grassroots intellectualism and working-class, disabled history.
In working on this article, I realized a couple of things. I realized that I or someone probably needs to write a book about this. I realized that whatever I can record right now will be useful, but clearly the product of one person’s experience—a forty-year-old queer AFAB mixed Sri Lankan/Irish/Roma sick and disabled and Crazy mixed-class femme documenting the organizing and cultural moments I have personally experienced because it is what I currently have the capacity to do in this article. I did not include material about stuff coming out of agencies like Across Boundaries (Toronto’s long-running and only POC mental health agency, where Andrew Loku hung out) because I have not hung out or been in community there. There are a million more stories I could tell, and want to: the stories of Camp SIS insisting on ASL and access in their annual Pride shows and the presence of disabled queer women of colour at those shows and organizing collective; Unapologetic Burlesque’s radically deep access, from ASL to live captioning to greeters welcoming those not already knowing everyone in the community; MADPOC’s 20teens’ organizing of Crazy identified people of colour, led by queers; GAYASL and ORAD’s queer ASL classes that many hearing and Deaf QTBIPOC began taking in 2011, leading to some combating of audism within hearing SDQTPOC and QTPOC communities; Accessexable’s work trying to create crip-made accessible sex parties. This is a partial, incomplete history that does not claim to be definitive or the only one. I hope it will be of use.
When I moved to Toronto in 1996/1997 as a young, queer, cis, femme, brown, Crazy, soon to be disabled twenty-one-year-old, I did it for a lot of reasons: the vibrant queer people of colour organizing and cultural scene, Sri Lankan community, Desh Pardesh, my lover, the fact that I could afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment with a backyard to grow vegetables, a liveable wage eventually once I got papers. But I also came into a community where disability and being a psychiatric survivor and/or abuse survivor were things that were talked about, organized around, not silences in our radical QT Black and Brown movements and communities.
One of my first activist commitments was writing for, editing, and distributing Bulldozer Community News Service, founded in 1980, and formerly known in early incarnations as Prison News Service and Bulldozer. Bulldozer Community News Service was a radical newspaper that defined its constituencies as prisoners and former prisoners, psychiatric survivors, First Nations people, people of colour, and poor people. It was named Bulldozer after the paper’s motto: “The only vehicle for prison reform is a bulldozer!”
In its incarnation as Prison News Service, the paper had been one of the most important North American prison justice papers in the 1980s and 1990s and had developed a strong analysis linking group homes, psychiatric prisons and criminal prisons as part of the same system—years before radical academics would use the term “carceral systems.” White, disabled queer writer Eli Clare would ask in his 1999 book Exile and Pride,2 with wistfulness: What would have happened if the disability and prison justice movements had built alliances in the 1980s, recognizing that prisons and psych institutions and hospitals and nursing homes all lock away people the WSCCAP3 wants contained? Well, in Three Fires territories, some of us had asked that question, and organized around it, in 1996. We were a super working-class, racially mixed collective of young queer people of colour, older white working-class ex-prisoners, sex workers, current or former drug users, and survivors of abuse and psychiatrization. While we might not have seen ourselves as a disability group, disability, PTSD, and madness were deeply interwoven to the social justice journalism we did.
And we talked, and wrote, about our experiences as survivors of childhood sexual abuse, PTSD, and madness. Jim Campbell, the main editor and longest standing collective member (who funded Bulldozer/PNS almost solely on his wages as a city meter reader), was particularly brave and tone setting in talking about recovering his memories of being sexually abused as a child in his white, working-class/farming rural community in Northern Ontario and the connections he drew between childhood sexual abuse and colonization, oppression, and prisons.4 Issues of Bulldozer from 1997 contained unsigned (because we wanted to evade surveillance by CSIS) articles about how to survive going crazy in jail through books, meditation, and herbs, sex work organizing against NIMBY (not in my backyard) restrictions trying to move street-based workers out of areas where they worked, First Nations organizer Dahkajawaea’s recent tour to Toronto, and youth of colour breaking out of a new boot camp-style youth jail.
Parkdale, a now heavily gentrified neighbourhood in Toronto, was, in the 1980s and 1990s, filled with working-class and poor Black and Brown people, and known as “Canada’s biggest psychiatric ghetto” (many of whose members were also Black and Brown). With the development of long-lasting injectable and pill-based psychopharmaceuticals in the 1960s and 70s, 999 Queen West, aka Queen Street Mental Health, had moved from locking up all its inmates to releasing them into group homes in the community, where you would get a daily allowance of your ODSP or welfare doled out and your meds monitored (these were still policed places). This was voiced as a humanitarian effort, but it was really a profit-maximizing one. However, de-institutionalization allowed Crazy people to get together, move more freely, organize about our conditions, and talk about whether we were actually crazy the way the psych system had said we were, or whether maybe we were kinda, but we also had survived abuse, residential school, colonization, and migration.
Psychiatric Survivor Pride Day was a locus of psych survivor/madness activism in Toronto in the late 1990s. Founded in 1993 by Lilith Finkler, a queer, working-class Libyan Jewish psych survivor and Parkdale Community Legal Centre’s Psychiatric Survivor Community Legal Worker, Parkdale Legal was the free, social justice–focused legal clinic, a lifeline so many in Parkdale depended on for help with immigration, the criminal legal system and the psych system, or all three.5 Parkdale CLC was one of the only legal clinics in Canada with a specific focus on mental health law. Parkdale Legal was what helped process my immigration paperwork and helped me when my partner got abusive. The waiting room was a hot spot of poor, of colour and Crazy community—you ran into everyone there trying to see a worker. And their community legal workers both provided free legal services to poor folks and did community organizing as part of their paid work. (Imagine that.)
Lilith was a tireless working-class, queer, crazy, femme organizer of colour. She taught me so damn much. One of my strongest memories of Lilith is her hanging out and organizing at the Country Site Cafe, a doughnut shop opposite the Gladstone Hotel where many poor people and/or psychiatric survivors hung out. (This was all pre-gentrification/white/upper-middle-class invasion and displacement in Parkdale. Poor people lived in the Gladstone, paying rent by the week, and had built a strong poor people’s community there.) The doughnut shop’s position across from the Gladstone and a ten-minute walk from Queen Street Mental Health and many folks’ homes in Parkdale made it a popular hangout for broke psych survivors wanting coffee and a beef patty, and a place to hang out. Lilith would greet every person in the doughnut shop by name, talk with them, hand them a flyer for Psych Survivor Pride Day Organizing Committee’s meetings, and sometimes offer free legal advice about forced treatment orders or disability benefits in a corner of the coffee shop. She loved everybody hard, she loved other Crazy people, and she taught me so much by watching her Crazy femme of colour working-class survivor organizing skills.
I went to those meetings as a Crazy, broke, barely making it twenty-two- and twenty-three-year-old queer brown girl. Those meetings were some of the first meetings where I ran into what I and others would name hallmarks of disability justice culture: free food, free tokens, a physically accessible space, organizing happening at the pace and from the needs of the people doing the organizing, and the belief that Crazy people were capable of doing organizing, that we were competent. I walked, with fibro, from my house at Dupont and Dufferin to the clinic at Dufferin and King—about three miles each way—until a horrified Lilith found out and gave me a week’s worth of tokens. Not two tokens, but ten. These were like gold to me. Organizing happened crip style, and slow, with breaks when someone lost their shit or needed to throw up or cried. And the organizing happening from our ideas and needs—not being imposed on us from above like much social service “community engagement” projects turned out to be.
And while like in much psych survivor organizing, there were white, cis, straight Crazy dudes who sometimes tried to dominate, in my memory the majority of the participants were Black, Brown and Native women, many of whom were queer. And we were led by Lilith, who was upfront about setting a deeply working-class, POC, queer, Crazy agenda, and who was great at telling a white Crazy dude to stop yelling at a Brown Crazy woman. It was from her queer brown craziness that the idea of a Psychiatric Survivor Pride Day had come—she reasoned, queer people had come up with the idea of Pride, not shame, and psych survivors were both often queer and had a lot of shame to overcome.
The years I was a part of Psych Survivor Pride Day, we had a day-long conference at the Parkdale Library, a wheelchair accessible community hub, with know your rights (about housing, jobs, dealing with welfare, and dealing with the psych system and forced treatment) and healing spaces, a delicious free lunch that everyone tried to take home, and an unpermitted march down the middle of Queen Street. I remember a whole bunch of crazies, including maybe QT/POC, holding signs and balloons that said NO FORCED TREATMENT and PROUD TO BE CRAZY, marching to a boarding house which had recently caught on fire and killed six psych survivors. The impact of seeing a bunch of nuts being a people, marching with dignity and resistance to mourn our dead, assert our humanity and demand our right to be Crazy without punishment, had a huge impact on those marching and those watching from the sidewalks.
Lilith would leave her job and Peggy Gail Dehal-Ramson, a queer, femme Indo-Caribbean organizer, would take her place, changing the name of Psych Survivor Pride Day to Mad Pride and continuing the tradition of Toronto psych survivor organizing with leadership by queer women of colour.
Edmund Yu was a broke Chinese immigrant man who was a psych survivor. In February 1997, normative people on the Spadina streetcar complained that he was “acting abnormally.” Someone called the police. Edmund pulled out a small hammer he used to crack open nuts, and the police shot him dead.
Organizers in Toronto quickly called out Edmund’s murder as both racist and ableist—that the cops murdered him because of the interlocking oppressions he faced as a disabled/Crazy man of colour. Toronto disabled, Crazy and/or POC organizations such as Toronto Coalition Against Racism (TCAR), a group with many queer and trans women of colour organizers, World Majority Lesbians, Psych Survivor Pride Day and others organized a huge protest march that took Queen’s Park in 1997. Yu’s murder affected a lot of people a lot of different ways but became a focus point for folks to look at ableism and racism in police murder at the same time.
Creating Collective Access’s 2012 promotional blog post:
Creating Collective Access is at the Allied Media Conference again this year! This is our second year and we are growing! We are getting big and juicy! This shit is for real!!!
Are you a crip and/or someone with a chronic illness that is going to be in Detroit this summer for the Allied Media Conference?
We know that for many of us, access is on our minds when it comes to traveling, navigating the city, movement spaces, buildings, sidewalks, public transportation, rides, the air, the bathrooms, the places to stay, the pace, the language, the cost, the crowds, the doors, the people who will be there and so so so much more.
Would you like to be connected to a network of crips and our allies/comrades who are working together to create collective access?
What is collective access? Collective Access is access that we intentionally create collectively, instead of individually.6
Most of the time, access is placed on the individual who needs it. It is up to you to figure out your own access, or sometimes, up to you and your care giver, personal attendant (PA) or random friend. Access is rarely weaved into a collective commitment and way of being; it is isolated and relegated to an after thought (much like disabled people).
Access is complex. It is more than just having a ramp or getting disabled folks/crips into the meeting. Access is a constant process that doesn’t stop. It is hard and even when you have help, it can be impossible to figure out alone.
We are working to create mutual aid between crips and beyond! We try and work from an anti-capitalist framework. This framework is a big part of what holds us together. Last year, we shared food and resources, we found last-minute housing for each other, some of us fronted money for food and some of us who had long-distance phone plans made phone calls.
Things we are thinking about as possibilities for collective access in Detroit:
*collective eating and food gathering. having a central accessible place where we eat together. This space could also be kid friendly to help provide mutual aid for parents and their children. We may go on joint food runs to the grocery store or to pick up food and bring it back.
*collectivizing rides—pooling transportation for those who need it. helping to co-ordinate rides to and from places.
*sharing information/communication. helping us be in touch to share information (about access, ableism that is happening, workshops, resources, etc.), connect and provide a working network of crips through out the AMC.
The Network: We imagine that there will be pockets of planned access happening. We cannot anticipate or meet everyone’s medical or access needs and we are sure that for a lot of you, you have your PAs, folks who you feel comfortable with and trust already lined up. Our hope is to create a network that can connect these access pockets together. We hope we can help each other and share resources: you can’t walk long distance, but i can speed in my chair down to the end of the block and get food; i can’t read, but you can, so you help me find my workshop in the schedule; you can help make calls to organize the food gathering and eating, while i carry the food up into the room. We hope that together we can create a culture of collective access.
Creating Collective Access (CCA) Detroit was born in 2010 out of three queer disabled Asian Pacific Islander cis women’s deep revolutionary desires for kin, and out of our terror of how the hell we were going to survive the Allied Media Conference (AMC) and the 2010 US Social Forum, both held in Detroit, Michigan, as disabled QTPOC. Mia Mingus, Stacey Milbern and I were all working on the Disability Justice track of the AMC; Mia and Stacey were also working on creating DJ workshops and space at the US Social Forum. We were all on five conference calls a week, and we were all silently freaking out about how much these ten days of conference would destroy our bodies. It’s a familiar disabled thought pattern: no access to kitchen, not home with our PCAs and beds and strategies, in a super over-stimulating environment with little sleep, uncertain accessible transportation (Will the wheelchair access van even show up? Are the buses in this city really accessible, or just some of them?) and long walks and waits for food, crowded rooms, scents, and exposures. Until one day, three weeks out, when we were honest with each other during a check-in about how we were feeling. And we started dreaming this wild thing—crip-made access, made by QTPOC sick and disabled queers supporting each other, allowing each other to be cognitively different, a vent user, a cane walker, needing to lie down.
Within three weeks, we put up a blog, spread the word within our networks, and saw people respond from all over North America. Stacey was driving up from Fayetteville, North Carolina with her access van; she brought three folks from the Disabled Young People’s Collective and two paid PCAs who agreed to do care work for all of us. We asked to be put in suites together so we could build community. We made a scent-free suite; folks who didn’t have MCS used fragrance-free products for the weekend. Patty couldn’t travel, so she Skyped in to her presentation. We crammed fourteen people into an access van that was only supposed to hold four.
We committed to moving together. We had all shared an experience of being left behind—too sick to go out, building nonaccessible, too many exposures, not able to move fast enough to keep up with able-bodied people. So we stayed together, moving in a beautiful pack of cripness at the rate of our slowest member. We ate together in the common room. We went around and haltingly talked about our lives. Some people cried because it was the first time they’d been able to talk about disability—because of both ableism and the whiteness of most disabled spaces.
We worked on cross-disability solidarity in many marvellous ways. Teukie took Mia’s wheelchair and filled it up with takeout because she could walk to the shawarma place and back, bringing it back to the crip suite. Mia used her cis femme traditionally beautiful crip charm to get us access to the fridge and stove on the tenth floor. We gave each other permission to take the conference at crip speed. We had meetings lying down. We facilitated workshops lying on ice packs. We did not apologize or feel ashamed of our disabled QTPOC bodies.
Further, we used our collective power and the AMC’s relationship-based model to work with the AMC to build relationships that changed how AMC made the whole conference more accessible. They put a scent-free space policy in place, mail ordered unscented Dr. Bronner’s soap ’cause nobody in Detroit sold it. They emailed workshop presenters beforehand to ask them to integrate access into their space, three months before and a month before and a couple of weeks before.
It wasn’t perfect. Two paid PCAs who were nondisabled got really burnt out PCAing for twenty-two people for ten days. But CCA was small and huge. It changed the lives of everyone I know who was in it. We took the memory of it home to our home communities and used it in many ways to build disability justice community and activism.
And Toronto sick and disabled QTPOC folks were at the AMC. Detroit is a four-hour drive or five-hour bus ride from Toronto, and for the first time, in 2010, many Torontonian QTPOC began to attend this grassroots media conference, including SDQTPOC. We brought the experience—both of collective access, and of cross-disability crip space made by and for disabled queer women of colour—back to Toronto, dreaming what could be next. We had small gatherings of sick and disabled QTPOC to talk about our lives, bodies, and experiences of disability and ableism within society and our communities, racism and whiteness within Toronto’s disabled community. We talked shit, we gave each other the caring of listening, and we began to envision what building QTPOC community and access in Toronto could look like. As Toronto queers continued to come to AMC, Toronto SDQTPOC participated in CCA from 2010–12. The outcome is hard to pinpoint scientifically, but those years saw a broadening of conversations about disability among SDQTPOC in Toronto.
Sins Invalid is a Bay Area, California-based disability justice performance incubator. Founded by Patty Berne and Leroy Moore, two physically disabled Black and Black/Asian, queer and kinky artists and revolutionaries, Sins creates large-scale, all-disabled, broadly accessible performances about sex and desirability in the lives of sick and disabled people, centring queer and trans and/or Black and Brown people. Sins is one of the places many people heard the term “disability justice” for the first time and has been pivotal in using SDQTPOC performance about sex, eugenics, ableism and resistance as a way of building disability justice community. Cofounder Patty Berne, when I asked her why Sins decided to focus on performance art, said, “I could do a million workshops trying to convince nondisabled people of colour to care about ableism, or white disabled people to care about racism and our lives. Or I could make a three-minute performance that shows them their dreams and nightmares and turns them inside out.”7
I began performing with Sins in 2009 after watching their 2008 show and crying, coming and having my mind blown and life changed. Since our founding in 2006, our full-scale performances have all occurred in the Bay Area because the cost of accessibly transporting twelve disabled performers and many staff to another part of North America is usually prohibitive. However, beginning in 2010, we began to offer some touring of reduced versions of our shows—two to four performers, plus video—to college campuses and venues throughout North America. We usually offered a performance plus a disability justice workshop, viewing both as an organizing opportunity to share our vision of disability justice—centring people of colour and queer and trans folks and everyone usually marginalized in mainstream white disability organizing.
In 2011, Sins was approached by Syrus Marcus Ware, a queer, Black disabled trans artist, cultural worker, co-organizer of Blockorama and Toronto’s Prison Justice Film Festival and youth arts worker at the Art Gallery of Ontario, to bring Sins to Toronto, to perform at the AGO. Knowing Syrus’s groundbreaking work in Black disabled queer/trans culture, I was very excited that SDQTPOC and QTPOC communities in Toronto would be able to see a Sins show, live, for free, in a beautiful, accessible theatre.
The organizing process was not without challenges, primarily because of the racism of the rest of the organizing committee. Syrus went on parental leave, and this meant that four out of five of the disability studies academics who organized to bring Sins were white disabled people with a history of being racist to disabled Black and Brown folks in their disability studies programs. They showed their racism in many ways while we planned the show together: claiming they didn’t know any disabled QTPOC (despite having kicked out or harassed SDQTPOC in their program into leaving); asking Loree Erickson, a white queer disabled femme porn maker with decent anti-racist politics also on the committee, “You seem to know some disabled people of colour—can you invite them to join?”; saying to a Sins performer (me) during our disability justice workshop, “We’re aware we had a diversity problem—that’s why we invited you!”; and choosing to hold the after-party in a bar that, while being physically accessible, was also a white frat bar adjacent to U of T during Saint Patrick’s Day filled with drunk, white, straight able-bodied patrons and thus inaccessible to disabled QTPOC because we felt uncomfortable and unsafe. As we prepared to start the show, many Sins artists and SDQTPOC gazed nervously at the audience. White/nondisabled people made up more of it than we would’ve liked and many sick and disabled QTPOC, living in the immigrant suburbs or outer ring housing, dependent on the undependable Wheel Trans, came late to find the venue at capacity. This could have been prevented by creating priority or reserved seating for SDQTPOC at the show. These are the ways in which racist ableism plays out in micro and macro ways of organizing and cultural production.
However, it wasn’t all bad. Disabled QTPOC organized to house Sins artists and pick them up from the airport, hanging out and building connections. Sins artists and Toronto QTPOC artists ditched the party and hung out at a sushi restaurant together after the show. SDQTPOC came to the workshop and the performance in numbers, saying that it was literally a show they had been waiting years to see. And some SDQTPOC artists, namely myself, Syrus Marcus Ware, Eshan Rafi, Arti Mehta, and Nik Red, went out to brunch the Sunday after and, over gluten free crepes, shared stories of racism within white disability studies and our ideas for what a Toronto version of Sins could look like.
On January 17, 2013, Elisha Lim, a nondisabled, mixed-race, Asian genderqueer visual artist, made a public commitment via a Facebook event page to not attend any inaccessible events for one year. This action emerged out of Lim’s long-term friendship with Loree Erickson, a Toronto-based white, queer, femme, power-chair-using disabled porn creator and disability activist. “It was really personal,” said Lim. “I realized I’d been lying to Loree for a couple years where she’d be like, ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t know.’” The truth Lim wasn’t admitting was that they were going to events that Loree would not be able to go to because they were inaccessible. “I couldn’t bear to do it anymore. I decided that I wanted to boycott inaccessible parties just on my own. And then I thought, maybe this is an opportunity to make a public statement.”
Lim was amazed at the number of people who joined the Facebook event: 399 in the first week. People from across North America became aware of the action, and the Facebook page became an accessible hotspot for people to debate, collectively pool, and co-create new resources. The page was the first place I saw Toronto’s collectively created Google Doc listing accessible performance spaces, started by Toronto queer writer Sarah Pinder. The doc’s template was picked up by organizers as far away as Texas who wanted to create a similar resource for their communities.
“The best part about [the action] was the conversations and the fights,” said Lim, who faced criticism and backlash from some able-bodied queer and trans people of colour organizers who charged that Lim was hurting low-income QTPOC event planners who wanted to throw parties in inaccessible (but affordable) spaces or inaccessible houses. Lim and other organizers countered by reminding folks that most disabled people are poor too, and by researching and sharing info about affordable, accessible performance spaces, and where to rent a ramp for thirty-five dollars in Toronto (i.e., from Shoppers Drug Mart). The Facebook page for the event became a place where disabled QTPOC, nondisabled QTPOC, and white SDQs came together to argue and debate and learn and change people’s minds.
Participants also shared and discussed concrete, crip-made accessibility tools like billie rain’s fragrance-free event resources,8 the blog Building Radical Accessible Communities Everywhere9 about how to make a space that’s accessible except for the bathroom (rent a wheelchair-accessible Porta-Potty; take the hinges off the door; find a nearby space with an accessible bathroom that will let folks use it), and DAM 2025’s document “Affordable ASL for Community Based Organizations.” People drew on, shared, and built on the already-banked brilliance of low-income sick and disabled folks in creating the access we need.
“People fought a lot, and people really stood their ground. I feel like it became more trendy to ask, ‘Is this party accessible?’ Certain parties [like QPOC, a dance party] moved to accessible spaces because of the action. [S]paces that maybe weren’t as ‘cool’ became cooler because they were accessible. There was a cultural shift.” Erickson agrees, while noting that many people signed on to the document but few joined Lim in boycotting every inaccessible party. Both feel that the action was a way to use Lim’s able-bodied privilege and cultural capital as a popular nondisabled QTPOC artist to raise the profile of accessibility, instead of disabled people always being left with the role of challenging organizers about access and ableism. I agree. I saw this action and the resources it created as touching off a change, where QTPOC performances that were not specifically disabled or led by disabled folks began to provide detailed access info, be held at accessible venues like the Tranzac, Gladstone or Unit 2, and provide ASL or be prepared to face anger when they did not. It was no longer business as usual or ok in the same way for able-bodied QTPOC organizers to “forget” about accessibility.
Lim officially ended the Facebook event a year after it began. “I feel great because I don’t lie to Loree anymore,” they said. “To this day I don’t go to inaccessible parties, which means I often don’t go out at all. Sometimes I feel out of touch and lonely. But people with disabilities feel that way all the time.”
Remember that gluten free post-Sins brunch? It didn’t stop there. Through emails and texts, many failed and one successful grant application, Leah and Syrus hatched a plan to launch a Toronto-based, QTPOC-majority disability art collective, Performance/Disability/Art (or PDA). Our QTPOC performance show, Crip Your World: An Intergalactic 2QT/POC Sick and Disabled Extravaganza, brought ten sick, disabled, Deaf and Mad video and live disability justice performance artists from Toronto and across North America together for a sold-out show at the 2014 Mayworks festival. We planned and carried out a cross-disabled, QT/POC-centred arts retreat for sick, disabled, Mad, and Deaf mid-career artists, The Great Disability Arts Retreat, in Fall 2014. Consisting of eight weeks of workshops where we’d meet, hang out and talk about our work as disabled and Deaf writers and artists, and, well, what it means to be a crip writer or artist in a world where we’re so assumed to be unable to create and where there are so many invisibilized and very apparent ableist barriers to our being able to be creators. Our latest show, PDA Takes Over the Artists’ Newsstand, was a case in point: invited to perform in an inaccessible venue (the Artists Newsstand, a takeover of an unused newsstand in the inaccessible Chester subway station), we highlighted its inaccessibility by creating a crip arts march from Broadview, the closest accessible subway station, and by filling the subway station with disabled art, ASL interpretation, many people sitting and taking up space with our scooters, wheelchairs, canes, pain, signing and Madness.
We continue to meet, create, and perform on a crip basis—“as spoons allow” as co-creator Syrus Marcus Ware says. I believe our small, important space has helped other sick and disabled arts spaces populated by QTBIPOC grow. I would like to believe our work makes other SDQTPOC artists feel like they can throw a big show, write a big complicated work. Writing about our arts practice makes me think about many questions about disability justice arts practice. What does it mean to make disabled art space that is richly Black and Brown, poor, cross-abled, with childcare, cheap, and moving at the slow, sick, cancelling, Access-a-ride broke down pace of our bodies? Often, it means not producing at the “hot shot,” “ambitious” able-bodied pace of abled arts practice, even abled QTBIPOC practice. Are we seen as less serious because of that? How can we keep insisting on our slow moving, strong and vulnerable SDQTPOC arts practice? This chapter is still being written, and we are excited to keep writing and performing it.
When I was working on booking the Mangos with Chili’s 2013 Toronto show, I listened to myself as I explained to my co-director that not only was it simply the right thing to do, we would have to have ASL because people, both hearing and Deaf, folks of colour would be outraged. That the culture had shifted—not at all fully, and not automatically, but through years and decades of cross-disability and Deaf cultural activism—and it was no longer just acceptable business as usual to have queer performances in inaccessible spaces. People who did could expect resistance and a community raising our voices in anger.
And I was rewarded. At the show, there was a line of signing folks right up front, parents holding kids watching burlesque, many wheelchair users with nice wide rows, fragrance-free seating and frag-free soap in the washroom, an accessible toilet seat brought in by a performer on their lap in the cab to the show, folks who left halfway through because they got too tired, youth and elders.
As disabled QTPOC, there are so many things we don’t control. But sometimes, we can control the stage. The Toronto Mangos show was the disabled QTPOC centring movement and community I want to live in and make art for and with. It was the opposite of an inaccessible performance space filled with able-bodied, nonparenting, young white queers. It was a cross-disability, parenting and mixed-class community for three hours where I felt like all my parts could come home, where I was not isolated from other disabled, deaf, chronically ill and/or Crazy folks because of the walls ableism enacts to separate us from each other and forcibly isolate us. That show and that crowd, it was the world to come. Made by sick and disabled QTPOC genius. May there be many future ancestors to come.