An Episode of Desperate Housewives

Because of Silas & Keith's insistence to get out of the apartment, I was unable to watch the episode of Desperate Housewives with Marlee Matlin guest starred as Alisa. Thank God for kaybee, she taped it.

I watched it tonight with Sarah. It presented the exact concerns that I always have with hearing persons. I'm glad that Desperate Housewives exploited the dark truth about how hearing peers often exploited deaf people's inability to hear things by talking offensive things about them in front of them. Even with Lynette lambasting Dennis for badmouthing his wife Alisa in front of others, it is *rare* that anyone else would have done that the way Lynette did.

I heard plenty of horror stories where the deaf-hearing relationships ended, Deaf people would be informed by hearing folks that they used to endure hearing their partners about how shitty s/he is but they never lambasted the "hearing partner" for badmouthing.

This always made me wonder about having a relationship with a hearing man? Would I be oblivious to these delicate, embarassing and degrading situations? The answer is obvious yes.

I already saw that in deaf/hearing relationships, especially with gays. Many hearing people thought it was "easy" to maintain a relationship with Deaf person because it is easy to deceive -- with the attitude that can go, "If he does not know about it, then do not bother to tell him -- what he does not know will not harm him at all."

To me, that is very audistic mentality. I find it very degrading, offensive and all that.

This reminded me of a tale that Helmuth once told me when he attended his friend's deaf friend's civil ceremony with his hearing partner who is a lawyer in San Francisco. This particular lawyer is a scumbag because he had the gall to pull his partner who was with his deaf friends during the reception and told him to start cleaning the kitchen while the hearie lawyer continued to mingle with his kind all night long. Helmuth and his deaf friends were enraged and nearly destroyed the reception. I would if I was there. Hell, I'm sure Beth, Rayni and I would probably firebomb the reception to smithereens, though.

However, I was disturbed when Alisa pulled her daughter to interpret for her as she lambasted Lynette for intruding in her marriage. Funny as it is, but it is ... unfortunately very common in Deaf Communities when things became desperate, Deaf people would go for desperate measures to use their hearing children to relay the messages to the appropriate persons. Hell, I did it several times with my hearing brother in order to get my message across to the hearing ones.

Loved the scene where the kid said, "She said ..." when Alisa said, "Bitch!" That was hysterical.

But the general idea of what happened on the show, especially with the interaction of deaf-hearing relationships, is often the cold reality of our lives when we attempted to forge a relationship with a hearing person.

Say, if I have DowntownLad all to myself, I'd still feel cautious and wary about it ... unless he assured me that he's all for me ... trillion of times. Maybe I'll believe it.

I know DowntownLad is going to roll his eyes at this comment above, though.

R-