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Fighting
for the Crips and the Queers
By
Dan Woog
We've heard
the jokes. OK, we've probably made them ourselves. A female
friend gets turned down for a job. "Too bad you weren't a
real minority," we commiserate. "Maybe if you were a lesbian
in a wheelchair..."
Danielle Peers is that lesbian in a
wheelchair. But don't you dare
feel sorry for her. She'll kick your ass.
Peers,
called "Doc" for reasons explained below, grew up in
Edmonton, Alberta.
She played soccer, sailed, and high jumped, but basketball
was her passion. She captained
Grant
MacEwan College
to the national championship, and made the Academic
All-Canadian team.
But throughout her life Peers had knee and
leg problems. She was told it
was because she was an athletic female, but after her second
year in college, she could no longer play. A woman told her
to take up a new sport: wheelchair basketball.
"I'm not in
a wheelchair!" Peers protested. No matter, the woman said -
half the wheelchair basketball players in
Canada
are able-bodied.
Her first
time on the court was an eye-opener. "Compared to the
disabled people, I was completely unable,"
Peers recalls.
But she
loved the game and persevered. Three years later, her
condition was finally diagnosed: muscular dystrophy (MD -
"Doc," get it?). Finally eligible to try out for the
national team - restricted to legitimately disabled players
- she quit her job as MacEwan's
assistant coach and trained 40 hours a week. She helped the
Canadians earn a number-one world ranking (and was named
Most Valuable Player in a recent tournament).
She joined
the Alberta Northern Lights men's team, and became the first
woman on the men's all-star squad. In 2006, a French men's
team signed her to play in the only professional wheelchair
league on the planet.
"When I
wheeled in for the first time, the players were unsure about
a female," Peers recalls. "They
wondered if I could keep up, and what their wives would
think. The captain told them, 'She's not a woman. She's a
lesbian.' That was the last I heard about it. They figured
as a lesbian I'd be tougher, more athletic - and there would
be no issues with their wives."
Peers came
out at the end of high school. During her first
relationship, she vowed there would be no secrets,
discomfort, or shame. She made a commitment to herself to
always mention her queer identity publicly.
"There are
a lot of similarities between coming out as queer and coming
out as disabled," she says. "I pass as able-bodied, because
I can still walk, and in some situations I pass as straight.
I learned a lot about people's expectations of 'normal.'"
One day,
Peers was asked to speak about the Paralympics movement. She
enjoyed it, and talked to more groups. Today she speaks at
high school graduations, conferences, and even to
firefighters. She calls public speaking an "amazing" job. "I
can be political - and it pays the bills.
"I use
words like 'dyke,' 'queer,' 'crip,'
and 'gimp' a lot," she says. "People feel uncomfortable at
first, but hearing it from me allows them to discuss their
fears about sexuality and their bodies. They end up asking
lots of questions."
Peers talks often about failure.
"Failing to meet 'normative standards' is seen as shameful,"
she says. "People freak out that I chose to play wheelchair
basketball. They asked why I chose to do something that's
seen as 'failure.' Choosing to be out and queer plays into
feelings of failure, too."
Her
audiences struggle to understand, she says. But in the end,
their reactions are "overwhelmingly positive. That may be
because I don't tell them what to believe. I just relate my
experiences. I start with my preconceptions as an
able-bodied athlete, when I lost the ball to a
quadriplegic."
The first
time she spoke about her sexuality to a firefighters' group,
she worried about taking a risk. "But they didn't feel
threatened," she says. "Some of them cried. They told
stories about gay people they know. One guy e-mailed me
later, and said he'd asked a cousin about his partner for
the first time in his life."
Between
speaking gigs, Peers is working on her master's degree at
the University of
Alberta, in gay and disability
studies. She is studying "reverse integration as a tool of
social change." She explains: "People who are disabled want
to pass as more able, so they get a fake leg. But that says
there's something wrong with having a disability. As we age,
everyone has something go wrong physically.
"A lot of
gay people want to do the same thing
- pass as 'normal.' My goal is to make the
experiences of being gay and being a
crip very positive, in sports and all areas of life."
Another
goal is to compete in the 2008 Paralympics in
Beijing, immediately following the
Olympic Games. Qualifying is taking place at press time, at
the Parapan American Games in
Rio de Janeiro. Playing on the top
team in the world, Doc Peers should roll through the
opposition.
 Dan Woog
is a journalist, educator, soccer coach, gay activist, and
author of the "Jocks" series of books on gay male athletes.
Visit his website at
www.danwoog.com. He can be reached at
dwoog@optonline.net.
Sept. 14,
2007 |
