But, interestingly, there's this, about the priesthood and celibacy:
It would not have surprised Emilio Sandoz to learn that his sex life was discussed with such candor and affectionate concern by his friends. The single craziest thing about being a priest, he'd found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life.The single craziest thing about being blind, using a wheelchair, having an artificial limb ....
One of his linguistics professors, a man named Samuel Goldstein, had helped him understand the consequences of that simple fact. Sam was Korean by birth, so if you knew his name, you knew he was adopted. "What got me when I was a kid was that people knew something fundamental about me and my family just by looking at us. I felt like I had a big neon sign over my head flashing ADOPTEE," Sam told him. "It's not that I was ashamed of being adopted. I just wished that I had the option of revealing it myself. It's got to be something like that for you guys."
And Emilio realized that Sam was right. When wearing clericals, he did feel as though he had a sign over his head flashing NO LEGITIMATE SEX LIFE. Lay people assumed they knew something fundamental about him. They had opinions about his life. Without any understanding of what celibacy was about, they found his choice laughable, or sick.
When I was new to being visibly disabled, a teenager, I thought of this mixture of the inability to blend and being made to symbolize something outside my own true experience as a kind of odd celebrity. People stare wherever you go. You use back entrances, meet with managers (and busboys) to get into venues through long back hallways before arriving at your reserved seats, have special policies that apply just to you. I could be tardy to my high school classes because it was assumed the elevator made me late. (Of course, it was often the elevator.)
There was a special White House tour for crips when I visited DC with my family years ago. I was spotted and we were literally pulled out of the very long ticket line and told to just approach a particular gate at a certain time without need for passes. As instructed, we jumped the line at the Washington Memorial too. But I have no sense of whether our special gub'mint tour included extras or deprived wheelchair-using folks of something special I'd have liked to see. As far as I know, I didn't have the option of declining these services -- it was the "accessible" gimp tour or nothing.
Some of this has been alleviated by ADA compliance over the years. I don't know about the DC sites -- the last time I visited just as the ADA was passed and much had yet to change.
But the single craziest thing about my life with severe physical impairments has always been this bizarre social exchange about what would otherwise be a private aspect of my body and my life. Not just the architectural barriers that must be negotiated, but the prayers, the judgments and the self-conscious comments of others designed to satisfy curiosity or put themselves more at ease.
Steve Kuusisto has blogged a bit about this recently:
They've spotted the guide dog. They see you are by yourself. They are good hearted people. They want to talk about dogs or the fact that they have a blind uncle, or auntie, or they have a blind neighbor, or maybe their postman is blind and for some unknown reason he's still delivering the mail by touch and isn't this a miracle?Isn't it curious that the celibacy of priesthood, interracial adoption, being blind, and sitting on wheels all provoke remarkably similar public experiences? If you trust the fictional truth in the book I'm reading, that is. And I do. I do.
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