Remembering Tanis Doe, Chris Hewitt, Mary Frances Platt

First, let me introduce myself. I've been lurking here for sveral months. I'm a writer and disability activist. I've done a lot of work around the connections and intersections between LGBT (queer) identities and disability identities. I'm glad this community is here and am a fan of Joseph Shapiro's book No Pity, which I assume is where this community got its name.

Anyway, here's a bit of a memorial for Tanis Doe, Chris Hewitt, and Mary Frances Platt, all of them disabled queer writers and activists who I knew in person and/or through their work. But I knew none of them well. They have all died within the last 6 weeks.

At the Queerness and Disability Conference at SFSU in 2002, Tanis taught me the question when at a microphone, "For those of you who can hear, can you hear me," rather than simply, "Can you hear me?" Tanis is with me every time I do a gig, step to a mic, and ask. It's such a simple and right way to acknowledge D/deafness.

I knew Chris only through his work as a poet rooted in both crip culture and queer culture. The one time I heard him read live his voice lulled and rocked and held me. He wrote in "The Lifting Team":

Recently in the hospital,
and in great pain
from an accident
I had to be lifted:
bed to gurney, gurney to
x-ray table (brutally hard), table to chair.

Each time they sent for the Lifting Team:
Solomon, built like a football player with
a wide smile, and Merwin, smaller, agile,
a savvy bird. Each time Solomon would say,
(seeing the tenseness of fear on my face),
"Don't worry, you'll be alright."
Indeed, their arms held me in a firm cocoon,
I never felt the slightest pain.

When in death's last delirium,
I shall call on the Lifting Team.
They will arrive as angels at my bedside,
and Solomon will say, "Don't worry, you'll be alright."
And they will halt my ghastly nosedive into hell,
and lift me up, up, high up
into the field of stars.

Of course I hope Chris was held tight by his Lifting Team as he died.

Mary Frances is the hardest of the three to write about. I knew her the best and only learned of her death on Friday, well over a week after she died. She was a fierce, funny, deep, difficult femme. Here's part of an essay I wrote a couple of years ago; this section is about Mary Frances.

"All weekend we have been shouting slogans, singing songs, blockading doorways, being rude to cops, making as much noise as possible with the intent of disrupting the national Hemlock Society convention. Fifty crips and our nondisabled allies, we make it known in no uncertain terms that physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia put our disabled lives at risk. We say no loud and clear to Faye Girsch, head of Hemlock USA. She has said in support of 'mercy killing' that 'a judicial determination should be made when it is necessary to hasten the death of an individual whether it be a demented parent, a suffering, severely disabled spouse or a child.' We call ourselves Not Dead Yet, and when all the other slogans and songs dwindle away, we simply chant and sign 'We’re not dead yet. We’re not dead yet.'

"Amidst all the chaos—making placards, strategizing our next moves, working to figure out how to get into their conference rooms, passing out handcuffs to wheelchair users so they can lock their chairs together—you and I keep returning to each other. We flirt and joke and talk: talk about class, disability, queerness, writing, the freak show as crip history, talk and talk and talk. You a fat, queer, radical crip femme: as our blockade progresses, you park your three-wheeler among the jam of wheelchairs, lock your brakes, and fold your arms defiant across your chest. No one can get around you. Me a gimpy butch, shaved head and one ear pierced, shaky hands and slow speech: I’m a walkie—a crip who walks rather than rolls. Today the cops would love to arrest a walkie, easier than finding wheelchair-accessible transportation to the police department, easier than figuring out how to unlock wheelchair brakes and steer the power chairs of noncompliant gimps. So I hang back and watch, do support work, shoot the breeze with our lawyer, scope out which entrances are still unlocked. This is civil disobedience crip style.

"Through it all, you and I can’t get enough of talking, laughing, trading stories about queer community. I walk you back to your van at the end of the day. You call me a gallant butch. I give you shit for generalizing about femmes. You tell me about growing up white trash. I talk about being taunted. Your eyes take me in. I smile in return, my wide lopsided smile.

"Sunday as the convention winds down, we sit outside the hotel and make noise, using whistles, air horns, tambourines, our voices hoarse after two days of protesting. You and I watch a six-year-old kid in his bright red power chair. He wears a 'Crip Cool' baseball cap. His brothers hitch rides on the back of his chair. His nondisabled father wears an ADAPT t-shirt and has trouble keeping up as Sean motors through the crowd of gimps. We both know he could be another Tracy Latimer, a 12-year-old girl with severe cerebral palsy, killed by her father, who says he did it only to end her unbearable suffering.

"Something about how Sean moves—his wrists bent at odd angles, arms pulled tight against body, tremors catching his head—feels so familiar to me. His CP and mine are so far apart, and yet in him I can see my reflection—hands trembling, body slightly off center, right shoulder braced. You lean over and ask, 'What would it have been to grow up like Sean in the middle of crip community?' I can almost hear a dozen stories rise untold around us. I say joking, 'Don’t push it. You’ll make me cry, which I don’t do often and never in public.' You respond laughing, 'That’s what all butches say. But I know, you just need a pair of loving arms.' I try to banter but can’t, feel a lump form in my throat. I just look at you and start chanting again, 'We’re not dead yet.'"

I will miss Mary Frances.

In addition to missing, even grieving, Tanis, Chris, and Mary Frances in different ways, there's another thing. None of them were in my daily life, but I feel the loss of their presence in the world, feel the activist loss as much as the personal loss. I keep asking myself, "How do I honor these feelings I have for people I was half a step removed from?" It's an odd and not straight forward grief, different from what I've felt when loved ones have died and different also from what I felt when Gloria Anzaldua died earlier this year. She was a writer I deeply admired and whose work impacted me, but I didn't feel somehow personally close to her death.

All of it makes me remember the tangle of disability and death, death connected to bodily impairment, death connected to material and social conditions, death connected to isolation. Sad, just sad. I don't have many more thoughts. Just sadness. I wish I knew what I believed happened after death. I don't, but I will light a candle for Mary Frances.