(I accidentally posted this at 2:30am Pacific on Thursday morning, and deleted it without realizing that I couldn't repost it later. So here is Thursday's roundup, and I'll do one tomorrow (Saturday) to compensate.)
Welcome to the G.I.M.P. Daily Roundup - Growing Involvement in Media and Politics. This is a daily (Mon-Fri) diary series dedicated to highlighting disabled news, activism, politics and punditry.
In the May 26th, 2010 GIMP Round-up:
- The Disabled in Entertainment - a look at characters with disabilities actually - gasp! - being played by disabled actors and actresses.
- Today's News Headlines and Action Items - Segregation in Arkansas, Slavery in Iowa, and A Poet in San Antonio.
- Closing Thoughts
The Disabled in Entertainment
Via NPR:
There have been disabled characters over the years who have been played by nondisabled actors: James Franciscus, a sighted actor, portrayed a blind New Orleans lawyer in the early '70s drama Longstreet. After Raymond Burr stopped being Perry Mason, he became Robert Ironside, a tough San Francisco detective who used a wheelchair. Laura Innes was nominated for an Emmy — twice — for her role as Dr. Kerry Weaver, who sped briskly through the chaos in her Chicago emergency room in ER while using a forearm crutch. On the big screen, Tom Hanks won an Oscar as Forrest Gump (who was mentally and physically challenged), Tom Cruise and Jon Voight rolled to Academy Award nominations as disabled Vietnam vets in Born on the Fourth of July and Coming Home, respectively. (Voight won.) Dustin Hoffman stole every scene as an autistic savant in Rain Man, and Daniel Day-Lewis charmed audiences (and won an Oscar) as raffish Christy Brown, an Irish artist with cerebral palsy in My Left Foot.
"None of those performances — which were all brilliant, by the way — would have happened if there was some kind of rule that said only disabled actors can play disabled characters," says actor Michael Patrick Thornton. A spinal stroke almost killed Thornton in 2003. He had to learn to walk again — which he can do for short distances, "but it's exhausting" — and uses a motorized chair to get around.
"Do they consider us equally for parts?" Thornton says, "Obviously no, because disabled actors are so underrepresented on stage and screen."
NPR had an interesting article up about the growing number of disabled actors and actresses playing disabled characters on television this year. I don't watch the show, but apparently Glee has two characters in wheelchairs - one played by a disabled man, one not - along with an actress with Down Syndrome. The show Grey's Anatomy - another I don't watch - also has a disabled actor, quoted in the quoted above, as a member of the cast. It's nice to see this starting to happen, but it's still not happening enough.
Thornton's comment about those performances not happening if there was a rule is both absolutely correct and absolutely depressing. While we live in a country where white actors no longer wear blackface and black actors are hired to play black characters, we still have the majority of disabled characters - the few that ever get written in the first place - being played by able-bodied actors. I call it 'gimpface', and it honestly offends me.
I should note that I'm likewise offended when, for example, Chinese actors are hired to play Japanese people, and other variations of 'Americans can't tell ethnicities apart, anyway' casting occurs, because it's simply lazy and ignorant.
We don't have whites dress up in make-up to make them look black - and modern make-up can convincingly do it, as Black/White and Tropic Thunder have shown - not only because it's offensive to do so, but because a white actor isn't going to understand what life as a black person is like. Similarly, while some of the above listed roles Thornton cites are very strong performances, those actors cannot truly know what it's like to be disabled, no matter how much time they spend observing or how 'method' they go. Only we can understand it. You'll notice that a character with Down Syndrome or Dwarfism is never played by an able-bodied actor because to do so would require no small amount of make-up and CGI, and because such 'gimpface' would be seen as being in bad taste, like blackface. But putting an able-bodied actor in a wheelchair, a hearing aid or giving them a white cane isn't?
Moral objections aside, it also means less jobs for disabled actors. We get very few roles as it is, and are almost never cast for roles that weren't originally written as being disabled, even though very few roles would by necessity preclude a disabled actor from playing them, and still we have to compete with able-bodied actors for disabled roles as well.
And if you're wondering why this is so personal to me, I'm a disabled actor, writer and director of the stage.
Today's News Headlines and Action Alerts
SEGREGATION - NOT JUST FOR PEOPLE OF COLOR
Via AP:
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The federal government accused Arkansas in a lawsuit Thursday of leaving people with severe mental or physical disabilities with no choice but to go into state institutions.
The Justice Department lawsuit accused Arkansas of a "systemic failure" that places people in institutions when the state should pursue less restrictive avenues for their care.
"The state gives individuals with developmental disabilities the draconian choice of receiving services in segregated institutions or receiving no services at all," the lawsuit states.
Apparently the Civil Rights Division of the Obama Dept. of Justice has been making ADA issues a top priority. Good on them.
Too often, disabled people have to choose between living with their parents all their adult life, or living in an institution or group home. That's why the recent cuts in many states to Medicaid has been so bad for us - Medicaid generally covers things like aid care for those who live independently. When you cut the hours our aids get, we get less assistance, and decisions like moving back in with the parents or other family become reality.
Arkansas is apparently skipping that and going straight to the institution. Anyone want to ask Blanche Lincoln or Bill Halter what they think?
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ARE WE SURPRISED THEY'RE FROM TEXAS?
A Texas company kept mentally disabled men in a shack in Iowa and paid them 41 cents an hour for three years. Via Business Week:
The men lived in a 106-year-old building in Atalissa, with boarded-up windows and relied only on space heaters.
The report found that West Liberty Foods paid Henry's Turkey Service as much as $11,000 per week for the disabled men's labor. Henry's Turkey Service then paid the men a combined total of between $340 and $500 per week, or about 41 cents an hour, The Des Moines Register reported.
This is just wrong on so very many levels. Ugh.
First, they're putting disabled people in substandard living conditions without care or assistance. Then they're making them work for pennies when the company is keeping millions. This is exploitation of the highest order, a major civil rights abuse AND human rights violation all rolled up in one big ball of suck.
The scary part is that they're likely not the only ones doing it.
In America, the biggest victims of fraud and exploitation are seniors and the disabled. It's becoming an epidemic. Not only do they make easy targets, they often don't speak out after the fact, due to humiliation and despair.
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DISABLED POET FINDS VOICE
Just to show that not everything today is bad news, abuses and horror stories. And look! He's even from Texas! Via My San Antonio:
When the words came, they revealed the voice of a poet.
It's been that way for 20-year-old Terrence Ealoms since he was 15, looking for a way to slip free from years of adversity.
The words freed him.
But, he needed someone to transcribe his thoughts.
Terrence, a quadriplegic, is paralyzed from the neck down. His nurses, physical therapists, foster mother and English teacher, Ben Curtiss, wrote his thoughts for him.
“It kind of shocked me,” Terrence said in the bedroom of his Southwest Side home. “I didn't think I had it in me; it helped me deal with life better.”
You can read his poetry and buy his book here.
Closing Thoughts
Thank you to all of you who are reading and commenting. If you've found this series useful, please add it to your hotlinks and consider hitting the Rec button up top. As always, I'm looking for stories and contributors, so feel free to email me.
I'll see you in the comments!
Larime Taylor