Raymond Luczak
Words: 470
[Response to "Airing Dirty Laundry"]

Editor's Note: Readers are invited to suggest a thing, person, place, event, or concept for Raymond Luczak to write about. You can suggest anything up to three words and send it to editor@clercscar.com and Raymond will pick one to respond to each week. Thank you, Kathy Morgan, for suggesting "Airing Dirty Laundry"!

We live in an age in which no secret is taboo enough to not discuss online, but it is peculiar that often, within families, no one talks about the 800-pound gorillas in their lives. A husband might long for that sexy accountant at work; a suspicious wife wonders whether she should carry her fourth baby to its full term or go for an abortion; and their children, perhaps too young to process the tension between their parents, sense something is fundamentally wrong but it is something they cannot articulate until they are much older, when their parents have finally separated. Directness of language is much too painful, so one must take years to say: "I am seeing someone else." As hurtful as it usually is for the people involved, it is unfortunately the same old story enacted endlessly all over the world. It's in our human nature to fail continuously in our attempts to atone for the sins of adultery, avarice, and revenge in all their forms. We try, but as much as we crave love and acceptance, we seem to be blind saboteurs when it comes to our own hearts.
We bleed constantly, asking ourselves why but never the right questions to help stop our hemorrhaging.

Imagine being a public figure with the added anguish of having those 800-pound gorillas freed against your will and flaunted out there in the media. Suddenly strangers are discussing casually the very things that you could not always articulate. They ask you on the street, usually without so much an introduction, how things are going on with you and your partner, or how you feel about the other woman during your custody battle.
It's as if the public discussion about the offstage drama in your life has made it acceptable for anyone to ask the most impertinent questions. On the one hand their concerns seem genuine, but on the other hand, you cannot tell if they're looking for juicy tidbits to propagate online. You are torn between needing moral support and insulating yourself against further insult.

This is not all that different from how some of us in the Deaf community feel sometimes. We need to examine how we treat each other, and why we behave the way we do as a people, or our kindred spirits will feel estranged from the Deaf community. And what happens to a community that's filled with alienated members? We become weaker, and harder to resuscitate; unity for a single cause becomes next to impossible. Is that what we truly want for our community, the future of our language? We need to respect each other's privacy as we negotiate with those 800-pound gorillas for peace in our lives. Who knows, these animals may be just what gives us the courage to withstand those tourists gawking at us.

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Raymond Luczak's latest book is Assembly Required: Notes from a Deaf Gay Life. Six of his poems appear in Deaf American Poetry, which is available at https://www.clercscar.com/books

Raymond's Web site is at https://www.raymondluczak.com