Looking Good: Beauty Standards & Disability

Who deserves to be visualized in media when discussing disability? It's well known that attractive people are treated better by others.  And when you think of the term 'model,' you think of beautiful men and women. 

While contemplating the visuals for my last two novels, I spent days searching stock image licensing companies to find imagery that would represent the two main characters in both Every Time I Think of You and its sequel Message of Love.

And I failed.

I failed because I didn't settle for what was available, because the images for rent did not include young men who resemble the main characters, in particular, Everett Forrester.  Stock images of wheelchair users, are kind of stupid, as this snarky yet accurate AutoStraddle listicle shows.

British trainer Jack Ayers

Most stock image companies portray disabled people -specifically wheelchair users- as either frail, in a hospital, alone, or conversely, as super athletic.

An exception is PhotoAbility, which has a more diverse array of images, but none of their images include two men together that could even slightly be implied as gay.

Also, as I've written before, I did not want to specifically 'brand' the books as disabled-inclusive, or specific. I never shied away from mentioning it as part of the story. I simply thought that the nature field guide look of the two covers was more metaphoric, while referencing an actual part of the story, Reid's love and study of nature.

Message of Love: Bibliography

Since I've got a few great group readings with other authors coming up, the next one being in a library, I thought I'd share a list of the nonfiction books that were basically my homework while writing Message of Love, the sequel to Every Time I Think of You.

In the interest of variety, I'll link as many books as I can to Alibris, which features all my books, and is a nice alternative to Amazon.com. Just don't buy the overpriced listed editions. I got most of these books used online, and had fun finding them.


Out & About
For scenery and setting, I enjoyed perusing several travel and nature books.

The Peterson Field Guides for Wildflowers (Roger Tory Peterson, Margaret McKenny, editors) and Eastern Trees (George A. Petrides, Janet Wehr, editors) gave me accurate information about the flora of the area. Living in California makes for a little distance from knowing which kinds of trees and plants Reid would work with in his classes, his job, and elsewhere. They're also the sort of books Reid would use a lot.

Horrible, Wonderful

This is an essay about a lot of horrible things, so you've been warned; terrible awful things done to people with disabilities and able-bodied people whose bodies have been torn the shreds by heinous violence.

In Russia, the Malaysia Airlines plane shot down by a military rocket killed all the passengers, including children and several AIDS activists and HIV specialists headed from Amsterdam to the Melbourne AIDS Conference.

Dozens of memorials around the world have commemorated those lost. But even though it's now known that this was an intentional act committed by the military, albeit mistakenly, no international governing body has taken steps to sue, punish, or lay blame where it belongs; with the fascist Putin regime and his missile-wielding military thugs, who tried to cover up evidence, abscond with corpses, blame others, even spew out conspiracy theories about the passengers "being already dead" to the lie-filled Russian media. 

Lady Gaga's Crip Chic

Lady Gaga once again exploits disability as a pose, so I'm going to exploit her. It's been said that the 'virality' of a good blog post includes catchy words that will generate lots of clicks, or in the case of Lady Gaga, random clicks that have nothing to do with anything.