Making Pride Disability Inclusive

Joeita Gupta:
I'm Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse. We've just wrapped up Pride Month. Pride is a celebration of LGBTQS2 identity and a recognition of shared struggle. Though diversity and inclusion are important pillars of Pride, sadly, Pride Month too often overlooks LGBTQS2 members with disabilities. Accessibility issues are present in gay bars, parties, Pride parades, as well as protests and rallies. The physical spaces of many of these events present obstacles for people with physical disabilities or with sensory sensitivities. The fundamental meaning behind Pride is for everyone to be proud of their bodies, sexuality, and physical appearances. However, the same invitation is too often denied to LGBTQ people with disabilities. Today, we discuss making Pride disability-inclusive. It's time to put your finger on The Pulse.
Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI-audio. I'm Joeita Gupta, joining you from Accessible Media Studios in Toronto. We've just wrapped up Pride Month and at least in Toronto and I suspect all across Canada, we had a lot of big events and celebrations, lots of rallies. There was a street market just steps away from where I live, tons of flags, tons of T-shirts, tons of visibility for the Pride, for the LGBTQS2 community, but there weren't, at least to my reckoning, a lot of people with disabilities who were at the front and center. Now, this could just be me, but it just so happened that a guest that you have previously heard on the program recently wrote an article for The Conversation. Alan Martino, who you might remember from a previous episode of The Pulse, is now an assistant professor in the Cumming School of Medicine Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary.
When we last spoke, he was all the way in Toronto. Now he's trekked all the way to Calgary and his article, Making Pride More Inclusive Means Creating Space for 2SLGBTQS People With Disabilities, recently appeared as an article in The Conversation. Alan, hello and welcome back to the program. I am so happy you came back.

Dr. Alan Martino:
Oh, thanks for having me again. It's such a pleasure to talk to you today and yeah, thanks for making the space for me.

Joeita Gupta:
It's always nice to see when we have guests back on the program that they've had some changes in their life, hopefully all good things. Now you've moved all the way across the country to Calgary. Tell me a little bit about how you're settling in and how things are going for you in Calgary.

Dr. Alan Martino:
I keep saying to people that Calgary has actually a lot more to offer than we expect. I'm loving the community here. I made so many connections with different community partners here. It's been such an exciting time. People are really wanting to talk about disability, sexuality, gender, so it's been such an easy match, which is always fantastic.

Joeita Gupta:
You'll excuse me because I have the bias of a Torontonian where I think, well, Toronto's the center of the universe, which obviously it's not, but when it comes to accessibility and disability inclusion, what is it like for you in Calgary?

Dr. Alan Martino:
Yeah, it's interesting. There are some differences for sure in terms of access to spaces and communities. Calgary has a few limitations in that way, but what I found is that people are being so friendly and so patient. There's, again, that desire for self-advocacy. There's that desire for more significant change and learning lessons from other provinces. But even, there are some surprises along the way. I was recently in Saskatchewan and I learned that they have these amazing campaigns about disability and sexuality. They are so progressive and interesting. So there are some surprises along the way here in the Prairies.

Joeita Gupta:
Well, the producer and me started purring in delight when you said Saskatchewan has all these great campaigns. See, as soon as we're done talking about disability inclusion in Pride, once the show is over, I'm probably going to say, "Okay, Alan, now tell me who you talked to because I want to get them on the show." So Alan, I read your article in The Conversation and I guess that's the best place to start. What got you thinking about issues of disability inclusion in Pride Month because that's just wrapped up across the country, and what is it that got you thinking about the exclusions in Pride month?

Dr. Alan Martino:
Yeah. I would say two things. One, my own experiences as a queer person with certain invisible disabilities made me think about my own experiences trying to navigate this community and feel like I belong here. But also, I worked a lot of community as a community-based researcher and I often got requests from self-advocates, people with lived experiences, family members and service providers about how do we support 2SLGBTQ folks with disabilities in the community. Sometimes I would hear some hesitancy from folks. They would be like, "Come on. You're telling us that people with disabilities are sexual and now you're telling us that there are sexualities in the plural. Is it not everyone is heterosexual?" I'm like, yeah, exactly. There was also sometimes an assumption that talking about sexuality isn't plural for people with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities. It's going too far or it's too much. So that really made me like, let's do a research where we actually ask people who are at this intersection about their experiences and challenges.
Are they finding community? How are they learning and making sense of their identities, their experiences? As a queer person myself, I know how hard it is, it can be as a teenager growing up and feeling like you're different, like you don't belong or dealing with bullying. It's a very lonely time for a lot of people. So I wanted to understand people's experiences and I found lots of commonalities actually.

Joeita Gupta:
You say there are commonalities. What sort of commonalities would you say there are between the experiences of the queer community and some of the isolation that people with disabilities deal with on an ongoing basis?

Dr. Alan Martino:
Yeah. It's very interesting. As [inaudible 00:06:28] communities, queer people and disabled people, there's a lot of shared history along the way, the history of being medicalized, apologized, seen as deviant, treated as different, being given words that are derogatory and now reclaiming some of those words like queer for example. So we have some shared histories, but also in the community when I talk to people who are at this intersection, it was amazing to see how none of them, not a single one of them, for example, had any information about queerness in their sex education classes. This is something that is shared by non-disabled people as well, but it really stood out to me as, first of all, we are not talking about disability in sex education and now we're not even talking about queerness and gender identity. So there is gap here.

Joeita Gupta:
Well, you're saying when disabled people talk about sex, we're not talking about queerness. Why is that?

Dr. Alan Martino:
Exactly. Part of it is people just assuming that people with disabilities, especially people with intellectual disabilities cannot understand sexual identity. They don't understand. They're childlike in a sense. They have no sexuality, no sexual desires or the simple assumption that everyone is heterosexual. Sometimes even in my field work, I've seen moments where two queer people with disabilities will be treated as just best friends. Oh, they're just best friends, that's why they're holding hands. And I'm like, "No. Mike and Johnny are actually making out at the back of the building every time they have a chance. It's more than just a friendship." So sometimes that infantilization as well, that assumption that people cannot identify as queer and it's a big challenge as well. A lot of participants actually talked about how even when navigating queer spaces, one of the challenges is that they're not seen as being queer enough or even being queer.

Joeita Gupta:
Right.

Dr. Alan Martino:
They're just disabled.

Joeita Gupta:
That disabled identity almost subsumes other facets of someone's identity. But the LGBT, the whole movement around Pride is a recognition of sexuality, bodily autonomy, diversity within the movement itself. Why does this absence persist in the way that it has? Because it's not the first time I've heard this particular complaint about people with disabilities being left out of Pride celebrations, and you'll forgive the pessimism, but it may not be the last time we hear this complaint either. So what's going on there?

Dr. Alan Martino:
Yeah. I think first of all, there's not a lot of communication between communities. What participants often told me is that in disability-related spaces, they could only be disabled or they were only seen as disabled. And sometimes in queer spaces, they can only be queer, for example. There's very little recognition that people can be both, first of all. Services are not talking to each other. For example, if they want a service that is about gender identity, in disability support services, they will not get a lot. So they have to go into a whole different sector to find information. So these sectors already not talking to each other, which I think is a big issue. The other part too is that we're still not thinking about accessibility in a broader way. Sometimes I still hear from community people that accessibility is simply having a ramp at the back of the building.
We all know that accessibility and access is way more than that. It's actually about meaningfully engaging and inviting people into the spaces. It's about thinking about accessibility in terms of noises, colours, [inaudible 00:10:02], spaces, community. So it's much more than just building a ramp at the back. I think that's one of the biggest issues that I've seen still sometimes with Pride parades or Pride-related events, is that we're not thinking creatively still about how can we invite community in a way that feels right to their bodies or their minds. Why is it that we always just do the same kind of events over and over again?

Joeita Gupta:
And why is it that access seems to stop at having the accessibility van and even there it seems to fall short? What needs to change about how we plan Pride events so that more people with disabilities are included in that?

Dr. Alan Martino:
I think people with disabilities know what we need in terms of making spaces more accessible, so I think taking some of those lessons. For example, participants constantly told me that they wish they had more quiet spaces to celebrate Pride, like being in a space where they could just play board games and be queer and feel liberated in that space with others. So protesting and being a part of queerness and queer community, it doesn't have to mean always just marching outside and holding a banner. I think what people are telling us is that protesting can take various shapes. It can be me writing a blog post, for example, and mobilizing that. It means being active in online communities where I feel more comfortable. So we need to challenge what we think about community, how we mobilize, and ask people in the community about what their needs are, but also walk the walk. It's not just about talking the talk, but we actually need to make changes.

Joeita Gupta:
I remember in Toronto some years back, there was a lot of, I don't want to say scandal, but maybe controversy around Pride and the inclusion of police in the Pride parade. The Black Lives Matter movement and their allies really organized on a grassroots level to try and get that changed in Toronto. In fact, I believe they were successful in getting that changed in Toronto as saying that police should not be marching in the Pride parade. Because I just wrapped up an interview with another guest and they said that it's past the point where we have to stop being polite about disability, do you think maybe part of the reason we're not seeing the change that we all agree is needed is maybe because we're not being assertive enough within the disability community calling for some of these changes?

Dr. Alan Martino:
It's hard to say too because it's hard when you're facing, for example, ableism in spaces that don't see you as a sexual person, don't see you as a queer person or queer enough. Sometimes it's a lot of violence that we face and in various ways, emotional, no messages that you receive like you don't qualify as a desirable queer partner. All those things take a toll on us and I think that it also needs to be acknowledged. It makes very difficult to push back a lot of times. I think that as a queer community, we should not shy away from having conversations about intersectionality. One of the things that we need to be very careful, for example, is sometimes when we bring the issue of race in queer space, in some queer spaces, we are seen as being divisive. We want to divide the community, but I think that it's the opposite. We want to bring the community together by acknowledging our differences and appreciating those differences.
So every time when I raise my hand and I'm like, "We need to think about accessibility" or "We need to think about disability," that comment should be welcoming to that space. It should be appreciated. I think that also needs to change. It's a two-way street. I think queer disabled people are doing such amazing work already. For example, there's so many YouTube channels now by queer disabled people who are sharing lessons about how to make spaces more inclusive, what things they wish they had known earlier in their lives, and talking to younger people who are now at this intersection. There's so many now books. There are TV shows like special. There are podcasts like Disability After Dark with Andrew Gurza. There's so much material out there. So it's not even like we don't know these things or don't have the resources. I think that it falls through queer spaces and queer communities to also educate ourselves about all this material, all this knowledge that is out there already.

Joeita Gupta:
But also bearing in mind that disability isn't just something that happens to a group of people and they're over there and they've got their special needs, because again, just in speaking to another interviewer, I love that quote where she said, "The world is divided into two groups of people, those who are disabled and those who will be disabled." So when we start to think about access and inclusion in a more universal sense as a human condition that everybody's going to, at some point, become disabled in their lives or they know somebody who's disabled, do you think there's some scope to... Instead of talking about making Pride more accessible and having ramps and checking off the boxes, maybe what we need to do is actually have a conversation about making Pride more inclusive. Because when you talk about [inaudible 00:15:11] in a quieter space, I was thinking, well, it's not just people with disabilities who might want that.
If you have a small child and you think they're getting a little too excited, maybe you'd want to take them over to a quiet place and have them play board games. So what's the value in thinking about universal design and inclusivity broadly when we think about Pride?

Dr. Alan Martino:
Absolutely. I think what I love most about disability in the work that disabled activists are doing is that people are showing that there are ways that we can do things differently and how everyone benefits from those. So for example, one of the things that my participants often talk about is how when they want to talk about their gender identity or their sexual identity, they often had felt that they had to fit the script that exists. This is one way of being queer and be eligible to enter this group. But I think some of them were also challenging that very script. It's like, why do I need to learn to be queer in a particular way to fit in? Why can't I just be queer in my own way? For example, for some people, it was about a lot of communication. Before having sex or having any kind of relationship with others, they would be very clear about what felt right to their bodies, what didn't.
I know every time I heard that, it was like, everyone in this world should benefit from this, having clear communication and be able to articulate what you like, what you don't like, what feels good or comfortable or doesn't. So to me, that's what I like about it too. How about these things that we can learn and change that actually benefits everyone?

Joeita Gupta:
Yeah, that's a good point. Speaking of change, and feel free to tell me that I'm absolutely wrong about this, my feelings will not be hurt, but I think that just looking back at the Pride parade and the celebrations around Pride in Toronto, Alan, I think those have changed a lot in the last 20 years. I feel like in the mid 2000s when I started university, I really felt it was more a grassroots community type of event, but I just feel that in the intervening years, decades even, it's become a lot more commercial. You're seeing a lot of big companies jump on Pride and you've seen a lot of corporate sponsorship and a lot of money flow towards Pride.
If I'm not entirely wrong about this, so with the caveat that I could be entirely wrong about this, but do you think that the commercialization of Pride and the corporatization of Pride has maybe made it more challenging to make Pride disability-inclusive, whereas 20 years ago, we might have been more able to have those conversations and more able to pivot and more able to make changes because it was a grassroots community activists coming together and celebrating Pride Month?

Dr. Alan Martino:
I think it's a very fair critique to make. I certainly noticed the same thing. I think there's critique around Pride movements and Pride parades now being taken over by companies that changed their logos to rainbow colours for this one month a year. Then as soon as July is here, we just change back to what the way things were. We know, for example, even from people in the community that people that cannot be open about their families in their workplace, for example, so they might try to use words like partner as a way to avoid, for example, saying that it's he or she or anything else. So it's still so real and I think that it's really unfortunate that we know that the Pride parade really started as a much more radical, kind of political grassroots and it's been really led by people of color, by trans people.
These are folks that are the most silenced now or the least represented sometimes even. There's studies about queer spaces and what is called hierarchies of desirability. What is interesting is even when we look at queer spaces and the bodies that are privileged in the spaces, it's usually white, thin, non-disabled male bodies that are privileged in these spaces. This reproduces also a lot of [inaudible 00:19:22] violence towards people who do not fit that criteria. So you feel like you're not part of this community or you feel like you're less than or you're less likely to land a partner of your dreams or to have the nights that you wanted to have. And again, I guess that's where it brings back to my own experiences as a person of colour trying to navigate spaces where being a person of colour and queer is not usually putting us at the top of the list.
It's very clear. We all know it. It has such an impact on how we feel about ourselves, what is possible. I see some very similar, parallel with folks that I talk to in the community with disabilities where they are comparing themselves to this kind of a dominant image of what the best, the ideal is and you just cannot fit that. It fits that, whether you don't have the body or the skin colour or whatever it is. It takes a huge toll on people, really huge toll. So even in terms of representation, that was another big theme in the research. People are constantly telling us, "I don't feel represented. I don't feel represented in mainstream media. I don't feel represented in this queer spaces or disability spaces. I want to feel represented."

Joeita Gupta:
Right, and it goes beyond a question of simply representation because Alan, when you talk about people with disabilities who are also queer, they also continue to face a great deal of systemic and institutional violence because they occupy those multiple marginalized identities. What would you say is the benefit beyond simply making Pride, it's one month out of the year, inclusive of people with disabilities? What benefits would you say would accrue to people with disabilities who are queer if Pride makes more of an effort, shall we say, to try and be inclusive of people with disabilities?

Dr. Alan Martino:
I think it sends a message. It sends a message that we do not only simply welcome people with disabilities in quotes, but we actually invite and meaningfully engage with the disabled people in the spaces. Because it's one thing just simply [inaudible 00:21:31] we welcome people here, but what does that actually mean? Does it mean actually going to organizations like they are, for example, more disability-focused and being like, "We have all these events. These are the things that we're trying to do to make it more accessible. Do you have any other ideas? Are there ways we can cooperate? How can we make this space better so folks here can come here? How can we create more partnerships?" We have spaces or service providers creating resources, but they're not thinking again together. Sometimes I see a very interesting resources for people to understand sexual identity, but it's so inaccessible. It's not plain language. There's no other kinds of images to support some of the information and so on.
So how do we actually talk to each other much more and not just once a year, but really throughout the year? Because again, it sends a message to people with disabilities about what is even possible. I remember some folks that I talked to. They did not even see queerness as a possibility in their lives. They did not even have the vocabulary to talk about queerness or be able to say, "Maybe I am this" or "Maybe I can try this." It's to experience so much restrictions, so many restrictions and so many silences around queerness that it becomes almost like what one participant said. It's like imagine going to McDonald's and there's only McChicken. Of course, you're going to choose McChicken because that's the only option. But if you had a bigger menu of options, you might look at other options. You might contemplate or try. It might not be your thing, or it might be, but at least you know that you have this huge menu of options.
Again, with folks labelled with intellectual disabilities in the community, I don't think that's the case yet. People are raised with this assumption that you're expected to be this. You're expected to be straight and that's it.

Joeita Gupta:
Well, communication is key. Alan Martino, thank you so much for speaking to me today. It's always a pleasure communicating with you and I'm delighted you were able to make some time and come back to the program.

Dr. Alan Martino:
No, thanks for having me. Always a pleasure.

Joeita Gupta:
Alan Martino is an assistant professor at the University of Calgary. Well, folks, I got to run, but it was always a pleasure. Do leave me some feedback, especially about this conversation that we've just had with Alan Martino about queer and disability and about LGBT rights, Pride Month, and disability inclusion. I would especially love to hear from you because as a straight woman, I sometimes feel that maybe I'm not the best person to be having this conversation. So please, if you have any feedback about this particular episode, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. Now, there's a couple of ways in which you can reach out to us. You can write us an email, feedback@ami.ca. You can give us a call at 1-866-509-4545, 1-866-509-4545 and just leave us a voicemail. Sometimes it's nice to hear someone just leave a voicemail and be able to play that on the program. Just make sure you also give us permission to do that when you leave your voicemail, to say, "Hi. I'm so-and-so. I'm leaving a voicemail for The Pulse." We will definitely try and shoehorn that voicemail into the program.
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