Sitting at home one day, Wayne Herbert was feeling increasingly frustrated at the state of the conversation around the richly diverse disability community, which includes members of the LGBTIQA+ community, being described as ‘marginalised’, ‘vulnerable’ and other such terms.
“I don’t want any member of my community to feel marginalised or vulnerable. I want us to be seen as influential and powerful,” he says. ““I wanted to write a book which was a collection of letters, kind of like the queer disabled Vagina Monologues!”
Wayne describes himself as “a chronic over-sharer and a very average stand up comic who’s travelled the world and is extraordinarily fortunate.” He delivers speeches at events worldwide. He’s a comedian and a writer.
While he feels like everybody knows his story, there are a lot of other queer and disabled people’s stories that haven’t been shared. Realising he didn’t want to do the book alone, he reached out to his friend, fellow disability advocate and writer, Yenn Purkis, and together they reached out their network and gave people a simple brief: ‘Write a letter to your younger self about what success looks like for you’. They also reached out to key allies who are academics and who could add to the rich tapestry of perspective and experience. To Wayne, we need allies to get real meaningful change, just like with Marriage Equality.
This is Yenn’s 18th book and Wayne’s second. They collaborated on all aspects of the book.
Wayne expressed he wanted it to be accessible to anyone, at any point of their journey of understanding about queer and disabled communities.
As disabled and queer people are usually described only in terms of deficit or as ‘inspiration porn’ (a term they tackle right at the start of the book), Wayne wanted to show that they are so much more. The contributors openly recount experiences of facing discrimination, bullying, isolation and the ongoing challenge of seeking acceptance. I was particularly moved by the letters to the writer’s younger self and the joy and the humour that helped them along their path to success.
Wayne and Yenn realised that what they’ve produced is, in fact, an educational book. “I don’t think there’s many books quite like this that take the disability experience, the queer experience and celebrate that intersectionality and describe similar but vastly different experiences of success,” he says.
Wayne is so thankful to all the contributors for sharing so openly and honestly and trusting he and Yenn with their stories. In Our Words is a must-read for those interested in gaining deeper insights into the LGBTQIA+ disabled community.
In Our Words: Stories from the Intersection of LGBTQIA+ Identity and Disability by Wayne Herbert and Yenn Purkis is available through Lived Places Publishing.
