By Aaron Rose

Thinking back to my night at the Be-Bar for DPHH, I’ll always remember discovering that Harry Potter has quite a sizeable member based on observations made during a play in London, watching “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” projected onto the wall, and standing guard while some ladies bypassed the line to the women’s bathroom to sneak into the men’s. It was quite the night to remember for someone who had never had this much exposure to the deaf community in his entire life.

I first heard about Deaf Professional Happy Hour (DPHH) through a friend of mine that lived in DC. She indicated that it was awkward for her because she wasn’t fluent in ASL; after all she was raised using Cued Speech. I became intrigued and checked out DeafDC.com. I found the blogs quite informative and diverse. I had already planned to make my way up North for spring break, so I said to myself “why not go to DPHH and meet more deaf people?”

I grew up with the perception that most signers were not very highly functional because of my limited experience with the deaf community. The majority of the person-to-person interactions were difficult for me to deal with because of the communication barrier with their reliance on sign language versus my reliance on spoken language. During the onset of the Internet revolution, my online chats with two or three deaf signers indicated that they had limited understanding of the English language and a lack of proper grammar. They also failed to recognize my use of English idioms. I wondered to myself, “is every deaf person like this?” Later in life, I would learn that that wasn’t the case.

Why did I have all these perceptions? Blame it on my parents. For one thing, I grew up having deaf friends that were cuers and not signers. I keep digging back into the depths of my memory bin, and I can’t recall personally knowing more than two deaf signers from elementary school. I was in Kindergarten with one and in Boy Scouts with the other. In my Boy Scout troop, no one really had taken the effort to learn sign language in order to communicate with this deaf signer. His dad was the only window to the hearing world and always took part in every event and outing so that he wouldn’t feel left out. This memory would stick with me as I went on into high school.

I went to a signing summer camp in North Carolina when I was twelve, along with a few of my cueing friends. We became immersed in the signing culture. My friend’s brother and my old babysitter came along as camp counselors because we needed Cued Speech transliterators. After all, we lacked any fluency in sign language. It was a fun experience, but I did not bring any lasting friendships with me home since I did not bond that well with anyone. Perhaps it was just a lack of communication on a personal level with everyone. Yet, it was a very different experience from the cue camps that I had visited every year.

It wasn’t until this year that I actually had philosophical conversations with a deaf signer on the deaf culture and people’s diverse backgrounds. That occurred at the second GoDeaf social I went to in Raleigh, NC this past February. The person I spoke with was in her late 30s and worked for Sprint Relay. She grew up oral, but later became fluent in sign language. As I went to more deaf socials, all the perceptions I had on deaf culture changed. I became aware of the fact that the deaf community was quite heterogeneous and not dominated by the Deaf Culture.

How oral am I? Freshman year of high school, I fired my Cued Language Transliterators since I felt I didn’t need them anymore. This desire for “freedom” was a consequence of receiving a Cochlear Implant when I was six years old. I embraced the hearing world and rejected the deaf side of my identity. Vocational rehab actually denied my application for financial aid because I wasn’t deaf enough, pushing me to even reject the notion that I was deaf. I never bothered to register for disability services at North Carolina State University (NCSU), since I didn’t feel disabled. It wasn’t until after my sophomore year of college when I started meeting more deaf people from different educational backgrounds and modes of communication.

I’ve never personally been subjected to criticism for using Cued Speech, but when I went to my first deaf social as an adult I could feel all these eyes staring at our small group of cuers that stayed close to other. Isn’t it human nature to stick to what we know best? I caught many signers inquiring, “Who are these people? I thought this was a ‘silent social.’” Apparently some people still have reservations about interacting with deaf people that were raised oral or cueing. That wasn’t the case at DPHH. In fact it would be the opposite.

Despite people telling me that it would be overwhelming and intense, I immersed myself in the Be-Bar crowd without any qualms. Despite my shoddy signing, I was still able to converse with others without any difficulty. I told others how I did not know much sign language and how a pure-bred Southerner ended up in DC. Everyone I met was very open-minded and receptive to my presence. Conversations ranged from the aspect of linguistics in ASL and Cued Speech to the extent of how much I could hear with the CI.

Perhaps the most significant thing I learned from DPHH was just how diverse the deaf community is. For example, I met a 24-year old guy with a Cochlear Implant who was raised originally using Cued Speech, but his mother decided to switch him to a school that had a deaf program using sign language. An older guy told me that he grew up in the hearing culture, just as I did, but without the help of Cochlear Implants. There was what I like to call “cue-sign” couples, in which one person grew up cueing while the other signed. Essentially, everyone’s different even in the deaf community. Whether we grew up cueing, signing, or oral, we all were deaf or hard of hearing. It didn’t matter where you came from as long as you were open-minded and willing to embrace deaf culture.

Aaron Rose is a soon-to-be alumnus of North Carolina State University with a degree in Marine Sciences. After three years of undergrad research in meteorology and oceanography, Aaron gave up on his ambitions to become a research scientist and now plans to go to graduate school for a Masters in Deaf Education. He is buggered by the fact his own deaf friends can’t teach him to sign properly.