Deaf performer, writer Terry Galloway recounts why it was time for a memoir

From the Austin American-Statesman:

During a few hours spent chatting in the cafe at Central Market and driving around Austin looking for her old haunts, Terry Galloway makes one baffling, indefensible statement about her recently published memoir, "Mean Little deaf Queer": "I didn't think I had anything much to write about."

In fact, Galloway's life is so event-filled that the drama began even before she was born. When her mother, Edna, an Army wife, was six months pregnant with Terry and ailing, a doctor at the American military hospital in Stuttgart, Germany, gave her a mycin antibiotic.

Even at the time, mycin antibiotics were known to risk complications to the fetus. And nine years later, after the Galloway family had moved Texas, Terry began to go deaf, first slowly, and then in "chunks."

Not long after, another change came over her: The innocent sexual play Galloway engaged in with boys gave way to a deeper longing, for women. Gay and deaf, she was an outsider twice over, and spitting angry most of the time.

Like many outsiders, Galloway found a sort of salvation in theater, though salvation did not come easy.

When she arrived as a freshman at the University of Texas drama department, the adviser noticed her hearing aid and exiled her to the costuming department. Humiliated but undeterred, Galloway started hunting down the small, out-of-the-way places where Austin's underground theater scene was emerging.

"I had imagined the theater world as a cold, body-obsessed, hierarchical and hostile place since the day that department adviser had turned me away," she writes. "But in those Shangri-las of art and neglect where everybody smoked dope, drank a bit, seemed more in pursuit of play than perfection, deafness didn't seem to matter, I could fall flat on my butt...and who cared?"

After graduating from UT with a degree in American studies, Galloway, through her own gifts and a lucky break or two, became one of the founders of Esther's Follies, the performance troupe that has been a mainstay of Sixth Street for 32 years.

What followed was notable, too: a globe-trotting career as a performer, a good amount of drinking and drugging, a prodigious and "convoluted" sex life and a "complex" relationship of 25 years' standing with her partner, Donna Marie Nudd. Notable enough that Terry Galloway eventually figured out that, yes, she did have something much to write about.

"All my life I've loved writers and I thought they were just the most miraculous creatures that ever walked on the face of the earth," Galloway, 58, says. "And then I became one, and so I can't quite have that elevated opinion of them anymore. They've fallen to earth."

Galloway laughs when she said this. She laughs a lot when she speaks, amused by her instinct to dramatize and overdramatize almost everything she thinks and experiences.

"I'd rather be dead," she says, contemplating the prospect of waxing nostalgic about "old Austin."

"I got up and I vomited," she says of seeing the Holocaust movie "Night and Fog" and realizing that the beloved German nanny of her childhood had hid from her the truth about the country of her birth.

"I hope it falls into the sea," she says of Florida, a place where she spends half the year. (She lives in Tallahassee, where her partner Nudd teaches at Florida State University and where, Galloway says, the deaf community "hates queers.")

But the first thing you might want to know about Terry Galloway's chatter — other than its prodigious supply of cuss words — is how clear her voice is, how easy it is to forget that she's deaf, and therefore to speak to her while looking away. At which point Galloway gently, but firmly, reaches out and turns your face back to her, so she can see your lips move.

Galloway's skill at speaking and lip reading is the result of determined effort. "(T)he acts of speech, like lip reading, become subsumed into a semiconscious state of alert I'm not even aware of until those odd moments when my jaw starts aching," she writes in "Mean Little deaf Queer." "Then I'll realize I've been forcing my tongue down and pushing my teeth up so my S's won't hiss quite so much."

It's a choice that Galloway says make her doubly an outsider as a deaf person.

Perhaps because she wasn't born deaf, and perhaps because she's just plain obstinate by nature, Galloway isn't a member in good standing of the larger deaf community that insists on sign language as the primary mode of communication; she identifies herself as "small-d deaf," rather than "large-D deaf." When hearing people tried to tell her there were things she couldn't do because she was deaf, she kicked and fought her way out of that box. When deaf people tried to tell her there were things she had to do because she was deaf, she kicked and fought her way out of that box, too.

"People who are oppressed become oppressors themselves, and they were guilty of it," Galloway said of the large-D deaf community. "But they don't have the monopoly on deafness. That is changing."

It doesn't take much, though, for Galloway to revert to a militant solidarity. When an early reader of the book told Galloway that she has hated people without disabilities all her life for the cruelties they visited upon her, Galloway thought, "Me too, me too, me too. I hated what they did to me."

And yet. "I don't want to hate," Galloway says. "I want to get over it."

When we spoke in mid-July, when she was in town visiting family for a few days, Galloway noted that she was contemplating taking a big leap toward getting over it: In August, she was going to be evaluated for cochlear implants, which are controversial in the large-D deaf community.

"I'm still freaked out by (the idea of getting the implants)," Galloway said. She was worried that they would look ugly and that in Florida, a state with plenty of thunderstorms, the metal in her head would be a magnet for lightning bolts.

"It's very possible," she said, when asked if she might bail out on the procedure at the last minute. "It's actually quite possible."

Though Galloway would rather die than wax nostalgic about old Austin, she's not averse to getting in a car and pointing out the places that helped make her who she is.

There's the storefront on the Drag that was once a bar where a now-prominent Austinite used to deal drugs.

There's the CVS drug store that used to be a porn theater, where she saw her first dirty movie.

And there's the house on Pearl Street near the UT campus where Janis Joplin once lived, and where Galloway had some of her first lesbian affairs when she was 18.

Actually, Galloway can't find the Joplin house — it's either been radically renovated or razed and built over, or Galloway's memory of the place isn't as clear as she hoped it was. We drive and drive, block by block, but Galloway can't nail down the lot that should go with all her stories.

"That's where a lot of lesbians were living collectively at the time," she says. "They lived there trying to pay homage to the fact that (Joplin) had lived there."

Galloway liked the part of the Joplin worship that involved drinking a lot of Southern Comfort — "it was sweet and awful and cheap" — but not the part about romanticizing Joplin's early death. "I was too cynical for that," she says.

We head south to Clarksville, where Galloway lived in a succession of group homes as Esther's Follies was being created.

"When we first started Esther's, we were all poor," she says. "I used to live in a closet in there," she says, pointing at a house on Harthan Street.

Everything was communal: the meals, the booze, the drugs, the sex. "There was some sex, there was always going to be some sex," she says. "But it was always in the pursuit of something else."

The crew regarded themselves as pioneers, which they were. Thirty years ago, Sixth Street wasn't the tourist destination it is today, and Esther's Follies was a big part of the transformation. Galloway remembers that when they'd perform, women who worked at a "massage parlor" nearby would come in and soothe their tired hands in cups of ice. There was a salsa bar a few doors down that was frequented by the city's sanitation workers, who would sometimes get into fist fights. One of them, Galloway says, had studied mime with Marcel Marceau.

Oh, old Austin, with your crusty hippies clad in overalls and your fisticuff-wielding garbage men performing "Trapped in a Box"! Will we ever see your likes again?

Probably not, and that's fine with Terry Galloway, who knows she was an agent of many of the changes that have transformed the city, and doesn't regret it.

Well, most of the time. "We would have liked something maybe a little more ideal, something a little less drunken touristy," Galloway says of today's Sixth Street. "That makes me vomit."

In early August, Galloway, still ambivalent about the surgery, went to Gainesville, Fla., to be tested for cochlear implants. The audiologist put her in a soundproof booth, told her to turn on her hearing aid and repeat 40 sentences from a CD being played over the speakers.

"I'm sitting in there thinking I'm going to astonish them, I'm so \u2026 skillful at deciphering meaning just through the pattern of sound," Galloway says by e-mail last week.

Instead, she was shaken. "Out of those 40 sentences I got just one word right — the word 'the.'

"She takes me out of the booth and back to her office ... and repeats all 40 sentences (while I read her lips). I got every single one right — well, I kind of fudged one. She said, 'It's raining' and I thought she said 'Israeli.' But then I remembered the sentences were supposed to be common ones and corrected myself.

"It made me realize that all this time I really was as deaf as the professionals were telling me I was; that I'd been relying on the look of things, the visual cues, the lips, the expression in the eyes, the shift of the body ...

"And right then and there I began to change my tune," writes Galloway.

"Come January I'm having the implant. Then I'm going to learn how to hear all over again. Two things I want to do after I get the implants: learn to play the guitar and the piano; learn to speak French.

"I haven't thought beyond that."