{"product_id":"mean-little-deaf-queer-isbn-9780807019641","title":"Mean Little deaf Queer","description":"\u003cb\u003e\"Terry Galloway is resilient … caustic, depraved, utterly disinhibited, and somehow sweetly bubbly, a beguiling raconteuse who periodically leaps onto the dinner table and stabs you with her fork.\" —Alison Bechdel\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn anniversary edition of the laugh out loud memoir, with a new epilogue, from a self-proclaimed “child freak” about family, transformation, identity, and the messiness of living\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Told with understandable rage, quirky humor, and extraordinary humanity” (\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e), Terry Galloway’s \u003ci\u003eMean Little deaf Queer\u003c\/i\u003e invites readers on her journey from “child-freak” to exuberant performance artist.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBorn in post-WWII Germany, Galloway’s fetal nervous system was damaged when her mother was given the experimental antibiotic Mycin while pregnant.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs a child growing up in 1960s Texas, she had hallucinations and out of body experiences. At the age of nine, the voices of Galloway’s loved ones faded, eventually completely disappearing. It didn’t help that over this same time Galloway’s “romantic awe” of girls was evolving into “something sweaty and insistent,” despite her continued experimentation with boys.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRather than sitting on life’s sidelines due to her disability and “otherness,” Galloway threw herself into living. She continued roughhousing with the neighborhood kids, became a standout at a camp for “crippled children”, and, years later, earned a theater scholarship to the University of Texas, all while indulging in polysexual exploits \"with the tinker, the tailor, the mescaline maker.” And did she mention her nervous breakdown in New York?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFiercely original, screamingly funny, and with a new epilogue that covers Galloway’s life over the last 15 years, including her major decision to get Cochlear implants, \u003ci\u003eMean Little Deaf Queer \u003c\/i\u003ewill leave readers feeling charmed, heartbroken, and all the while thoroughly entertained.\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003ePrologue: Nine\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART I: Drowning\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThem\u003c\/i\u003e and Me\u003cbr\u003eVisions\u003cbr\u003ePresto Change-o\u003cbr\u003eMeaner\u003cbr\u003eThe Performance of Drowning\u003cbr\u003eLost Boy\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART II: Passing\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLittle-\u003ci\u003ed\u003c\/i\u003e Deaf\u003cbr\u003eOn Being Told No\u003cbr\u003ePassing Strange\u003cbr\u003eDrag Acts\u003cbr\u003eShhhhhh!\u003cbr\u003eJobs for the Deaf\u003cbr\u003eThe Shallow End\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART III: Emerging\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eScare\u003cbr\u003eWho Died and What Killed Them\u003cbr\u003eWhy I Should Matter\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEpilogue: A Happy Life\u003cbr\u003eAfterwordThis is a damn fine piece of work which is unbelievably powerful.—Dorothy Allison\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This is not your mother's triumph-of-the-human-spirit memoir. Yes, Terry Galloway is resilient. But she's also caustic, depraved, utterly disinhibited, and somehow sweetly bubbly, a beguiling raconteuse who periodically leaps onto the dinner table and stabs you with her fork. Her story will fascinate, it will hurt, and you will like it.\"—Alison Bechdel, author of \u003ci\u003eFun Home\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The most uncomfortable laughter of the season.\"—\u003ci\u003eOut\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"One of the finest, most nakedly honest and humorous autobiographies out there to be read. . . . Partly David Sedaris-esque in its slice-of-life essay moments, part slapstick farce, so very real, and always laugh out loud hilarious.\"—Rebecca Sarwate, \u003ci\u003eEdge\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[A] humorous and harrowing new memoir.\"—\u003ci\u003eThe Advocate\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Told with understandable rage, quirky humor, and extraordinary humanity, this remarkable woman's engaging account deserves a large readership.\"—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A frank, bitingly humorous memoir.\"—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Galloway] is dexterous in her use of words and devastating with a sense of black humor that brings numerous laugh-out-loud delights.\"—John R. Killacky, \u003ci\u003eThe Gay and Lesbian Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Galloway was born a storyteller, and her narrative gifts are in full force throughout, spinning yarns about herself and her family that mesmerize.\"—Robert Faires, \u003ci\u003eAustin Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003eKnown for her cross-dressing roles in Shakespeare and at Austin’s legendary Esther’s Follies, \u003cb\u003eTerry Galloway\u003c\/b\u003e 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.The year I turned nine, months before anyone knew I\u003cbr\u003e was going deaf, the voices of everyone I loved had all but disappeared.\u003cbr\u003e Their chatter had been like the nattering of birds\u003cbr\u003e in the trees—a cheerful if sometimes annoying reminder of\u003cbr\u003e how alive the world was around me. As their voices lapsed\u003cbr\u003e away, I no longer felt sure how any but the most common\u003cbr\u003e words sounded, how they ought to be pronounced, and\u003cbr\u003e that made me uneasy about opening my mouth. My place\u003cbr\u003e in the family that year was to watch, which was how I was\u003cbr\u003e learning to listen. I’d sit at the kitchen table—where most\u003cbr\u003e stories of any importance were told—and read lips, piecing\u003cbr\u003e together the shapes they formed until they made a kind\u003cbr\u003e of sense. Lip reading—whether you know you’re doing it\u003cbr\u003e or not—is a hard, intimate business, and during my ninth\u003cbr\u003e year, when the way people sucked or licked their teeth as\u003cbr\u003e they were talking took sneaking precedence over the look\u003cbr\u003e in their eyes, all that rapt staring at mouths would wring\u003cbr\u003e me dry. After every couple of stories, I’d turn my gaze\u003cbr\u003e away, give myself a breather, and recharge. It took me so\u003cbr\u003e much concentrated effort to make sense, much less sentences, \u003cbr\u003eout of the lips as they moved, that any and every\u003cbr\u003e utterance had to have a payoff. If people were making idle\u003cbr\u003e conversation or empty yak about, say, grocery shopping or\u003cbr\u003e getting their nails done, I’d heave the sigh of the doomed\u003cbr\u003e and lean my head against the table, pressing the bridge of\u003cbr\u003e my nose against the metal rim hard enough to dig a furrow.\u003cbr\u003e I’d glance up every now and then to see if the topic\u003cbr\u003e had changed to something more interesting, like who had\u003cbr\u003e died and what had killed them. If talk was stalled at yellow\u003cbr\u003e versus white onions or the rising price of a pedicure,\u003cbr\u003e I’d get to pitying myself, slaving like a dung beetle over a\u003cbr\u003e worthless bit of nothing, and give up—put my head back\u003cbr\u003e down on the table, close my eyes, and deliberately lose\u003cbr\u003e control. The rising, falling mumble of those incomprehensible\u003cbr\u003e voices would wash over me until sounds would inexplicably\u003cbr\u003e leap from the muttering to shake themselves clear\u003cbr\u003e in my mind as words. A name, the time of night, the make\u003cbr\u003e of a car, a part of town, a tired old cliché. I’d string them\u003cbr\u003e together as randomly as I caught them, but they still always\u003cbr\u003e seemed to be telling me a story. \u003ci\u003eRuby, two a.m., Ford, east\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eof Hutto, dying of hunger, \u003c\/i\u003eand I’d see the black-eyed Great-\u003cbr\u003e Aunt Ruby I’d never met gunning her Mustang down the\u003cbr\u003e one main street of a hick Texas town en route to love or a\u003cbr\u003e Burger King. It soothed my hurt and anger to imagine all\u003cbr\u003e those arbitrary words telling me the illicit secrets behind\u003cbr\u003e everything I hadn’t heard.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Which may be why I now find myself enamored of the\u003cbr\u003e memoir. The good ones thrill me every bit as much as the\u003cbr\u003e great novels, but it’s the crappy ones I’ve lost my heart to.\u003cbr\u003e They make me feel like a rescue dog, sniffing out the dim\u003cbr\u003e glimmerings of feelings sincere and raw within a tangled\u003cbr\u003e wreckage of inchoate ramblings and obvious lies. I’ve been\u003cbr\u003e reading a ton of bad ones lately, most of which I’ve gotten\u003cbr\u003e only halfway through. They are piled up by my bedside and\u003cbr\u003e not in the best of shape. I’m a passionate reader and the\u003cbr\u003e books have suffered for it, their covers wavy from having\u003cbr\u003e been dropped in the tub, spines busted from being tossed\u003cbr\u003e on the floor, pages folded, creased, coffee-stained, and\u003cbr\u003e marked with ink. Red. I feel intensely fond of the whole\u003cbr\u003e lot of lousy writing that has found its way to print because\u003cbr\u003e I smell in those stinkers a fecund democracy. Every sort\u003cbr\u003e of half-coherent loser getting their say. Maybe even mean\u003cbr\u003e little deaf queers like me.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e As a toddler I was an ardent chatterbox, with such an\u003cbr\u003e adult and rapid-fire vocabulary that one of our German\u003cbr\u003e neighbors in Stuttgart mistook me for a dwarf. By age seven\u003cbr\u003e I was becoming what passes in our family of energetic talkers\u003cbr\u003e as taciturn, more like my father, who would sneak away\u003cbr\u003e from the kitchen table in the middle of a detailed piece of\u003cbr\u003e family gossip my mother and my sister, Trudy, were sharing\u003cbr\u003e and flee to the bathroom so he could read the Sunday\u003cbr\u003e paper in peace. I never left the table. I just stopped talking.\u003cbr\u003e My mother and Trudy never worried about my growing\u003cbr\u003e silence—they’d taken it as appreciative. But then they\u003cbr\u003e didn’t know the reasons behind it. Sounds had started disappearing\u003cbr\u003e all around me. I didn’t know where to, and I\u003cbr\u003e didn’t think to ask—not then and not the handful of years\u003cbr\u003e later when I started having my “visions.” Or so I liked to\u003cbr\u003e call them, although they never clued me in to anything\u003cbr\u003e useful or remotely prophetic.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Whatever they were, they were first visited upon me\u003cbr\u003e when I was nine and our family had resettled from Berlin,\u003cbr\u003e Germany, to Fort Hood, Texas. One hot spring Texas\u003cbr\u003e night I was sprawled on the dry grass of our new front\u003cbr\u003e yard, gazing up at a spiral of stars, when I suddenly found\u003cbr\u003e myself six feet in the air, looking down at myself lying on\u003cbr\u003e the grass looking up at those stars. I was a little pissed off\u003cbr\u003e by how perfectly cheerful my body seemed without me.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e These odd displacements weren’t exactly a daily occurrence,\u003cbr\u003e but that year, they happened often enough to make\u003cbr\u003e themselves familiar. Once I went zooming to the ceiling of\u003cbr\u003e the school gym as if sucked up by a vacuum. I dangled there\u003cbr\u003e looking down on a scene that was small as a dollhouse, everything\u003cbr\u003e normal about it. My PE teacher blew herself red\u003cbr\u003e on her whistle while my six classmates and I, all of us looking\u003cbr\u003e a bit zaftig in our blue shorts and white snap blouses,\u003cbr\u003e thundered across the polished wooden floor. No one else\u003cbr\u003e seemed aware that while my body was stampeding along\u003cbr\u003e with the rest of the herd, I wasn’t there at all. I’d become\u003cbr\u003e a much more delicate presence adrift in the rafters, smiling\u003cbr\u003e down on our sweaty race as if it were a mildly amusing\u003cbr\u003e bit of low comedy. Decades later in London, where\u003cbr\u003e I’d gone to perform one of my one-woman shows, I saw\u003cbr\u003e something of the same kind of life in miniature in a pennymechanical\u003cbr\u003e shop. A carved wooden man, not much bigger\u003cbr\u003e than my own thumb, was sleeping on a perfectly detailed\u003cbr\u003e cloth and wooden bed inside his tiny bedroom. He slept\u003cbr\u003e there until I dropped in a coin that clicked the switch that\u003cbr\u003e set it all in motion. With a ticking noise, the window of his\u003cbr\u003e minuscule room flew open and a dream horse, its nostrils\u003cbr\u003e and eyes painted to look as wild and flaring as its mane,\u003cbr\u003e poked its head through the gap. Up the little man sat, his\u003cbr\u003e closed doll eyes snapping wide with alarm as the horse\u003cbr\u003e reared and the wooden chair at the foot of the bed tilted\u003cbr\u003e and twirled. Watching that nightmare unfold in the little\u003cbr\u003e man’s shoebox of a room awakened in me the same queasy\u003cbr\u003e prickle of enchantment I’d felt as a kid, looking down on a\u003cbr\u003e play-pretend world.","brand":"Beacon Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305212236005,"sku":"NP9780807019641","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780807019641.jpg?v=1767732478","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/mean-little-deaf-queer-isbn-9780807019641","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}