Background: Disability and the coming out metaphor

Much disability scholarship began with attempts to legitimize disability as a social category. One way this legitimization has been attempted is through articulating disability as a social category that is like other social categories and therefore should be analyzed as such. For example, literature in the sociology of disability from the United Kingdom, such as Tom Shakespeare's work (1996), begins with, "Parallels are drawn with the experiences of women, lesbians and gays, and black people" (Shakespeare, 1996, p. 94). More than a decade later, Hirschmann (2012) suggested that "disability is the new gender" (p. 396). Of all the social categories, disability has been especially likened to being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans (LGBT). As Samuels (2003) explained in a special issue of Gay and Lesbian Studies Quarterly focused on disability, "A number of disability theorists suggest that disability has more in common with sexual orientation than with race, ethnicity, or gender" (2003, p. 234). While narratives about the experience of being both LGBT and disabled have appeared (e.g. Brownworth & Raffo, 1999; Clare, 1999, 2001; Tremain, 1996) much of what is discussed here is the scholarship that draws on analogy, likening the LGBT experience to the disability experience (e.g. Davis, 1995; Linton, 1998; Shakespeare, 1996; Thomson, 1997; Wendell, 1997). It should be noted that analogy can often be problematic in that through saying one category is like another erases the intersections of identities, such as being queer and disabled. It can also shift the focus from the complex, interlocking systems of oppression at work, which is what intersectionality from Black feminist thought seeks to highlight (e.g. Collins & Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1991), to focusing exclusively on individual identities. Other scholars have already published work in this publication (e.g. Dunhamm et al., 2015) on the limits of analogies, particularly Schalk's section in Dunhamm et al., 2015, which addresses both their problematic nature, yet also the usefulness it sometimes has. Given these problems of analogy, it is important to investigate and reflect on the ways in which the field of Disability Studies has historically used an analogy between disability and queerness, particularly through its appropriation of "coming out."

The most common arguments that have appeared to argue for a strong affinity between disability and the gay/lesbian experience are the following: First, it is claimed that these identities both actively resist pathologization (e.g., Colligan, 2004), secondly that they are typically not shared identities within the family system (e.g., Samuels 2003), and finally, both may involve "passing" to a certain extent (e.g., Brune & Wilson, 2013). Specifically, invisible disability, which may not be immediately known without disclosure, "presents the dilemma of whether or not or when to come out or to pass" (Garland-Thomson, 1997, p. 14). A variety of other scholars have noted parallels in issues of normativity, managing stigma, and "passing" for both disability and queerness (e.g. Kafer 2003; McRuer 2002; Atkins & Marston, 1999.; Linton, 1998; Sherry 2005; Swain & Cameron, 1999). Harmon (2010) put forward "compulsory hearing," an idea that extends the demands that one "pass" and perform able-bodiedness to deafness specifically.

The noted similarities between queerness and disability in terms of pathologization, family experience, and passing have been most comprehensively and clearly articulated in the deployment of the discourse of coming out to describe a disabled individual's process of coming to identify with the disability community. That is, in the literature, coming out is situated as a tool disabled people 1 can use to resist pathologizing discourse, cope with difference within the family, and pushback against pressures to "pass." As is discussed below, the field of Disability Studies regularly borrowed coming out discourse specifically to talk about coming to identify with the disability community. In these instances, coming out is a mode by which individuals move through identity categories or enter into new sociopolitical meanings of one's embodiment. Although coming out has been a useful tool or concept in Disability Studies literature, it is a trope borrowed from the queer experience. Sedgwick insists that coming out is "quite indelibly marked with the historical specificity of homosocial/homosexual definition" (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 72). That is, the deployment of coming out discourse is complicated and problematic, a matter delved into further throughout this article. And yet the borrowing of "coming out" is not unique to Disability Studies; coming out discourse has achieved a kind of "master narrative" status and is often used across many marginalized experiences to articulate stages of identity development and to argue for reclaiming identities that have been considered pathological (Orne, 2011; Saguy & Ward, 2011). Because Disability Studies has utilized coming out discourse, the claim that disabled persons undertake the task of coming out is then a significant space to be explored.

Evidence of the use of coming out discourse in Disability Studies can be found in a variety of influential texts; Garland-Thomson calls her book, Extraordinary Bodies, "the consequence of a coming-out process" (Thomson, 1997, p.ix). She also uses coming out to articulate the difference between accepting a medical model of disability and a social model (Barnes, Mercer, & Shakespeare, 1999; Oliver, 1990; Shakespeare & Watson, 2001), as such coming out involves a person internally shifting the site of the problem from the medical/individual (i.e. one's body) and instead to the discriminatory and exclusionary practices in the social world in response to one's body. Similarly, Linton (1998) analogizes queer passing and the disability trope of overcoming. Passing is the work that individuals with disabilities may engage in to hide their disability: "Both passing and overcoming take their toll…It is not surprising that disabled people also speak of "coming out" in the same way that members of the lesbian and gay community do" (Linton, 1998, p.21). Linton (1998) also uses coming out discourse to assert collective disability culture: "We have come out […] straightforward, unmasked, and unapologetic" (Linton, 1998, p. 3).

Swain and Cameron's (1999) text is entirely focused on the discursive making of a political identity of disability through coming out discourse. They argue invisible disability is like queerness (but also that it is explicitly unlike gender or race) because both are presumed, defaulted (non-disabled, heterosexual) and not necessarily marked by a visibly different embodiment. In sum, coming out discourse encapsulates and distills the analogy between disability and queerness in the literature, is used to articulate an individual process of acceptance and identity development, and deployed as a way to describe the larger, collective level process of visibility as a group.

Finally, Shakespeare (1999) emphasizes that coming out as disabled is "not the same as "coming to terms with impairment," but is about assuming a social identity as a disabled person, and often about taking on a politicized understanding of disability (Shakespeare, 1999, p. 41). His interviews showed that coming out as disabled was a process that occurred over time, and he specifically points out the importance of gathering the voices of gay/lesbian disabled individuals because they are often assumed to asexual. While he had some deaf participants in his sample that discussed preferring to date hearing people because the pool of deaf people to date was quite small, there was no discussion of sign language (if it was used or not by the participants) and how their deaf and/or gay/lesbian identities were discussed vis-à-vis coming out.

In addition to exploring this complicated space of analogy, the research presented here highlights an underexplored point of divergence within the heterogeneous category of disability that may further complicate the borrowing of such discourse by the overall field of Disability Studies. This paper is based on a social scientific approach that utilizes empirical data in order to examine individual's experiences and move outward into larger theoretical discussions and implications from there. The basic contention is that Deaf people occupy the category of invisible disability and are well positioned to respond to the claim of the three areas of overlap in experience mentioned above: pathologization, family difference, and passing. As such, this research explored the following questions in interviews with Deaf, gay/lesbian individuals: Do Deaf persons tell "coming out" stories related to their Deaf identities? What does the answer to this mean for thinking the relationship between Deaf and disability studies? Although much more could be written about the intersections of the Deaf and queer experience, this article is specifically focused on the discourse that participants used to discuss their identity, namely that they talked about undergoing a transition from deaf to Deaf (even as these very d/Deaf categories are unstable, which will be discussed later). This articulation is then looked at through the lens of whether or not it aligns with the usage of coming out narratives that appear in Disability Studies more broadly.

It should be noted that much of the work in queer Disability Studies goes beyond solely analogizing the relationship between the categories of disabled and LGBT and instead delves into the ways queer theory and disability studies share a "radical stance toward concepts of normalcy; [both are] adamantly against the compulsion to observe norms" (Sandahl, 2003, p. 26). 2 That is, the term queer is an analytic model that "developed out of a specifically lesbian and gay reworking of the post-structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions (Jagose, 1997, p. 2) and may be different from simply looking at gay/lesbian identities. McRuer & Wilkerson (2003) argued that both queer studies and Disability Studies are enterprises are centrally concerned with social construction and the consequences of oppositional binaries (e.g. heterosexual/homosexual and able-bodied/disabled). A variety of other texts delve further into the connections between queer and crip theory, in particular McRuer's concept of compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer, 2002), which shows the interlocking systems of normativity around sexuality and able-bodiedness. And this interlocking system and compulsory able-bodieness forms the foundation of McRuer's Crip Theory (2006), which outlines crip theory as a tool exposing the ways in which both the categories of heterosexuality and able-bodiedness are constructed as normative and naturalized, as well as how they are situated and privileged within larger sociocultural and economic systems.

While the participants in this research offered much that can contribute to the body of work at the intersections of disability and queerness/queer theory, that is not the focus of this article. Instead, this article has a narrower departure point: an examination of the borrowing of coming out discourse in Disability Studies literature as it is used to articulate that disability is a social category similar to being LGBT and specifically whether or not Deaf individuals participate in this borrowing. One reason for making this distinction between queer Disability Studies and an examination of the LGBT experience – and within this group, the sample that was interviewed only represented the categories of gay/lesbian - is that the participants in this research did not identify as queer; rather, they all specifically identified as gay or lesbian. Secondly, they all engaged in deploying coming out discourse to talk about coming into their gay/lesbian identity; this demonstrates that for participants in this research study, this was indeed discourse they were comfortable with and had adopted. But the focus here is on what the process of coming to a politicized Deaf identity looked like and what terminology they used and characterizations they gave in making sense of that process.

Coming out discourse and Deaf culture

Before delving further, some explanations of conventions are important: In the literature, the word deaf is often used to denote an audiological state, while Deaf indicates a cultural identity stemming from this state. Brueggeman (2008) discusses how this convention began after a 1972 essay by James Woodward articulating the differences between these two categories. This was followed by the Deaf pride movement of the 1980s (Shapiro, 1994; from there, Deaf was understood as a term indicating an identity primarily characterized by one's use of sign language and embodiment of a set of distinct cultural values (Padden and Humphries1990). Later, Lane (1999) and Ladd (2003) talked about Deaf and Deafhood as terms that articulate a resistance to medicalization. Although the premise of this article is to investigate the movement between the categories of deaf and Deaf as Deaf people describe it, it is indeed far more complicated. For example, as Friedner (2010) discussed, these categories are actually unstable and their boundaries unclear, thus if we set out to explore "the ways that little d and capital D d/Deaf are intertwined, I believe that we will see that, despite our initial feelings of unease about the failure of boundary work around these categories, little d sets up conditions of possibility for capital D d/Deafness" (Friedner, 2010, p. 345). Although this paper does not explore the epistemic tensions between these categories per se, the data presented here could be useful for such discussions.

As indicated in the previous section, most of the consideration of similarities between the disability experience and the gay/lesbian experience have not specified any particular type of disability (aside from often highlighting invisible disabilities, as in the Swain and Cameron piece), and instead invoked the large, heterogeneous category of disability in general. However, disability studies scholar Brenda Brueggmann (1999), in a rare example, discussed the particular case of Deaf people through coming out discourse as well. Like other scholars in Disability Studies, Brueggemann draws parallels between Deaf and queer people in that both are stigmatized, marked by medical and religious institutions who attempt to normalize them, and both groups are understood as different from their families. Brueggemann argues that there has been a collective coming out of Deaf culture itself, not just Deaf individuals, beginning with the 1988 Deaf President Now protest, much like that of Stonewall in queer culture. Deaf President Now was a protest that occurred on the Gallaudet University campus where students and other members of the Gallaudet community came together to demand that the university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students be led by a Deaf person and not a hearing person, as had been the case since it was established (Christiansen & Barnartt, 2003). This was a seismic event in the Deaf community, as Gallaudet University, located in Washington, DC, is the only liberal arts college for the deaf and hard-of-hearing in the world and as such is a beacon to the global Deaf community.

Brueggemann also highlights how deafness is an invisible disability and invokes the metaphor of the closet: "Hearing, like one's sexual orientation and relationships, cannot readily be seen[…]You can stand in line next to, even bump elbows with, a gay or deaf person all day and never know. [Italics original][…]It seems so queer, these bodies so closeted" (Brueggemann, 1999, p.153). Thus, Brueggemann, like others, deploys the discourse of "coming out" and the metaphor of the closet as a reclamation, indicating an internal process of transforming a once pathologized body into an acceptable one and becoming a member of a larger culture or community. One becomes Deaf (as opposed to deaf) through a process of identity development that Brueggemann, like others in Disability Studies, analogizes with coming out.

My original analysis of the narratives below shows that unlike for those adopting a politicized disability identity, coming out discourse is not used to describe adopting a Deaf identity. This reflects the already well-documented tension between disability and Deaf culture. While Disability Studies often claims Deaf people as part of its constituency, Deaf people often do not reciprocate and instead argue they are an ethnic or linguistic minority (Eckert, 2005, 2010; Ladd & Lane, 2013; Lane, 2005). This tension has been long considered by sociologists and others (e.g. Burch & Kafer, 2010; Corker, 1998; Davis, 1995; Doe, 2014; Foster, 2001; Lane, 2002; Park, Fitzgerald, & Legge, 2015; Skelton & Valentine, 2003). Nevertheless, as Sinecka (2008) points out, "most culturally Deaf people argue that they are not disabled but that they constitute a linguistic minority. This differentiates their lived experience from other gay people with disabilities, especially with regard to using sign language to communicate and having a strong sense of belonging to the Deaf culture" (Sinecka, 2008, p. 476). Perhaps this is most aptly summed up in the statement on Deaf identity that, "We are proud of our language, culture and heritage. Disabled we are not!" (Bienvenu, 1989, p. 1).

Even though Deaf studies sometimes resists being associated with Disability Studies due to a preference that deafness be viewed as a linguistic and cultural identity, this research takes the Deaf experience seriously in order to think through the particularities of disability experiences (Corker, 2002; Sedgwick, 1990; Thomson, 1997). As has been argued in the literature on Deaf/disability tensions, the experience of deafness is a particular one because Deaf communities have their own language (ASL in the United States) and their own historical contexts. But as Sinecka (2008) argued, there is also an absence of empirical data about Deaf people presented and analyzed in the literature on disability and queerness. This paper seeks to address that gap. Certainly, however, there is literature on being Deaf and queer, as Friedner and Block (2017) state, "deaf studies scholars have recently taken up the challenges of considering how deafness intersects with other categories of difference" (Friedner & Block, 2017, p. 285). For example, Ruiz-Williams et al. (2015) discuss the theoretical project of using intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) to explore how Deafness intersects with different identities, including queerness. Bienvenu (2008) discussed the parallels between the pathologization of queerness and deafness, but also the specific identity of being a Deaf lesbian. There are also artifacts of cultural production that articulate experiences of being Deaf and queer, both in published written forms and in ASL. For example, Raymond Luczak published collections of Deaf and queer narratives (Luczak, 1993, 2007), Galloway (2010) published a memoir on being Deaf and queer, and Clayton Valli created ASL poetry about the AIDS epidemic's impact on the Deaf gay community (1995). And lastly, and perhaps most importantly in terms of drawing together literature of queer studies, Deaf studies and Disability Studies, Moges (2017) provides a literary analysis of much of this work through an intersectional and crip theory lens. All of the above Deaf studies scholarship is important work, but limited to cultural production, personal narratives, and literary analysis, not empirical data.

Method

Life histories were gathered from five individuals who identify as both Deaf and gay/lesbian. Participants ranged in age, but all but one of them were raised in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, with the exception of one older participant who grew up in the nineteen sixties. Three lesbian-identified women (one White, one Black, one Bi-racial) and two gay-identified men (one White, one Latinx) participated. One of the limitations of this research is the small sample size and, as I discuss below, as well as the age of the participants. However, the aim was not to obtain a sample based on its capacity for generalizability; rather this project gives voice to a particular set of experiences and identities from a particular time period, and seeks to explore how their reflections on their childhood experiences relate to patterns discussed in the Disability Studies literature regarding the broader category of disability. Furthermore, the in-depth hours-long interviews were meant to delve deeply into the experiences of these individuals to mine for possible future research projects that might be expanded to larger samples.

What is especially important and unique about these interviews is that they were conducted entirely in ASL. Importantly, this meant that Deaf individuals were able to narrate their lives in their own language, thus allowing for the discourse about their life and Deaf identity to emerge and be expressed in their primary language. This is not a common occurrence in research. Deaf people – and indeed people with disabilities in general - are often excluded from participating in or producing research. There are many reasons for the exclusion of deaf participants, including that most researchers do not know ASL and/or recruitment or study materials are not designed in an accessible manner (Jones & Pullen, 1992). One of the aims here is to privilege these often-marginalized voices. As such, all interviews were conducted in ASL, videotaped, and interpreted into written English.

It is important to note that the researcher is a hearing, nationally certified sign language interpreter. The transcripts of interviews that are presented here have been interpreted. That is, the actual signs are not represented in this research, but the best match for putting forth the meaning of the signs is represented in English. Because a process of translation is an inherent aspect in the research, the researcher took steps to ensure accuracy. For example, when possible, transcripts were sent to participants for approval and any corrections that were needed were made. Secondly, during interviews, the researcher clarified statements if it was needed.

This research was approved through the Institutional Review Board at Gallaudet University and had the following inclusion criteria for participants: 1) over the age of 18, 2) identify as Deaf, 3) identify as a member of the LGBT community, and 4) have hearing parents. Since more than ninety percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, this last criterion was easily met (National Institute Deafness and other Communication Disorders, 2010). It was also crucial for understanding how difference from one's family figures into the process of identity development and management. Participants were recruited through snowball sampling; that is, participants were referred to the researcher by connections in the community. While recruitment occurred through networks at Gallaudet, the participants were largely older and not traditional college-aged students. Gallaudet is not just a university, it also contributes to the surrounding area's Deaf community population. As with all qualitative research projects, the sample one ultimately obtains is not always entirely controlled or anticipated. But the age of the individuals in this sample is important. Based on anecdotal discussions and cultural shifts, if younger college-aged students had been interviewed, it may be that they would talk about radically different experiences from the individuals here. Although I am unaware of social science research documenting queerness and adopting queer as an identity in younger Deaf populations (again, perhaps an issue of the lack of inclusion of Deaf persons in research), it is noteworthy that the individuals in this paper are older and used the words gay and lesbian to identify. One reason not to expand beyond this sample of older individuals in this particular study was due to plans to conduct a larger, future study on younger Deaf and queer individuals to compare both the changes in Deaf identity development after the era of routinization of pediatric cochlear implantation and see if and how this corresponds to or co-occurs with a shift to more individuals identifying as queer over gay/lesbian. That is, the interviews in this study and the themes extracted from them can be used in a future follow up study with a much larger sample to investigate changes across time and technological change. As such, the research presented here is exploratory data; the research participants not only tell us about identity development during a certain time period, but they may help others design future studies intended to capture Deaf experiences so that we might represent the various ways – and how this differs across time—of being Deaf.

Another reason the sample size was kept purposefully small was due to the nature of the interviews; life histories took time and the goal was to delve deeply into their narratives. Participants were broadly asked about their experiences growing up in a hearing family with a different embodiment from them, how they came to identify as Deaf, as well as how they came to identify as gay/lesbian. Each participant was also interviewed twice and each interview lasted from one to three hours. All interviews were conducted on the Gallaudet University campus using an open-ended set of questions designed to capture a comprehensive life history – this included questions about their childhood, adolescence, earliest memories of realizing they were deaf, how they came to identify as gay/lesbian, and how their parents responded and interacted to them. These open-ended questions encouraged participants to use the discourse they would normally use to discuss their identities, as well as discuss anything they felt relevant to telling the story of their life and identity development. Per my methodological approach – one that privileges the stories of these individuals and their knowledge about their own lives and ways of framing their experiences—I asked probing, follow up questions or asked for clarification when needed or desired. Many of the interviews delved into emotional, trying, and sometimes abusive or traumatic experiences and these instances were treated carefully by the researcher during and after interviews.

The inductive and interpretive approach of narrative analysis, along with aspects of grounded theory, was used to analyze the interview transcripts. "Narrative approaches look at how individuals actively construct and reconstruct narratives in the process of making sense of their experiences and presenting their self/selves" (Miller, 2005, p. 19). Narrative methods not only focus on how individuals use the tools available to them, such as tropes like coming out, to make sense of their experiences, but also highlight how experiences are socially structured. That is, this research is not only concerned with how the stories are told, but why they are told in a particular way and the conditions shaping them (Riessman, 1993). For example, in my previous research (2016), I outlined competing "scripts" about deafness – a cultural script and a medical script – that appeared specifically in medical settings and hearing families with deaf children as they contemplated obtaining a cochlear implant for their child. These scripts figured into the ways the participants in this research framed their understanding of what it meant to be deaf, as well as the development of their Deaf identity. The interviews with Deaf adults presented here reveal how participants attempted to live well within a particular normative discourse about what their bodies meant, but also how they encountered, integrated, and/or resisted competing discourses or scripts about deafness.

Once translated into written English, transcripts of the interviews were uploaded into Dedoose, a qualitative research software, and then coded line by line. While grounded theory was not utilized throughout the data collection, data analysis in Dedoose was inductive and followed a grounded theory approach by following patterns and themes that emerged from the life histories and narratives rather than imposing them (Charmaz, 2006). The first round of coding consisted of going line by line and attributing codes that built toward a larger theme (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). For example, as individual participants told stories about interactions with their parents related to their deafness, these were each coded individually then brought together under a larger thematic code called "family dynamics and deafness." This kind of systematic coding was followed line by line throughout the entirety of interviews. The concrete examples and stories from the participants' lives in this article reflect the themes in the findings relevant to the discussion at hand. All participants have been given pseudonyms.

Findings

Discussion

These narratives show that participants used the phrase "becoming Deaf," in contrast to the adoption of "coming out" often seen in Disability Studies, to indicate the transformation of their identities to Deaf. Although the phrasing is different, there are similar features found in both processes. Individuals used these narratives to resist pathologization, gain agency, and re-author meanings of their bodies and experiences. These data also clearly show significant overlap between the disability and Deaf experience of pathologization and difference within the family. As seen in previous literature on disability and queerness, Deaf people are also pathologized through ideologies found in medicine and religion. Additionally, Deaf people were also pressured to pass. However, the form that passing takes is specific to the performance of language, extending Harmon's (2010) notion of compulsory hearing to something more along the lines of compulsory speaking. Finally, the transformative effects that coming out discourse in Disability Studies seeks to articulate – shifting the site of the problem from the body to society, describing self-acceptance, and entering into a community – are also present in the form of "becoming Deaf."

This research reveals that even as the transformative identity processes are similar, Deaf persons simply do not use the phrase "coming out" to talk about their experience of becoming culturally Deaf. English terms such as "passing," "closet," and "coming out" do not fit with the Deaf experience, which is centered around the politics of language, even as they might be tropes readily adopted in broader Disability Studies. While I had previously argued (2016) that Deaf persons and Deaf studies would benefit from collaboration and cross-identification with disability, the stories presented here shows that there are important particularities of the Deaf experience. Nevertheless, there are comparable processes being expressed in these transformative narratives.

Many have noted the limits of borrowing coming out discourse and comparing disability and queerness when theorizing disability as a social category (e.g. Samuels 2003, McRuer 2006), but these limitations have most often been based on the argument that the use of analogy is problematic. Here, the particularities of the Deaf experience are used to show a limitation to the borrowing of coming out discourse because of differences within the category of disability and that this further reveals tensions between Deaf/disability studies.

Two important questions are raised by this research that remain to be answered. The first is: What does the particularity of the Deaf experience tell us about the category of disability? Thomson (1997) writes about the valuable role of universalizing discourse in Disability Studies, which states that issues cut across a continuum or spectrum of identities. This is in contrast to minoritizing discourse, which is focused on a more narrowly defined population. Universalizing strengthens the claim that disability is a social category. But the stories told here may complicate the abstracted, disembodied idea of a social category of disability. Yet as the narratives show, there are similar social processes occurring. There is no reason why taking seriously the particularity of the Deaf experience cannot co-exist with and be in dialogue with the broader project of Disability Studies. Indeed, the Deaf experience enriches Disability Studies, and the themes and patterns found in Disability Studies help explain the Deaf experience. I see working at the intersection of these identity categories as a way to deepen the scholarship in both.

The second question this research raises is: How does being Deaf intersect with one's queer identity? In this article, the Deaf, queer experience is used as a vector for examining the use of coming out discourse in Disability Studies and how the Deaf experience may relate to the broader category of disability. And while it contributes to the literature by including Deaf narratives, there is much more to be done regarding the intersection of Deaf and queerness that is not taken up in this paper. For example, how do these pathologizing experiences around one's body from infancy or early childhood affect the ways in which Deaf individuals see their queerness? How does becoming Deaf bolster the queer experience? For example, Kattari (2015) found that membership in the disability community enhanced the experiences of people who belonged to a sexual minority group. How might being Deaf strengthen one's queer resistance and identity? Follow up research on the Deaf and queer experience is needed.