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Kenny Fries finds parallels between evolution and his life experience in new book. (Photo courtesy of Carroll & Graf)
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KATHI WOLFE
Friday, June 08, 2007
For most of his life, gay writer and poet Kenny Fries only saw that he walked differently from able-bodied people when he looked down at his orthopedic shoes. Now, Fries, born in 1960 with bones missing in both of his legs, sees much more than this difference.
He remembers the places (from temples in Thailand to the Colorado River rapids running through the Grand Canyon), where his shoes, adapted to his different way of walking, enabled him to travel.
“The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory,” his newest work, defies pigeon-holing. Fries juxtaposes the story of his changing made-to-order shoes with a concise history of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s development of the idea of evolution. The author offers a travelogue as well as probing explorations of ableism (prejudice against people with disabilities), difference and adaptation.
Fries, like a growing number of gay and straight writers with disabilities, places disability within a context of civil rights, pride and culture. Though he has had pain from his impairment, Fries believes that disability is more than a medical issue. “What is a disability? Who is disabled? Who decides?” he asks.
Often this decision is made, not by the person with a disability, but by a non-disabled person, acting out of fear or ignorance, Fries argues. As a graduate student in New York and later in San Francisco, he was successful at finding sexual partners in gay bars. But once, a man decided “not to go home with me after he noticed my legs,” Fries writes, “… what made me disabled was not my bodily impairment but this man who decided to disable my body by choosing … not to have sex with me that night.”
JUST AS GAY people sometimes internalize homophobia, people with disabilities can be ashamed of being disabled, especially in approval-based situations like cruising a nightclub. When he first went to bars, Fries sat on a stool and avoided standing to keep his disability from being noticed.
“By deciding to remain stationary, in my mind I made myself nondisabled,” he writes. “As soon as I walked, I felt I would become disabled.”
Fries has also a completely opposite experience. After being photographed for a gay sex guide to portray a disabled men having sex, Fries learned that his disability “didn’t read” (wasn’t visible enough). His photos didn’t appear in the published guide. Instead, there was only “one fully clothed disabled man in his disability-signifying wheelchair,” Fries writes.
THIS ISN’T THE author’s first exploration of these themes. In 1997, he wrote the searing memoir “Body, Remember” and edited “Staring Back: the Disability Experience from the Inside Out,” a superb anthology of writing by people with disabilities.
“The History of My Shoes” is a fascinating edition to his developing oeuvre. With incisive passion, Fries argues that the ideas of Darwin and Wallace yield insights into how disability fits into culture. Disabled people adapt (as Fries does by changing his shoes to meet his needs) in order to survive just as species do. Because variation is important to evolution, “people with a physical difference” are important to the survival of the human species.
The shift between chapters on evolution and essays on Fries’ life is jarring at times and the writing on science can be a tad dense. But these are minor quibbles. “The History of My Shoes” will take you on a remarkable journey of memoir, disability and culture.
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