I tried to get into the Rialto again without success so I drove home in exasperation. I checked my email and discovered Paul Longmore had died on 9 August in the night – maybe some 24 hours prior. I was in shock and spent the day as if sleepwalking. I stayed at La Perla and wrote about Paul the next morning.
Paul Longmore changed my life. He came to visit Stanford in the fall of 1989. The director of the Disability Resource Center had been telling us disabled students that this great disabled historian was coming to check the place out prior to being installed as a visiting professor the following winter.
I had never met a disability rights activist before, and the time couldn’t be more ripe for me. I was just beginning to articulate the marginalization that myself and my disabled peers had faced by using the language and ideas of other civil rights movements. Paul came at the right time to support me on my course and to challenge me to go further.
During one meeting of the disabled students group that I had helped to start, I had carelessly used the words “devaluation” and “oppression” as if we all understood those terms the same. The backlash from my peers was intense and immediate. I recall the meeting breaking in disarray. I felt awful and a failure as a leader. Paul consoled me afterwards. “They’re just not ready for those words yet. You’re 100% right, but just be careful how you handle that language.”
Paul and I quickly became friends. I’d like to think we would have been close even without our common disability experience – but that is such a big part of both of us, it’s impossible to say. My favorite thing about him was his sense of humor. It could be ridiculously corny, playing off the most asinine puns. He’d look at me expectantly, out of the corner of his mischievous eye. If I didn’t respond right away – I didn’t want to incent his bad humor - he might kick me gently. But Paul’s deeper humor was his sense of irony. He could laugh at the most painful, tragic, gross or macabre things. “We have to,” he would tell me. “An ironic sense of humor is the cornerstone of disability culture.” I tested this over the years and time and time again found him to be right.
He theorized that due to our oppression we clearly see the duality of how things seem and what they are really like. When you can simultaneously see how others deem your life not worth living and know that your life is magnificent, humor seems a good response. Laughing outright is defensive or fake, and becoming despondent isn’t productive. The bittersweet chuckle with a lump in your throat is the crippled response.
I can’t go back to that time and do it all again so I’ll never know what I would have sorted out on my own or what Paul taught me. I know for sure that he hasted the process immeasurably. When I was 20, seeing Paul was like looking in the future and having a huge part of my identity reflected back. I suppose we can all do this to some extent with out parents, but it was different with Paul. He was like me in a way no one else was. And our common ground was the area I most wanted to explore and the terrain society said was least valuable about me. Boy is society stupid.
In my senior year, I took Paul’s history class. I knew most of the stuff informally from hanging around with him. As an activist professor, Paul was nothing if not holistic in his mentorship of young people with disabilities. At State I’d often see his mentees around and I would nod to myself, knowing what a privileged ride they were on. Paul had already changed my life and yet I had never even set foot in his classroom.
Speaking of classrooms, I remember trying to organize Stanford to build an electric door opener for him at History Corner. This was before the ADA came into effect – not that Stanford shouldn’t have been adhering to 504 or state laws. We got the door opener but the department did it begrudgingly with great hemming and hawing. This infuriated me, but not Paul. I learned a lot about pragmatic activism. “Look Mark, I don’t give a shit if they like it, at least now I can get in the damn door.”
After Paul’s class, I had to write my senior thesis. Of course it was going to be largely about disability. I never thought twice about having Paul as my advisor. I feel old now, but this was in 1992 so there really wasn’t much in the way of “disability studies” per se. It was just me and Paul discussing disability identity formation and Shakespeare. A student of mine just asked me a few days ago about my thesis, and even 18 years later, I was stunned at how important those themes Paul and I explored still are to me now.
After college, I took jobs in and out of the disability rights movement. When I needed a wise word, Paul was always there. In fact, I chuckle as I recall most of our phone calls starting like this: “Hi Paul, it’s Mark.” “Oh hi Mark, how are you? What do you need?” It was never testy, just simply him opening up the door. He always seemed to have time, or would call me right back.
In 2005 I think it was that Paul received the Henry B. Betts award for his activism. He asked me to be one of his three presenters. I was so honored to go on videotape to talk about the man whom I admired. Looking back now, I realize this was the only time I really ever thanked him. I wish I had said and done more, but that’s probably just for me. Paul, I believe, was proud of me, and this was enough for him. He was proud of who I had become as a man, as a person with a disability, as a leader, as an intellectual, and as an activist. And I was honored to make him proud. In fact, that’s the only thanks I can give him.
Some times I only talked to Paul maybe once a year. Other times it might have been every couple weeks. Recently we had been working together again. I’ve been working on a film that’s partly derived from my experiences coming to understand my disability. Paul, of course, had been intellectually, emotionally, and politically supportive. And I don’t think it was just altruism on his part. I know he loved me and wanted to support me, but we were also largely political allies. We’re both in the same movement, believing the same things, reaching for the same goals. He believed in my film and thought it will make a difference in the world. His passion and enthusiasm meant a lot to me and kicked my project into the next gear. It is with deep regret that I imagine Paul not seeing the project come to fruition. But I know that if I succeed in helping people to understand disability differently in their lives, it will mostly be due to Paul helping me to see mine differently.
Thank you Paul.
Mark
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