Marvellous Grounds by Jin Haritaworn

Author:Jin Haritaworn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Communities of Care and Healing

12 Toronto Crip City

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.

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