Ben Mattlin - Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post-ADA World

For M.L., Paula, and Miranda

again, always, and forever.

we, young folk in the disability rights movement, are called the ada generation because we grew up with rights older disabled people fought for. we, for the most part or at least a higher proportion, were allowed in schools and in public. many of us who are labelled as ada generation have also been given opportunities.... what we do with these opportunities is going to define the future of our movement and community.

STACEY PARK MILBERN (19872020),
dear ada generation, cripchicks weblog

I n the summer of 2018, in the heart of bustling, jam-packed, pre-pandemic Times Square, a giant billboard for the skin-care brand Olay might have gone unnoticed. But for anyone who looked up and saw, anyone who knew, who understood, it was revolutionary. Over the words TOO DEFIANT, with too crossed out, was the luminous face of a rising young model named Jillian Mercado. A native New Yorker of Dominican descent, Mercado was born less than thirty years earlier with a variation of muscular dystrophy. (Later, on Instagram, shed describe herself as a latinx model, who is queer af [as fuck] and happens to have a disability.) Five years before, shed unexpectedly won an open modeling call for Diesel, the clothing brand that sells jeans starting at roughly $200 a pair. Campaigns for Nordstrom and Target followed. In 2016, she appeared in merchandising for Beyoncs world tour. Her career trajectory was meteoric, if unlikely. No one thought anyone who used a motorized wheelchair could go so far or so fast. No one had before. In the beauty business, some big-name companies had included plus-size and older models, but showcasing disability was unheard of.

Soon after her work with Diesel and Nordstrom, Mercado signed with IMG Models, the agency that represented supermodels Kate Moss, Gisele Bndchen, and Heidi Klum. Following the Times Square splash, she was featured on a Teen Vogue cover and, later, did runway work at New York Fashion Week. Then she landed a supporting role in the Showtime series The L Word: Generation Q, moved to Los Angeles, and signed with Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills. I had to prove myself, Mercado shares, trying to explain her ambition and success. I had to overcompensate to prove to them I was worthy. And thankfully the Diesel campaign went viral, so that helped tremendously.

It also opened a few doors for others.

About a month before the Olay billboard, apparel retailer American Eagle boldly promoted its Aerie lingerie brand with an empowerment campaign featuring women we hadnt seen before. One was Abby Sams, then just twenty, a bespectacled dark-haired Alabama native with muscular arms and a girl-next-door smile, seated in her wheelchair in a black lace bra and black leggings. Another was Rajee Aerie (yes, her surname and the brand name are coincidentally the same), a glowing thirty-four-year-old Chicagoan in a camo-blue bralette and matching yoga pants, grinning rebelliously as she stood with crutches from childhood polio in India. A third was Gaylyn Henderson, a fit Atlanta resident, then thirty-three, looking calm and supremely self-assured in a navy blue bra and panties, brandishing a colostomy pouch. Yet another model wore an insulin pump. Some of the women had stretch marks; others had scars.

Aerie Continues Its Real Streak, Casting Models with Illnesses and Disabilities, declared Adweek, noting that new images feature women with health conditions.

The door was now more than ajar. In the summer of 2019, Aaron Rose Philip, a then eighteen-year-old transgender woman who uses a motorized wheelchair because of cerebral palsy (CP), appeared in ads for Sephora, Dove, and designer Marc Jacobs and in a Miley Cyrus video and on TBSs Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Philip had emigrated from the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda as an infant and gone through the New York public school system. Along the way, shed snagged representation by Elite Model Management, the onetime home of Linda Evangelista, Monica Bellucci, and Tyra Banks. By the end of 2020, Philip became the face of Moschino, the Italian luxury fashion brand. Her star was rising at such a spectacular pace that, before this book was finished, shed advanced to runway work and changed agencies.

To my knowledge, fashion has not been the most welcome space, she says, even when it comes to things like race. So disability was definitely uncharted territory for the industry. Agencies didnt embrace it until Jillian Mercado, until she had her Diesel campaign, which was major. After she did that and got signed, there was me.

In October 2019, Abercrombie and Fitchthe retailer known for displaying only the sexiest of modelsfeatured photos of author and YouTube sensation Shane Burcaw, then twenty-seven, who has spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), with his disabled fiance, Hannah Aylward, twenty-four. They were part of the retailers rebranding for diversity and inclusionwords and concepts that have become such overused hallmarks of modern media, and, indeed, of the broader society, that at times you might wonder what they really mean.

This is what they mean: something new that can redefine your view of normal.

The trend is certainly not unique to fashion and advertising. In April 2019, just as the hit ABC sitcom Speechlessabout a goofy yet typical family with a teenage son with CPwas canceled after its third season, Netflix launched a comedy series called Special, about the coming of age of a twenty-something gay man with CP. Written by and starring Ryan OConnell, himself a gay man with CP, it lampooned his vain attempts to hide or at least minimize his disability, and introduced mainstream audiences to notions such as internalized ableisma kind of self-hatred that many disabled people experience, based on an acceptance of societys prejudices against those who have disabilities.

Not long after, Ali Stroker, a thirty-two-year-old paraplegic actor and singer, became the first wheelchair user to receive a Tony Award. Her winning role for Broadways top prize wasnt a little old retiring granny or an outcast such as Laura Wingfield, the disabled loner who pines for a gentleman caller in the Tennessee Williams classic The Glass Menagerie. Rather, she won for playing Ado Annie, the happy-go-lucky town flirt in the musical Oklahoma!

For Stroker, a blonde powerhouse, it was the pinnacle of a career full of firsts. Paralyzed from the chest down due to a car accident at two years old, the mezzo-soprano was the first actor in a wheelchair to graduate from the theater training program at New York University. Stroker started gaining attention in 2012, at twenty-five, when she appeared on the reality TV competition The Glee Project. In 2015, she debuted on Broadwaythe first actor in a wheelchair to do sowinning rave reviews for her role in a revival of Spring Awakening. After the Tony, she told the New York Times she felt excited and proud to be not just successful but a symbol.

Fast-forward to the spring of 2021. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, a documentary about the early days of the disability rights movement, codirected by disabled filmmaker Jim LeBrecht, was nominated for an Oscar. Though it didnt win, that years ceremony was the first in the Oscars ninety-two-year history to show several wheelchair users on the red carpet at the same time. It was also the first time the Oscars stage was ramped.