Books
Deaf, gay poet explores loss of a twin in new book
‘Once Upon a Twin’ ponders how life would differ if sibling had survived
“Asshole/battybat/big baby/blundering boob/…deaf & dumb/dick/dumbdumb/fag,” Deaf, gay poet and playwright Raymond Luczak writes in his poem “the easiest words to lipread in a schoolyard (even if you’re not deaf).
The poem appears in Luczak’s new book “Once Upon a Twin,” released this year by Gallaudet University Press.
Luczak, 55, who lives in Minneapolis, graduated from Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1988. He has written and edited more than 20 books, including “QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology,” the award-winning Deaf, gay novel “Men with Their Hands,” “The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips” and the drama “Snooty: a Comedy.”
Growing up wasn’t easy for Luczak. He grew up in Ironwood, a small mining town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
At eight months old, he lost his hearing due to double pneumonia and a high fever. This wasn’t detected until he was two-and-and-a-half years old. He was one of nine siblings in a hearing family.
At that time, many Deaf people weren’t permitted to communicate with their language – American Sign Language. Forbidden to sign, he was outfitted with a rechargeable hearing aid. There was no program for deaf children in Ironwood. For nine years, he stayed with foster families during the week in Houghton, a town two hours away. In Houghton he was in a speech therapy program.
Life opened up for Luczak when he enrolled at Gallaudet where he could communicate with American Sign Language.
In interviews conducted by email, Luczak talked with the Blade about a wide range of topics from coming out to what inspired him to write “Once Upon a Twin” to why Whitman would take selfies today.
Growing up as the only Deaf person in a hearing family was frustrating and infuriating for Luczak. “A classic situation: I’m sitting at the big kitchen table with all 11 of us, and everyone is talking at once,” Luczak said, “Where do I focus for lipreading? Why is my sister laughing? What was so funny?”
Luczak wants you to imagine what going through this for every meal would be like. It’s one thing if you endure this with strangers who know nothing about deafness, he said. But, it’s quite another thing if you’re with a family who should know better about your deafness.
“It’s as if they wanted to believe that my lipreading skills are so superior I didn’t need further assistance. Not true,” Luczak said. “I don’t have the ability to geolocate a sound so this explains why I cannot catch who is speaking and turn my attention in order to lipread that person.”
Language is a powerful bond for a community. In Milan, Italy in 1880, there was a conference on the education of the Deaf, Luczak said. There it was decreed that the use of sign language would be banned as a teaching method.
Up until then, “the Deaf community had a real Golden Age in which they came together through the establishment of Deaf residential schools, Deaf clubs and whatnot,” Luczak said.
It was devastating to the Deaf community when Alexander Graham Bell and his ilk made every effort they could to eradicate sign language, Luczak said. Luczak likens the attempt to eradicate sign language to the attempts made throughout history to force LGBTQ people to change their sexual orientation.
Luczak always knew that he was interested in men. Though, it didn’t have a name or specific feeling, and it had nothing to do with sex. He gradually came out, slowly, when he was in his teens.
Luczak came to Gallaudet University in the summer of 1984 and came out publicly a month later.
“What gave me the strength to come out were the first batch of books I’d bought from Lambda Rising [the LGBTQ bookstore that closed in 2010],” Luczak said. “That place was really my second home away from Gallaudet…And the fact that I was allowed to use ASL really gave me the self-confidence I had sorely needed all my life.”
Luczak in poetry, non-fiction, and plays has written in various styles from formal poetry to free verse about many topics from love to Thomas Edison to Walt Whitman to being queer. If Walt Whitman had a love child with a photographer’s eye, it would be Luczak.
In “Once Upon a Twin,” Luczak imagines what his life would have been like if he had a twin. Growing up, he knew that his mother had had three miscarriages, but he never asked her about them. When he was 16 “she mentioned that her third miscarriage happened in the same year I was born,” Luczak said, “and that it happened while she was sitting on the toilet. The fetus had apparently popped out.”
“I couldn’t get that image out of my head,” Luczak added.
Over the years, his mother told Luczak conflicting stories about the miscarriage. About 10 years ago, he looked into whether it was possible for a twin to miscarry and to have the other twin undetected in the womb. “It turns out that the ultrasound technology during the 1960s wasn’t advanced enough so the possibility was quite real,” Luczak said.
Luczak had long wondered how different his life would have been if his twin had survived. In 2018, he wrote a collection of formal verse. After that, he was eager to write in a different style. “Once I realized how I should write my next book (no formal poetry, almost no punctuation, etc.), it hit me that I really should explore the idea of my lost twin,” Luczak said.
“Would I feel as left out at family gatherings if my twin helped include me?” he said, “…Would my twin speak up for me?…I hadn’t dared to examine the possible changes in our family’s dynamics, and how it would’ve affected my self-confidence.”
Luczak was surprised by how easily the book wrote itself. It had been waiting a long time to be written.
Like queer poet Walt Whitman, Luczak’s creativity contains multitudes. In 2016, Luczak’s volume of poetry “The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips” was released by Squares & Rebels. Because Whitman wasn’t taught to him when he was in high school or college, Luczak had few preconceptions about Whitman. Other than, he said, that Whitman was a poet with a boyfriend who was a streetcar conductor. But when he read the opening of the “Song of my Self,” Luczak said “Whoa!”
“The poet had conjured a palpable vision of what America could be,” he said, “if Walt were alive today, he’d be sharing selfies and Tweeting away.”
“He loved having his picture taken; he had 127 photographs taken when Abraham Lincoln scored 128 photographs,” Luczak said, “in fact, Whitman was probably America’s first celebrity nude model!”
How does Luczak feel about being a Deaf, gay writer? It’s complicated. On one level, he doesn’t think of himself as a Deaf, gay writer at all. “I do mention this fact but that’s only because I need to stand out a bit more in a country that brings out thousands and thousands of new books each year. It’s a marketing angle,” Luczak said.
He hopes readers will recognize that he’s much more than just a Deaf, gay writer and accept his work as beyond those labels.
Yet, “I still feel proud of being a Deaf gay man,” Luczak said. “It’s enriched my life in ways that I don’t think anyone would’ve anticipated. It’s certainly led me to meet people I wouldn’t have met otherwise. For that I’m grateful.”
Raymond Luczak (Photo courtesy of Luczak)
Books
A rabid fan’s look at the best and worst of queer TV
‘Rainbow Age of Television’ a must-read for viewers
‘The Rainbow Age of Television: An Opinionated History of Queer TV’
By Shayna Maci Warner
c.2024, Abrams Press
$28/304 pages
Wanna hand over the clicker?
You don’t want to miss the season premiere of that show you binge-watched over the summer. You’re invested, a fan who can’t wait to see what happens next. You heard that this may be the last season and you’ll be sad, if that’s so. Is it time to start looking for another, newer obsession or will you want to read “The Rainbow Age of Television” by Shayna Maci Warner, and find something old?
Like most kids of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, Shayna Maci Warner spent lots of time glued to a television screen, devouring programming before school, after school, and all summer long. For Warner, that programming eventually led to a revelation. They saw people that looked like them, for which they formed “a personal attachment.”
It was “life-changing.”
It didn’t happen all at once, and some of TV’s “milestones” are forever lost, since broadcasts were live until the 1950s. Shortly after shows were taped and preserved, homosexuality became a “source of worry and blunt fascination” but certain performers carefully presented gently risqué characters and dialogue that nudged and winked at viewers.
Some queer representation appeared in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until the 1970s when dramas began to feature more gay and lesbian characters, however subtly. It took a while for “the ‘rest’ of the alphabet” to be represented in a meaningful way and – despite that “Star Trek” and its many versions included gender-diverse characters – it wasn’t until 1996 that an intersex infant was featured on a regular television drama.
Since Ellen DeGeneres came out practically on her namesake TV show and “Will & Grace” became a wild hit, queer representation on TV has ceased to be an unusual thing. And yet, programmers and writers know that caution is still warranted: sometimes, “there can still be hesitation around pushing the envelope and fear that a queer character who burns too brightly just won’t last.”
Quick: name three after-school TV shows that aired when you were in fourth grade. If you can’t do it, one thing’s for certain: you need “The Rainbow Age of Television.”
But get ready for some argument. Author Shayna Maci Warner offers a rabid fan’s look at the best and the worst queer representation had to offer, and you may beg to differ with what they say about various programs. That makes this book a critique, of sorts, but Warner offers plenty of wiggle-room for argument.
Tussling over the finer points of queer programming, though, is only half the fun of reading this book. Microwave a box of pizza snacks or mac-and-cheese, demand “your” sofa seat, and dive into the nostalgia of old TV shows, most of them from the later last century. Yep, your faves are here. It’s like having an oldies channel on paper, and in your hand.
This is a must-have for former kids and current TV addicts who are happy to see themselves represented on TV. If that’s you, who brought the chips? “The Rainbow Age of Television” will just click.
The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.
Books
Author rails against racism and desire, politics, loss
‘Rage’ explores being ‘Queer, Black, Brilliant’
“Rage: On Being Queer, Black, Brilliant… and Completely Over It”
By Lester Fabian Brathwaite
c.2024, Tiny Reparations Books
$28/288 pages
Somewhere up in the clouds.
That’s where your blood pressure is, right there as high as it’s ever been. Hoo, boy, are you angry. Your teeth are clenched, your eyes are slits, and you can’t trust yourself to speak in more than a growl. You’re plenty steamed and, as in the new book “Rage” by Lester Fabian Brathwaite, it shouldn’t have to be this way.
When he came with his family to America from Guyana at just four years old, Brathwaite couldn’t believe what his new home country offered. Malls, new kinds of food, cable television? Shirtless white men on TV and in magazines? Yes, please!
He’s always had crushes on white men, but he loves being a gay Black man – even though racism, overt and subtle, can be an aggravation. When Brathwaite is on a dating app, white men sometimes dismiss him with a racial comment. He’s heard and seen the “n-word” more than once and he doesn’t tolerate it. Wouldn’t a greeting and a no thanks be less rude?
He is bothered by unnecessary meanness.
He is bothered in a different way by bodybuilding. Hot, muscular bodies, to be exact and he’s sure that whoever created the sport was a genius. Brathwaite participates in bodybuilding himself sometimes – it’s expensive and he does it for himself, not for other men – though he believes that gay men are bodybuilding’s biggest subset. For sure, he’s payed homage to his share of bodybuilders, superheroes in movies, and hot shirtless boys on TV.
There were many times, years ago, that Brathwaite ended up drunk and in a stranger’s bed or looking for an old hook-up, and he was arrested once. Nearing 30, though, he realized that that life wasn’t what he wanted anymore. His knees couldn’t take it. Besides, he liked who he was and he liked his blackness. He realized that he didn’t need anyone else to be a hero of his tale. He could do it better himself.
One thing’s for certain: “Rage” lives up to its title.
At times, author Lester Fabian Brathwaite rails against so many things: racism and desire, club society, being a writer and editor, the generational differences between gay men, politics, and loss. At other times, he’s outRAGEous and hilarious, writing to readers as though he’s holding court in a cafe somewhere and you’d better listen up.
You should know that that means honesty – poking in the corners, calling things out for what they are, chastising people who need schooling on how to behave in a way that doesn’t leave room for nonsense. This arrives unabashed and raw, accompanied by plenty of profanity.
You’ve been warned.
And yet, Brathwaite’s candor and his blunt talk is fresh and different. This gay man doesn’t pussy-foot around, and getting his opinions without fluff feels good and right. Readers will appreciate that, and they might come away educated.
Generally speaking, this ain’t your Grandma’s book, unless Grandma likes real talk laced with profanity. If that’s so, then get “Rage.” You’ll both be mad for it.
The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.
Books
Fall books offer something for every taste
Hollinghurst’s latest plus a look at Queer Harlem Renaissance
Welcome to the fall book season, where you’ll find gifts for your friends, family and (most importantly?) the best reads for yourself. This is when you’ll find the blockbuster novels you’ve been waiting for, the surprise memoirs and nonfiction that you’ve wanted, and gorgeous gift books your coffee table. This fall, keep your eyes open for all kinds of literary goodness.
NOVELS
Lovers of a good novel will want to curl up with a huge TBR pile.
Romance novels will fill the shelves this fall, and if love is what you want for the holidays, you’re in luck. Look for “The Rules of Royalty” by Cale Dietrich (Wednesday Books, December), a modern tale of a prince and a “commoner”; or “Feast While You Can” by Mikealla Clements and Onjuli Datta (Grand Central Publishing), a scary-romance-erotica novel of small-town life and monsters.
Reach for “Our Evenings: A Novel” by Alan Hollinghurst (Random House, October), a novel of a young man who happily accepts a scholarship to a boarding school filled with classmates who are much, much wealthier than he is. “The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts” by Louis Bayard (Algonquin Books, September) is a historical novel about Oscar Wilde’s family.
For lovers of Gothic tales, look for “The Resurrectionist” by A. Rae Dunlap (Kensington, December), a tale of bodysnatching. Classics lovers will want to read “Private Rites: A Novel” by Julia Armfield (Flatiron Books, December), a queer reimagining of King Lear. Or find “Women’s Hotel” by Daniel M. Lavery (HarperVia, October), a book about a second-rate women-only hotel in New York City.
If your taste runs more to rom-coms, there are dozens of those available this fall, too, as well as Christmas novels with gay, lesbian, and trans characters inside.
NONFICTION
Even nonfiction readers will have reason to read this fall and winter.
Look for “Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I’d Known” by George M. Johnson and Charly Palmer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September), a book about 1920s Harlem and the influential queer folks who left their marks on entertainment.
“Something, Not Nothing” by Sarah Leavitt (Arsenal Pulp Press, September) chronicles, in comic form, the death of Leavitt’s partner and the paths grief takes to healing. Learn more about LGBTQ history with “The Book of Awesome Queer Heroes: How the LGBTQ+ Community Changed the World for the Better” by Eric Rosswood and Kathleen Archambeau (Mango, December); check out Mary L. Trump’s heartbreaking memoir, “Who Could Ever Love You?” (St. Martin’s Press, September); or check out a collection of essays in “Songs On Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes” by Anthony Veasna So (Ecco, December). Look for “Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous,” an anthology of secret confessions from women around the country, by Gillian Anderson (Abrams Press, September), or find “Queer Disability through History: The Queer and Disabled Movements Through Their Personalities” by Daisy Holder (Pen and Sword History, November). Also: Cher has a new biography out this fall, “The Memoir, Part One” (Dey Street Books, November).
Not quite what you’re looking for? Check with your favorite bookseller or librarian for more ideas because, this fall, they’ll have lots of them. Or give a gift certificate and hold on for spring. Season’s readings!
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