Terry Galloway :: mean, queer and deaf
Author and performer Terry Galloway has never been one afraid to speak her mind, even if she can’t exactly hear the words that come from it. Her memoir - Mean Little deaf Queer - has been lauded by critics for its biting humor and astounding openness on her life navigating the world for decades as an openly lesbian deaf performer. Chosen among Out Magazine’s top five reads for last summer, the memoir is a must-read. Her writing is enlivened in performance, where truly no holds are barred.
With Galloway coming into the Windy City for a series of appearances this week, EDGE jumped at the opportunity to pick the performer’s brain on being "mean," finding acceptance and why her show has been compared to one’s first experience giving oral sex.
Loved to write
EDGE: How has the transition been from performer to author for you? It seems the writing comes fairly naturally to you, though you’ve been focused on performing for so much time.
Terry Galloway: When I was younger I was a recluse. My family was worried that I was going to turn into an Emily Dickinson, locking myself away in my attic retreat, writing, writing, writing. Thank God for my sex drive, it was probably the one thing - well, that and a lack of talent - that saved me from being a posthumously famous poet.
Which is just to say I’ve always loved to write. The same way I’ve always loved to perform. So I write and perform every chance I get. But the different forms of writing don’t always come naturally to me. I have to work at it. And writing a memoir... Man, it took me years to figure it out. The memoir arose from a couple of personal essays I wrote that got published and got me my agent. The agent asked me how soon do you think you can finish a memoir and I said, oh six months. Ten years later, I was still struggling to figure out my real voice.
I wrote twenty drafts of the first chapter before I moved on to the second. And before it was published, I wrote twenty more drafts of that first chapter alone. Writing and revising is very much like rehearsing and rehearsing. You figure it out as you go along. You listen to what your directors and editors and audiences tell you. And every once in awhile you decide to defy them and then worry like hell that what you created might go up in flames.
