Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability

Informative, defiant, upbeat and occasionally humorous, these essays, interviews and poems unblinkingly tackle a wide range of illnesses and medical conditions: birth defects, genetic and autoimmune disorders, AIDS, chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome, mental illness, deafness and recovery from accidents and assault. Marginalized by their sexuality and their disability, the contributors (who include established writers like Patricia Nell Warren and Nicola Griffith as well as novices) explore the complications that arise at the intersection of these two identities. Faced with homophobia within the healing professions, lesbians are often reluctant to seek medical intervention. Families sometimes blame an illness on a woman's sexual lifestyle. In most jurisdictions, a lesbian has no legal right to make medical decisions for her ill or injured partner, as Karen Thompson's eight-and-a-half-year battle to gain guardianship of her lover, Sharon Kowalski, so poignantly points out. Some of the problems come from within the lesbian community as well. ""I am not the strong, athletic, independent woman our subculture says we are all supposed to be,"" declares one essayist. Some contributors, such as Vicky D'aoust, who is deaf, do not consider their conditions disabilities while others champion in-your-face activist groups like ""Not Dead Yet."" Many feminists who have long fought for sexual and reproductive freedom may bridle at the anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia agenda of many contributors. Clearly, lesbians have no unifying political position, but they inhabit every imaginable type of body. (Nov.)