Assembly Required: Notes from a Deaf Gay Life

by Raymond Luczak

Very Good Soft cover RID Press. Inscribed and signed by author, Raymond Luczak, on title page. . Very Good. Soft cover. First Edition. 2009.

Genres: Memoir, Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT

143 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It has taken me all my life to say this without hesitation: I am proud of both my deafness and gayness, for they are both one and the same to me: I do not think in terms of whether which is more important than the other. I cannot choose, for they are both entwined in ways impossible to disentangle. Deafness and gayness are both emblems of differentness, the very quality most people are most afraid of being.”

That quote comes near the end of Assembly Required, a fascinating glimpse at what it is like to grow up and live as a man both Deaf and gay. The book is separated into three section: Discovering, Connecting, and Identifying. Each section is divided into mini-chapters which are comprised of small snippets which detail Luczak’s life and experiences. The construction of short bits and pieces makes this a fast and easy read, one that holds the reader’s attention from beginning to end.

There is a bit of repetition between the sections but overall the stories are light yet bursting with meaning, relaying what Luczak has had to overcome throughout his life. For people in the hearing community, this is an enlightening read which provides a view of what it is like to experience the world without the ability to hear. My personal favorite is the “My Technological Evolution as a Deaf Person” section which details each technological advancement that helped to improve Luczak’s life in some way. It is quite informative, and a reminder of how fast technology changes and how the smallest things can make things so much easier for a Deaf person.

Assembly Required is a well written book that is both charming and touching, filled with the life experiences of one man which is definitely recommended.

[Jeff Keith]

BOOK REVIEW: ASSEMBLY REQUIRED, BY RAYMOND LUCZAK
Comments by Jeff Keith, January 2021
Five stars; I loved this book. This is a short book, just 108 pages long, but fascinating. The author says it is “an updated edition,” and he brought this edition out in 2019. He grew up in a Catholic family of nine children on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He’s around the same age as my daughter, born around 1970, and was a teenager in the 1980s.
He lost his hearing when he got severely sick as a baby, and he was the only deaf kid in his family. His education was variable; sometimes there was an effort to mainstream him and get him to read lips. In those years he developed great reading and writing skills, but of course he was terribly isolated socially. Young Ray wasn’t allowed to fully communicate with any other people until he transferred to a regional school that had programs for deaf kids during his junior high years.
This book has a lot of descriptions of his teenage years, with beginning sexual awareness and negotiating through gay adventures with men and boys. He preferred sex with affectionate partners and had a relationship with a hearing guy in the town where he went to high school.
For college, he went to Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., and that’s where things really opened up for him and he was able to fully come out as gay. He was at Gallaudet during the groundbreaking “Deaf President Now” struggle in 1988, but just mentions that in passing without any deep descriptions of it. After college he moved to New York City and got work writing and editing.
One of his longer chapters is about Deaf gay men that he knew in New York who died of AIDS. Some of those memories, and interviews that he did, were later expanded for inclusion in his outstanding 1993 anthology Eyes of Desire: A Deaf Gay and Lesbian Reader. (He later brought out a second volume of Deaf LGBTQ writings, but something was mismanaged about that and it went out of print.)
He didn’t stay in New York forever, because the liner notes for this book say that he currently lives in Minneapolis. He says that one of his siblings grew up male but was later an MTF transsexual, but that is one of many things that he simply mentions and doesn’t delve into further. I hope he does more of these memoir writings and interviewing of Deaf LGBTQ people.

[Trent · Rating 2 out of 5]

Raymond Luczak is a Deaf man and a gay man. As this book's subtitle--"notes from a deaf gay life"--suggests, his dual identity has shaped his experience and his worldview. Whether one shares both attributes, just one, or none at all with the author, he provides fascinating glimpses about how he has found his place in the world. At its best, the volume is thought-provoking, and I recommend it to anyone who is Deaf, or gay (or both, or neither) and has pondered seriously the questions of how we grow up, become comfortable in our own skin, and claim our place in the world. I am giving the book only 2 stars, however, because the parts do not add up to a satisfactory whole--the "notes" in the subtitle are discrete pieces, and the writer has not made them into one cohesive memoir.

[Shannon Wyss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, eminently readable look at what it's like to be Deaf and gay, to grow up in a small town surrounded by people who are hearing and straight, not to be taught a language that would actually be helpful to you, finally learning that language and starting to bridge gaps, and continuing to live between the hearing and Deaf worlds. Highly recommended.