Mean Little deaf Queer: A Memoir [Paperback]

In 1959, the year Terry Galloway turned nine, the voices of everyone she loved began to disappear. No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. As a self-proclaimed child freak, she acted out her fury with her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children. Ever since that first real-life performance, Galloway has used theater, whether onstage or off, to defy and transcend her reality. With disarming candor, she writes about her mental breakdowns, her queer identity, and living in a silent, quirky world populated by unforgettable characters. What could have been a bitter litany of complaint is instead an unexpectedly hilarious and affecting take on life.Prologue:Nine
 
Part I: Drowning
Themand Me
 
Visions
 
Presto Change-o
 
Meaner
 
The Performance of Drowning
 
Lost Boy
 
Part II : Passing
Little-dDeaf
 
On Being Told No
 
Passing Strange
 
Drag Acts
 
Shhhhhh!
 
Jobs for the Deaf
 
The Shallow End
 
Part III : Emerging
Scare
 
Who Died and What Killed Them
 
Why I Should Matter
 
Epilogue:A Happy Life . . .This is a damn fine piece of work which is unbelievably powerful.—Dorothy Allison

This is not your mother's triumph-of-the-human-spirit memoir. Yes, Terry Galloway is resilient. But she's also caustic, depraved, utterly disinhibited, and somehow sweetly bubbly, a beguiling raconteuse who periodically leaps onto the dinner table and stabs you with her fork. Her story will fascinate, it will hurt, and you will like it. —Alison Bechdel, author ofFun Home

The most uncomfortable laughter of the season. —Out

One of the finest, most nlâ