#QueerCripRollCall

Queer Crip Roll Call:

“I was hoping that #QueerCripRollcall was some kind of promotion for a moonlight sequel but sadly it’s just a bunch of lesbians with canes” — @huntersbompton

“To be visibly Queer is to choose your happiness over your safety.” — Da’Shaun Harrison @_iAmRoyal (buy the shirt and support da’shaun here)

Last week, while scrolling through a viral tweet of “girls who like girls”, I was struck with a slight feeling of loneliness while scrolling through woman after woman and not seeing even one with a visible medical device or mobility aid.

It’s important to remember that not all disabilities are instantly visible. It’s almost certain that somewhere in the 4,300ish responses that there are some women who have various disabilities or chronic illnesses that weren’t immediately apparent in the photos they chose nor from their tweet. But I intend to bring more visibility to all disabilities — regardless of how immediately apparent the disability.

My own disability is often visible in photos of myself, as I am an ambulatory wheelchair user — and when I’m not using my wheelchair, I will usually have my crutches, cane, or a walker. (I also see its visibility in other things — a pale or sickly shade of skin, thinning hair, swollen joints — but we’ll leave the topic of subjectivity of “disability visibility” rest till another day.)

I’m used to less visibility as a disabled, mobility-device-using, Jewish, Queer woman to begin with (and I still have more visibility than most of my disabled friends of color get to see). In this instance, however, I’d just been reading crip theory. I decided to take the opportunity to crip the post. I chose photos of myself in which my mobility devices (and, therefor, my disabilities) are fully on display, announced my sexuality and arrival, and threw a hashtag on there to emphasize both identities: #QueerCripRollCall.

I invited others to join in, encouraging them to post their selfies under the hashtag #QueerCripRollCall. Slowly but surely, photos started trickling in from Disabled, LGBTQIA+ folks, until I was struggling to keep up with retweeting them all.

Here is a small, curated collection of some of those tweets.

For two days, #QueerCripRollCall was trending, with dozens of people posting their pictures under the hashtag. It was a fleeting moment, as most technologically-based moments are in this day and age. But for at least a couple of days, we carved out a very small space of the twitterverse for us — for us who are disabled and LGBTQIA+, and who oh-so-very rarely get opportunities to see both of those identities proudly represented at once.