Assembly Required, the latest work from Raymond Luczak, is sub-titled “notes from a deaf gay life”, but could as easily have been called “essays tending toward an autobiography”.  In eleven chapters, many having previously appeared in various periodicals, Luczak traces his life as both a Deaf man and a gay man, from his earliest years attempting to navigate the hearing world by way of cumbersome hearing aids and lip reading to his discovery of American Sign Language and the world it opened up, from fledgling innocence to navigating the uncharted waters of romance in college and then in the outside world, with heightened awareness of his differences and the politics of being gay, being Deaf, and living with a foot in both worlds.  Through it all, his precise prose reveals the differences we hearing folks do not, cannot, or will not see: how body language speaks, the relief and joy of finding others who “speak” one’s language, the syntactical and rhetorical challenges of translating between spoken English and American Sign-ed English, the minor and major impediments posed by living and working among non-ASL speakers.  

This is not, however, an autobiography in the usual sense; memories charted, yes, and reflections on the author’s personal progress.  But the book is also a reflection on the gulf that separates the hearing and Deaf communities, and the possibilities that exist for bridging that gulf.  There is occasionally a glimpse of anger, a look at the confusions of a young man learning to be himself in a doubly confusing environment, but this is more than balanced by grateful portraits of the people who mapped this difficult new terrain and mentored him and of those who walked the same path with him.  I was particularly moved by his account of the first man he met who was both deaf and gay, who helped him learn ASL and became a sort of Dutch uncle to him during the years before he left home for college, but other friends, teachers and acquaintances also receive acute, sympathetic portraits, adding up to a vibrant cast of characters limned with spare but exact strokes, all presented with the strength of someone who succeeded in finding his voice in two languages and communicates his findings in a way that is useful to his readers no matter which side of the deaf/Deaf/hearing or gay/straight divide they inhabit.

Luczak is a novelist, poet, playwright and filmmaker.  If you have not read any of his other work, you will be pleasantly surprised by his mature, muscular prose and certainly you will be intrigued by the story he tells. 

Assembly Required – notes from a deaf gay life by Raymond Luczak, ISBN: 978-0-916883-49-2, is available in paperback from RID Press, of Alexandria, Virginia, at $14.95; go to www.rid.org and click to their online catalogue for ordering information, or request it at your local bookstore.