A Q&A with Terry Galloway

Author photo: Alan Pogue. Cover design: Louis Roe

The anniversary edition of Terry Galloway’s Mean Little deaf Queer is finally here! “Told with understandable rage, quirky humor, and extraordinary humanity” (Booklist), her memoir invites readers on her journey from “child-freak” to exuberant performance artist. With a new epilogue that covers her life over the last fifteen years, including her major decision to get cochlear implants, Mean Little deaf Queer is as fiercely original and laugh-out-loud funny as it was when it was first published in 2009. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with her to chat about it. This is part two of two. Read part one.

Christian Coleman: You wrote a new afterword about the life-changing decision of getting cochlear implants. Why was it important for you to tell this chapter of your story?

Terry Galloway: Well, I was really pissed that most of the YouTube videos featuring babies getting cochlear implants show their little faces lighting up with joy when they first hear Mama cooing their names. Hah. Don’t believe it. A lot of those babies—me and a ton of others—scream bloody murder when those things are first turned on. Your brain can be so overwhelmed that you want the bang that implant right out of your head. I want to inspire more of those videos.

But despite the violence of the transition, it was life changing and in some beautiful ways. Like every single other technological shift in my life, it had both enormous and absolutely negligible effects on my life. And because each time the technology shifted, I couldn’t imagine anything better. I thought, “Wow, that’s it! Nothing better than this.” But it’s like buying a new car after you’ve driven your old one into the ground—it’s a brand-new world you’re driving around in and a lot of buttons you’re scared to push. 

But more than that, even though it isn’t a one-size-fits-all story, it is hopeful. Look at this continuing, historical push on the part of incredibly skillful people who have devoted their working lives to make life better for others. That the technology exists to do such a thing! Yes, there are drawbacks. But more and more, there are true miracles being wrought by humankind. And I got one. And it changed me. And for the better.

CC: I was really struck by the part in the afterword where you write about forgetting what it meant to be deaf after getting the implants. As technologies for the Cure develop and become commonplace, do you think future deaf generations will worry about losing their connecting to the disability community?

TG: I need to stress that many people in the Deaf world don’t think of Deafness as a disability. They regard it as their culture with its own language, its own social mores. Cochlear implants are still subjects for debate, but the talk of it being a form of genocide has died down a lot. The deeper implications of your question, though, are intriguing and scary to think about.

The Deaf are not the only ones who might find their communities riven by cures wrought by genetic tinkering and technology. I think that is happening all over the disability spectrum. Maybe there will be a day when we can all be “fixed,” but that’s not happening any time soon. Cochlear implants aren’t for everyone. Gene therapy isn’t for everyone. Transplants fail, diseases still wreak havoc on some bodies and not others, and the best of care can go sideways. That’s why what worries me most is the ruthless capacity we humans have for forgetting. 

There are churches—many which once preached the gospel of wealth—that are now preaching that a lack of empathy is a good thing. That’s how forgetting rears its nasty little head. Forgetting makes you cool to pain, suffering, the ugly part of life. That’s why models and the nastier rich have such haughty faces. They are projecting forgetting, uncaring. They inhabit their own perfectly beautiful universe and need nothing from the rest of us but that we sit back and admire.

They don’t want to see or acknowledge anything that causes them pain. And remembering can be painful.

I’ve talked with my neighbors and my buddies in our theater company, the Mickee Faust Club, who have disabilities different from mine. None of them have been “cured” in the way I have been—by the miracle of technology. But they’ve undergone their own changes, some in the realm of technology or medicine, such as having painful, useless eyeballs surgically plucked out. Yes, that is an actual example. And they’ve gone through the usual plain old life changes—marrying, divorcing, buying homes, having kids. But many still have to contend with isolation, poverty, superstition, and the wink-wink-nudge-nudge of people who think we’d be better off dead. Many of them grew up frightened and fighting for their right to live and to live the lives they wanted to live.

We all agree that in today’s political climate we are back, once again, to being frightened and fighting for our lives. We don’t have the greatest resources for fighting back but fight back we do. We make phone calls to our representatives, always getting a fucking busy signal. We write to them and get AI-generated replies. We’re out there protesting if we are able. And we vote, vote, and vote again. And lose a lot. At least here in Florida. That’s why I’m so glad I wrote about doing activist theater like Mickee Faust. Because it is another way a bunch of us—and not just those of us with disabilities—are fighting back!

We like to think it makes a difference to put our own voices out there in public. The same with the group of queers in Faust—we got a chorus of queer voices (lesbian, gay, trans, bi, as-yet-to-be-determined)—trying to make our voices heard. We may lose once again but we’ll go down screaming witty insults and choice invectives, trying to make the determinedly unconscious and unempathetic wake the hell up. We are fighting against people who lack empathy, who would rather we not exist, who want to disappear everyone who differs from their own golden mean, and who want, most of all, to forget. 

I like to think my memoir is a way of fighting back. I reread it, and it fights back on every page by trying to explain, to show, to evoke, to remember. It doesn’t always win. But it fights.

Read part one. 

About the Authors 

Known for her cross-dressing roles in Shakespeare and at Austin’s legendary Esther’s Follies, Terry Galloway has toured internationally as a solo artist and with P.S. 122’s Field Trips. As a giant rodent, she heads up Mickee Faust, a community theater for Tallahassee’s weird, queer, disability community. When not touring, she lives in Tallahassee with her wife, two cats, and a bevy of friends and family.

Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.