GaySL Workshop GayAF
By: Zach Terrillion, Features Editor
The GaySL workshop held by the Oberlin Linguistic Society last Friday promised to teach “LGBTQ+ related sign language while fostering a group discussion about Deaf culture, intersectionality, accessibility, and more!” So it was that I found myself exchanging the brilliant 4:30pm afternoon sun for a dimly lit Cat & the Cream. The Cat was packed, students at nearly every table, couches filled. As with any Oberlin event with “Gay” in the title, this workshop had drawn a crowd.
The event was led by Hayden Kristal, a Deaf, bisexual, Jewish, queer activist and stand-up comedian. With their bright pink slacks and graphic tee that read “Save a Horse, Ride a Lesbian,” they fit right in amidst the gathered Oberlin students.
After the initial introductions of OLS leaders Elisa Caterina and Robbin Alexander, Hayden stepped on the stage, beginning their workshop in ASL. Hands flickering beneath the stage lights, Hayden didn’t speak a word. I felt my stomach drop, mind flickering through the Linguistic Society email that had categorized this event as “appropriate for beginners.” Had I misunderstood the implication of beginner? Was I supposed to know ASL to attend this event? Had I just signed myself up for an hour and a half talk where I’d be unable to understand anything?
Hayden’s hands dropped to their sides. “I’m just kidding. I start every workshop that way.” This introduction, a staple in Hayden’s workshops and stand-up routines, serves a double purpose. In one sense, they said, it dissolves the tension and anxiety they feel when public speaking. The relief they described “looking out onto a sea of doe-eyed faces” dissolved the formal atmosphere that often permeates teaching workshops such as this one. This introduction did more than ease audience/presenter tensions. It also served as an introduction to the concept of accessibility in social justice spaces that Hayden would build on over the course of the workshop. By throwing their audience into a situation in which their access needs were not met, Hayden had flipped the script, giving us a chance to sit with the discomfort of not being able to understand.
The easy, reciprocal nature of the workshop was further reinforced by Hayden’s insistence on the importance of asking questions. “Who wants to ask the first question?” they asked the audience, pointing towards a hand that rose in the back of the room. “Is the choice of lighting yours?” the attendee asked. As for many events, the Cat was dimly lit, swathing the audience in semi-darkness while Hayden, the presenter, stood illuminated beneath warm stage lights.
“The dimness?” Hayden replied. “No, it was not. Can we change that actually?” they asked, directing their question to the lighting crew in the back of the room. The lights came up and the audience stirred in their seats, suddenly illuminated. The interaction couldn’t have been more perfect if it had been staged. Even though this event had been specifically created to discuss access within social justice spaces, the access needs of the audience and Hayden had not been met. People who have difficulty hearing often rely on visual cues — ASL, lipreading, facial expressions — which had been limited in the semi-darkness of the event space.
The workshop itself led the audience through the signed alphabet with the intention that the audience, by the end of the night, could add fingerspelling — a form of sign language in which individual letters are formed by the fingers to spell out words — to their signing repertoire. Throughout, Hayden arbitrarily dolled out points to tables that gave subjectively good responses to their various rhetorical (or not?) questions keeping up an easy and comfortable pace that let each participant find their own rhythm while keeping the entire audience focused and engaged.
The practical foundation of ASL and intermixing of jokes and light anecdotes laid the foundation for and balanced out the discussion of the more serious topics of accessibility and intersectionality in social justice spaces. Hayden challenged the audience to think about the ways in which they could practically apply these concepts in their social justice work and everyday lives, warning against apathy or inaction, “You can’t predict everything, but there are things that you can do to make the experience more accessible and intersectional.”
The sign language I retained from the workshop also has practical applications. Since the talk, I have been trying to teach everyone I know the sign for lesbian. First, make an L with the pointer finger and thumb of your dominant hand. Then, put it up to your chin, palm facing towards your chest, like you’re thinking really hard about something important (perhaps about lesbian icon Kiera Knightly in Pirates of the Caribbean?) Perfect! But the most important thing I left Hayden’s workshop with was a sense of hope.
Discussions about the barriers to access omnipresent in our moment can feel hopeless. As young people who care desperately about the world around us, it is easy to see that world’s intolerance as insurmountable. Though Hayden Kristal’s talk did not ignore the gravity of the issues they discussed, the care and warmth with which they approached their workshop left their audience, not with a feeling of disillusionment or devastation, but with hope for a better, kinder world.
In the workshop, Hayden taught the audience about the different signs for the acronym LGBTQ+. Though several of the signs had one or two variations — lesbian can also be signed with the palm-facing-chest-L, but moved slightly to your right, the pointer finger touching the center of your chin — the sign for transgender had just one iteration. Prior to 2003, there wasn’t a word for explicitly transgender, just a sign that has since become outdated and is equivalent to “transexual” in spoken English. This changed during a 2003 conference in Florida when a group of Deaf trans people took it upon themselves to develop a new sign. Place your hand towards the left side of your chest, palm facing out towards your left. Twist your hand and forearm to the right as your fingers draw together as if you are screwing in a very tiny lightbulb until the hand changes into a shape resembling what one website calls “a flower bud” at the center of your chest. Hayden sees the existence and development of this sign as evidence of the progress small groups of dedicated people can and will make in their own communities if they take the initiative to do so.
“Accommodations are not gifts…they are what we do for people in our community because they are part of our community,” Hayden said towards the end of their workshop. As I continue to think about the ways in which I can provide for my own community, inside and outside of Oberlin, I think back to a question Hayden had posed simultaneously to themselves and to the audience, “What am I doing today that we’re going to look back on in ten years and think that was the start of huge radical change?”
