Teresa wrote a fantastic article discussing Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project on YouTube. There’s more than 100 videos by people who have experienced or seen others experienced bullying, harassment, or general bad experiences because of their sexual orientation. She also expressed the need for the Deaf and signing community to make similar videos for Deaf LGBT youth, especially as they might be doubly isolated in hearing mainstreamed environments. Let’s [...]

Having always lived near the ocean, I know that things flow and ebb and flow. And so it goes with writing and the Deaf community. It’s interesting, this relationship that Deaf people have with writing, with journalism. Protracted love affairs with the written word are, for us, more like fits of fancy. Newsletters, magazines, the written Deaf publication, they all come and go. As bimodal bilinguals, technology and social change [...]

Based on my experience, twenty-nine year old Deaf women should have twelve tattoos, read Paul Auster, and have a penchant for watching Buffy shows. Based on my experience, Deaf women my age should be spending their days and nights reading the latest (and the oldest) articles about what a sentence means in ASL. Based on my experience, Deaf women should consider themselves culturally Deaf but still cherish their participation in [...]

My good friend, Rachel Knopf, gave me “the unheard: a memoir of deafness and africa” (words in the title uncapitalized in respect to how it was printed on the cover of the book) by Josh Swiller for a birthday present a few weeks ago. When I pulled the book out of the gift bag, I knew immediately what it was. The book was about a man, born deaf but raised [...]

So on Saturday night, I went out to Madam’s Organ in Adams Morgan with four other girlfriends. One’s Deaf, two are interpreters, and one was in the Peace Corps around the same time as me and learned KSL (Kenyan Sign Language). So we all used ASL, sometimes KSL, while chatting with one another. The table next to us was filled with some men who kept looking over at our table. [...]

So, I’m studying linguistics at Gallaudet. I spend each day thinking or talking about what language is, what sign language is, what ASL is, etc… These aren’t easy questions to answer. I wouldn’t be studying linguistics if they were. When I ask people, I get different answers. My own answer even changes on a daily basis, even in the course of one discussion. But there is an important question that [...]

“Things are quiet and peaceful in small-town Jericho, Kansas, but when a baffling explosion occurs in the distance, Jericho’s residents are plunged into social, psychological and physical chaos. No one knows what to think, and fear of the unknown takes over the town, especially because its isolation cuts it off from outside help. When nearly everything they know seems gone, will the residents of JERICHO band together to face their [...]

This isn’t even about Gallaudet. This particular gem of news takes place nearly 400 miles away in an upstate New York university named Rochester Institute of Technology. I’m talking about the RIT Student Government (SG) elections, which just concluded last week.

One of the nice pleasures of eating out in D.C. is the likely happenstance that your waiter has probably served a table with deaf people before. So you’re safe. You don’t have to work on “educating” the waiter or just mumble along, pretending to understand the specials and instead go straight to the entree menu. And if you’re the waiter’s first deaf patron, no matter. DC waiters are so well-seasoned [...]