|
Sex on Wheels
Photography by Brenda
Prager
In
1993 I was a photographer in
grad school, and someone gave my name to a man
who wanted his portrait taken. He didn't have
any money to pay me, and it turned out that he had
cerebral palsy. When he called me up, I could
hardly understand him, but I decided to meet him.
He told me that his wife was pregnant and he
wanted a portrait of them together. It was his
second child and her first. He said that he was interested in doing more
than just a portrait, because he was going to be a
father, and people had no idea that disabled
people even had sex. I said, "Ohhhh." I was
nervous, but I agreed to take some nude portraits.
It turned out that he was a radical disability
activist, and he wanted to educate me about his
condition so that I could educate others through
my photographs. We hung out for three months until
the point where I was really comfortable, and I
could understand everything he said. He would pee
and make me watch him so I could see he could do
it by himself. At the end of three months I told
him that I had had enough but that I would
continue to pursue the project if he would
introduce me to some of his disabled friends.
I had started out
thinking this was going to be a body of work about
sex and disability, but then I realized that sex
was sex, and to only show people screwing was
going to limit what I saw, so I decided to think
about it as a project about the physicality of
disability. I began photographing couples doing
everything they did together. I met a woman
who was a gardener and used children's rakes
to work from her wheelchair in her backyard. She
really turned me around to the more physical side
of disability. I also met a man
with dystonia who had a lover with MS — she
has since passed away. She lived in Alaska because
people with MS don't tolerate the heat well. I
think they were a pretty average couple, having
email sex when they were apart. But was sex the
focus of their lives? No.
The two
women in the wheelchair weren't a couple; they
were friends who'd always wanted to play around
with each other, and their relationship evolved
because of the photographs. It didn't last, but it
was a wonderful time for both of them. One had
cerebral palsy and the other was a quadriplegic.
One of the more
interesting characters I met was a man
whose mother had taken a Thalidomide-like
drug. He was kind of homeless and kind of a
thug. He normally wore prosthetic hooks. I
photographed him right after he took a bath at my
house, while he got dressed. After the session he
disappeared, and I received a letter from him in
jail, where he was serving time for clawing a man
with his hooks. The man had stolen his girlfriend.
He'd said, "What are you going to do about it?"
Before I went into
this project, I would have sworn I didn't know a
disabled person, but I had two cousins with polio
who walked with canes. I had an uncle who was a
little person who I'd never thought of as
disabled; he was just my uncle. I now feel the
same way about the people I photographed for this
project — they are just people, and they are still
my close friends.
From the Sex and Disability Special Issue
© 2001 Nerve.com,
Inc. | |
|
