I’ve been legally blind since birth. Ever since I can remember, Helen Keller has been etched in my brain.
Like many disabled people, I’ve lived under the shadow of Helen Keller. With the exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who had polio, she’s the most famous disabled person in the world.
For decades, I’ve chafed against Keller. Until, I came to identify with her and respect her legacy. It took a while.
Helen Keller feeding swans, 1913
Keller, born in Tuscombia, Alabama, lived from 1880-1968. She became deaf and blind after an illness at the age of nineteen months. Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired, was sent by the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston to be Keller’s teacher.
“The Miracle Worker” was an Academy-Award winning film (and before that an acclaimed play and TV show). But, even as a kid, I hated the story of Keller, the wild child, being miraculously civilized by Anne Sullivan. If I’d known of the late disability activist Sheila Young’s phrase “inspiration porn,” I would have shouted it at the movie screen!
I had no love, either, for the images of Keller as a sexless, saintly woman that are the flip side of the wild child image. I’m all for doing good. But, from early on, I’ve known that I’m not asexual or saintly.
Nondisabled people sometimes assume that, because of my disability, I can’t have romance or marry. Often, they say, I shouldn’t worry about not being coupled up because I can be “like Helen Keller.”
Ironically, I began to identify with Keller after I met Anne, the love of my life.
Anne died in 2001 at age 46 from cancer. Marriage equality wasn’t on the horizon then. We knew, though we’d been together for 12 years in a loving relationship, that we couldn’t wed. When Anne had surgery, the hospital wouldn’t let me be with her. Until I said I was her sister.
If you mention Helen Keller, most people will think of either “inspiration” or of “overcoming” disability. “She achieved so much out of such a sad life,” a woman from Apple tech support said on learning I was writing about Keller, “She’s such an inspiration!”
There’s so much that’s not widely known about Keller.
She was an early supporter of the NAACP, a vaudeville performer, a feminist, a socialist, an author and a friend of Mark Twain.
I was thrilled to learn that Keller wasn’t a goody-two-shoes. I respect her commitment to progressive politics. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when she and Mark Twain hung out.
But it was the story of her doomed love life that really made me identify with Keller.
In June 1916, when she was 36, Keller met and fell in love with a journalist named Peter Fagan. Fagan, like Keller, was a socialist. He communicated with Keller by fingerspelling into her hand. Without telling anyone, the couple made plans to marry. But, Anne Sullivan and Keller’s family disapproved of the marriage.
Keller’s “extended family vigorously squashed the relationship with forced midnight train trips out of town, an angry and gun-waving brother, and drama worthy of a bad novel,” historian Kim E. Nielsen writes in “Helen Keller: Selected Writings.”
At this point in her life, Keller was world-renowned. When she received her degree from Radcliffe College in 1904, she became the first DeafBlind woman to graduate college. She’d given lectures across the country and written several books. Yet Sullivan and Keller’s relatives “felt adamantly that marriage and childbearing were not options for a deaf-blind woman,” Nielsen writes.
At that time, this attitude was common. In some states and cities in the United States “ugly laws” prohibited people with disabilities from being out in public. Families often kept their disabled family members hidden. In many states, disabled women weren’t permitted to marry and have children.
Keller “apparently acquiesced” to her family’s and Sullivan’s disapproval of her marrying Fagan, Nielsen writes. As far as we know, Keller didn’t interact with Fagan again after their marriage was nixed.
“I corresponded with the young man for several months;” Keller wrote in her memoir “Midstream” about the aftermath of her romance with Fagan, “but my love-dream was shattered.”
In the years before marriage equality, I often thought of how Keller couldn’t marry the man she loved. My life was quite different from hers. I wasn’t world famous. Anne and I could live together. But I could see parallels.
Jean, my (now deceased) step-mom, loved me. But, “that’s absurd!” she said, when I mentioned that Anne and I had talked of having a child, “with your eyes like they are – you’re handicapped – how could you raise a child?”
People often saw Keller, because she was DeafBlind, as being incompetent. They couldn’t imagine her being supportive of other people or as supporting herself. The reality was different.
“I am paying my own passage through the world and am proud of it,” Keller told the Chicago Tribune.
Anne Sullivan was 14 years older than Keller. As she got older, Sullivan’s vision impairment worsened. Keller provided emotional support when Sullivan became ill or emotionally stressed.
When people saw me with Anne, they often assumed she was my caretaker. Sometimes, they were surprised that I knew how to pour a glass of milk, let alone earn money as a writer. Often, Anne and I would walk to a market in our neighborhood to buy groceries for dinner. “Where is the blind lady you usually walk here,” a passerby asked Anne one night when I wasn’t with her. One afternoon, I went to the emergency room with Anne. She was writhing in pain from her cancer and shivering from a fever. But, the ER staffer thought I was sick. “What’s wrong with her?” she asked Anne.
Though it must have been terrible for Keller to have been unable to marry Fagan, she didn’t let prejudice ruin her spirits. Until she became ill in the last few years of her life, Keller didn’t stop working to make the world, as she said, “as I would like to see it.”
Keller’s unflagging commitment to human rights inspired me to do what I could to work for marriage equality. Keller had queer friends. She knew the gay literary critic Alexander Wolcott and socialized with the lesbian actress Katharine Cornell. Given the times they lived in, they may well have not been out to her or to each other.
It’s risky to speculate on how Keller, who came of age at the beginning of the 20th century and died the year before the Stonewall Uprising, would feel now about same-sex marriage. Yet, I can’t help but believe that if she were here today, she would cheer for marriage equality. For everyone, queer, nonqueer, disabled, nondisabled – everywhere.
