Learning Who I Am (Winter 1997)
By Marty Jezer
 
Editor's note: Marty Jezer is a writer and political activist living in Brattleboro, Vermont. His latest book, Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words (Basic Books) is now available at your local bookstore.
 
In Chapter 20 of the book, Marty draws an important connection between the stuttering self-help movement and the gay liberation movement. As the chapter opens, we meet one of his close friends from 25 years ago:
 
Life's lessons often come from friends or strangers who don't pretend to be teachers. These lessons can come at unexpected times and in unexpected places. One of my important life experiences took place in New York City in the early 1970s. I was living and writing a book in New York and on weekends I'd get a ride to and from Vermont with my friend Rod Parks. Rod worked for Columbia University and had a cabin on the road near my communal farm. On our return to the city, he would park his car in the upper reaches of the Bronx (where parking was easy) and we would ride the IRT subway into Manhattan together.
 
This was a time when gay liberation was a new movement. Gay men and women were coming out of the closet and asserting their pride by openly being themselves. I know of no one who asserted himself with more chutzpah than Rod. Every time we rode the subway together he would pull out his needles and yarn and begin knitting. Since Rod's interest was music rather than crafts, I knew that he was deliberately being outrageous, that he was daring others on the subway to scoff at him or even--this was not inconceivable--attack him verbally or physically for being a "faggot."
 
What Rod was doing unnerved me, but it also made those trips exciting. His daring others to react to his gayness put me to a test. Should I sit next to him, talk to him, and act out the fact of our friendship? Or should I try to subtly distance myself from him, so no one in the subway car would take me for another homosexual, or even his lover? What would I do if some toughs began to harass him? Would I defend him? I knew I would--but how? Would I come to his aid as a friend? Or would I pretend that I was simply a concerned bystander? People stared at him, and at us. Some smiled--in amusement or, I am sure, in admiration for his audacity. Others smirked or glared. He knitted, and we talked. At each stop I'd keep a wary eye on the door to see if anyone who looked threatening got on. It was a long one-hour ride from East 241st in the Bronx to the Sheridan Square stop in Greenwich Village, one of the few areas of the country where gay people could live openly and without fear.
 
The lesson that my friend was unintentionally teaching, as I conceived it, didn't have much to do with the issue of homosexuality as much as it did with the question of self-acceptance. Rod was asserting his identity without regard for what other people thought. Did I have the courage to speak in public and show myself as a stutterer with the self-assurance with which Rod knitted and showed himself to be homosexual?
 
Stuttering and homosexuality are not exactly analogous. Being a homosexual is a normal manifestation of human diversity. Being a stutterer is having a disability--one that most of us who suffer from it wish we did not have. Moreover, there are no laws against stuttering as there are, in some places against homosexuality. There is no word like "homophobia" to describe society's intolerance for stuttering. Though I know stutterers who as youths had fights with kids who mocked their stuttering, hoodlums don't go running through the streets hollering, "Let's get the stutterers!" Rod's knitting was an in-your-face way of goading people to react to him as a homosexual. With his needles and yarn he was directly confronting the negative attitudes that society then (more so than now) had towards homosexuals and was stating by his act that he would no longer be intimidated by other people's hostility. He would no longer hide. My speaking, were I willing to do it publicly, would simply be an attempt at ordinary communication. Yet our situations were similar. For all the progress I had made in speaking out, I still believed, deep inside, that stuttering was something to be ashamed of. Riding the subway with Rod opened my eyes. I was still in my closet; he had come out of his.
 
Copyright 1997 by Basic Books. Used with permission of the author.
 
Order information can be found at these two URL's:
National Stuttering Project: http://members.aol.com/nsphome/books/bound.html
Amazon Books: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0465081274/7450-2858224-820715
 

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