Being queer and disabled, it's hard to articulate.
You can't really know unless you are queer and disabled.
But it's pretty great.
It's pretty special.
There are drawbacks at times to one or the other,
but I think there's something magical about being both.
And I wouldn't trade it for anything.
People say to me, oh, you're blind.
That's so awful.
I say, no, it's not.
It's a lot more difficult because the way
that we've designed the world around us is so ridiculous.
I'm a bit of an advocate, I guess.
I like seeing people who don't have what they
need getting what they need.
It's definitely a statement when I take my cane out
into the club, being like, fuck yeah, I'm blind.
And a lot of people will come up to me
and talk to me about that.
And I just use that as an opportunity
to advocate for my own community and normalize disability.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
My name is Ari Kerssens, I'm 28.
I live in Tamaki Makaurau, Auckland,
and I'm extremely gay and extremely blind.
I've got my setup here with my little screen
that I can zoom in on.
But realistically, most of what I'm doing is just guesswork.
I have a ridiculously rare genetic condition
called Knobloch syndrome, which is not a very sexy name.
The long and short of it is that there's
a specific type of collagen that adheres the retina, which
is the light sensitive tissue at the back of your eyes,
to your choroid, which is the inside of your eyeball.
And that specific type of collagen
is shorter than it should be.
So our retinas are less deeply adhered
and they have a propensity to detach.
Visually what I see is completely
nothing out of my right eye and then
the left has no peripheral vision.
What I can see through is like looking
through really muddy water is the way that I normally
describe it to people.
I was legally blind pretty much my whole life,
but I never identified as disabled.
I never wanted to identify as disabled.
And I had this stigma against disability that a lot of people
have.
It took me a long time to really be proud to be the person
that I am.
I'm a bit of a chameleon and that in itself
is a form of expression.
So I've always got different hair colors
and quite loud clothing.
Yeah, loud is probably a key word.
Fashion expresses my queerness.
I dress quite boldly because I'm quite a bold person
and I'm quite outspoken about everything that I do
and everything that I am, which includes my queerness.
But I don't necessarily have to put a big badge that says,
I am gay.
I don't hide it, either.
It's just I am myself.
For getting around, I only really use a cane.
And normally, a cane looks like this.
It's white with the red section at the end.
I use a cane that I've actually customized myself.
What I love about it is the rainbow holographicness
that the cane has means it does catch the light.
Customizing it, as I've done, I think
is really powerful because it gives an element of control
and feeling like you're in a situation where,
like losing your vision, you feel out of control.
And this just gives a little bit of that back.
I've been organizing this event in the past
and it's just returning now.
Customize Your Cane day is a day where blind people, people
with low vision can come in and they
can customize their cane, which is a really empowering way
to make a mobility aid that you need to use uniquely yours.
My cane is a little bit worse for wear,
so I'm just going to give it a zhuzh up.
Once we're all finished, I guess I'll take it out
for a night on the town.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I think it's important to break the stigma
around the white cane because it's just really creating
a lot of misunderstandings and perpetuating
the lack of understanding of what blindness is,
and what blindness means, and who blind people are,
and their value in the society.
The cane, it's just become an extension of me.
It definitely wasn't at first.
It felt like this weird, alien protrusion,
but now I feel naked without it.
Tonight we are having a few drinks at my place
and then heading off to K' Road to christen
my new cane, which I'm looking forward to.
I think they'll react to in the same way they react
to my old cane, which is confusion, surprise,
and accusations of not actually being blind.
But I know how to handle those, so it's fine.
The thing I love about nightlife is
the energy of people letting loose and being
a bit more free, and expressing themselves,
and the happiness that they get from that.
We don't see many disabled people
accessing nightlife for two reasons, one of which
being the stigma against disability
and just them either not wanting to go out,
not feeling like they'd fit in.
The other reason is simply accessibility.
What's accessibility like in spaces at the moment?
In two words, I would say pretty garbage.
The lack of disability representation in queer spaces
is really frustrating, and I think
probably the most frustrating part
is how used to it that we, as a queer community
and as a disabled community, are.
A lot of the time, I'm told that I'm not blind,
which is a little bit annoying.
But I guess I just use my cane like I do anywhere else.
It's mostly as a signal to other people.
If they choose not to believe it, then that's on them.
Being queer and disabled, there's
definitely a learning curve.
And I think for some people, the journey of acceptance
is a lot more arduous than it is for other people.
I'm definitely really happy and proud of the person
that I am now compared to when I first became disabled,
or where I first realized that I was queer because I was still
figuring myself out.
And now, I've slightly figured myself out a teeny bit more.
[MUSIC PLAYING]