Corbett Joan O’Toole still fighting for self-determination, respect for disabled people

Author and activist on coming out, intersectionality, and a lifetime of advocacy

By KATHI WOLFE

(Editor’s Note: One in four people in America has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Queer and disabled people have long been a vital part of the LGBTQ community. Take two of the many queer history icons who were disabled: Michelangelo is believed to have been autistic. Marsha P. Johnson, who played a heroic role in the Stonewall Uprising, had physical and psychiatric disabilities. Today, Deaf-Blind fantasy writer Elsa Sjunneson, actor and bilateral amputee Eric Graise and Kathy Martinez, a blind, Latinx lesbian who was Assistant Secretary of Labor for Disability Employment Policy for the Obama administration, are only a few of the numerous queer and disabled people in the LGBTQ community. Yet, the stories of this vital segment of the queer community have rarely been told. In its series “Queer, Crip and Here,” the Blade will tell some of these long unheard stories.)

Corbett Joan O’Toole, 71, a queer, disabled elder and a Ford Foundation 2022 Disability Futures Fellow, knew one thing for sure growing up in Boston: She didn’t want to be a nurse.

O’Toole has had a physical disability since she was 12 months old. “I sometimes joke that my becoming disabled was my birthday present when I turned one year old,” she said in a phone interview with the Blade.

O’Toole has used a wheelchair since she was 30. Before that, she walked with crutches and leg braces.

As a child, she’d had surgery, O’Toole said. “I saw what nurses did,” she added. “Men told them what to do. I knew nursing wasn’t for me.”

Even as a child, O’Toole could tell that male employers had the same attitude toward secretaries. “Sitting in an office all day didn’t seem like fun,” she said, “The only other thing a white woman in my generation could be when they grew up was to be a teacher.”

“I decided to be a teacher,” O’Toole added, “where I’d have my own classroom and no man would be telling me what to do.”

When she was young, O’Toole led, by her account, a sheltered life. She didn’t know then that she was queer. “I didn’t know if I met any queer people,” O’Toole said, “but I always knew that I liked strong women. I thought they were interesting.”

And, O’Toole, like many kids and teens with disabilities then (and, even often, now) knew that little was expected of disabled people. That disabled lives weren’t highly valued. “I was in school all the time with nondisabled kids,” O’Toole said.

Nearly everything was inaccessible then from libraries to courthouses to movie theaters. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) wouldn’t be passed until decades later. “You were expected to adapt even if things were inaccessible,” O’Toole said.

If you couldn’t make it in an inaccessible world, the attitude was “you don’t have to be here,” O’Toole said.

O’Toole didn’t meet other disabled people except during the summer, when she’d spend a month at a camp for disabled kids. The director and staff were nondisabled, O’Toole said. But at camp, she got to hang out with 90 other disabled kids. O’Toole got to interact with people like herself – disabled kids living vibrant lives. “We explored nature,” she said, “we collected blueberries. Made pancakes.”

There, O’Toole developed her life-long love of sports. As an adult, she has played competitive wheelchair basketball and power soccer. At her childhood summer camp, “We did archery,” O’Toole said, “and played baseball.”

At a time when sexism was the norm, O’Toole got to do things that girls usually couldn’t do at camp. “We went fishing,” she said, “We used power tools in a woodshop,” she said, “It was empowering!”

At camp, if the kids wanted to do something, they’d figure out a way to make it accessible – to make it work, O’Toole added.

O’Toole, author of “Fading Scars: My Queer Disability History,” a groundbreaking book that was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, graduated in 1973 from Fitchburg State University with a bachelor’s degree in education and her teaching credentials. The summer after graduation, she moved with a friend to Berkeley, Calif.

O’Toole was eager to go to California. It would get her out of the cold of New England, where getting around in ice and snow if you’re using crutches or a wheelchair is difficult. “It sounded like fun,” she said. “I’d be in a part of the country where it’s a Mediterranean climate –it’s spring or summer. No snow.”

The move to California was transformative for O’Toole.

There, people thought about disability accessibility. She met queer people and disabled people as well as many nondisabled and disabled lesbians.

“At 23, I came out,” O’Toole said, “I met a woman in a women’s workshop.”

She got to know Kitty Cone, an out disabled lesbian and disability rights movement leader. (Cone died in 2015.) She connected O’Toole to the burgeoning independent living movement. “She brought me to the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley and to the disabled lesbian community,” O’Toole said.

The independent living movement believes in self-determination and self-respect for disabled people. It fights disability-based discrimination and views disability from a cultural and social, rather than a medical perspective. Independent living centers are community-based, non-profit organizations, organized and controlled by disabled people. They provide advocacy, information and other services.

“The Berkeley CIL had a lot of lesbians who were nondisabled,” O’Toole said, “we are the wives of every movement.”

O’Toole came to California at a pivotal moment in disability history – at the beginning of the modern disability rights movement. She quickly became a vital part of that history.

O’Toole, along with Cone and Judith Heumann, the disability rights movement founder who died last month, was a leader in a 1977 nearly month-long occupation by disabled protesters and their allies of a San Francisco federal building known as the “504 sit-in.” As a result of the protest, the Carter administration signed the ‘504’ regulations, which prohibited schools, hospitals, and other entities receiving federal funds from discriminating against disabled people. These regulations were the precursor to the ADA.

“Berkeley became like Mecca,” O’Toole, who is featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Crip Camp,” said. “Disabled people came to Berkeley from all over the world.”

In the years since the 1970s, O’Toole’s life has contained more multitudes than even Walt Whitman could have fathomed.

She is a single mom. Her daughter, whom she adopted, has a physical disability. O’Toole was a founder of the Axis Dance Company, an acclaimed ensemble of disabled and nondisabled performers. Currently, she’s working on a novel and traveling in a self-built camper van.

But things haven’t always been easy for O’Toole. Like many disabled parents, especially those who are disabled and queer, she’s encountered prejudice.

O’Toole’s daughter is now 30. Raising her daughter, O’Toole often feared that because she was a single mother, disabled and queer, she’d lose custody of her physically disabled child. It was fraught, O’Toole said, because of the bias against queer and disabled people being parents.

“The courts – the social service system – are all too happy to take your kids away,” O’Toole said.

O’Toole had to fight to get her daughter the services and education she needed.

“Because I was a lesbian, I had to constantly be in the closet,” she said, “our of fear that they’d take my child away if I was out.”

Her lovers, if they were around school system staff, would have to pretend to “just be my friends,” O’Toole said.

For decades, long before intersectionality was a fashionable buzzword, O’Toole, who is white, has thought about the intersection of class, queerness, race, and disability.

“I grew up in a working class neighborhood,” O’Toole said. “My Dad was a firefighter. I was taught a lot about class.”

“But there was a lot of racism embedded in my world,” she added.

It wasn’t until she went to Berkeley and became part of the lesbian community that she was “in rooms with lesbians of color,” O’Toole said.

White women need to listen better to women of color, she said. “We need to follow their lead.”

O’Toole couldn’t believe how much she didn’t know about what women of color experienced. Take just one thing: “I didn’t know that parking tickets could turn into jail sentences,” she said.

“I have to do the work,” O’Toole added, “it’s not their job to educate me. It’s my racism that’s blocking me from the truth.”

Despite all of the difficulties, O’Toole is hopeful. People are resilient. They love and care for each other, she said. “What are you doing to spread hope,” O’Toole asked.