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Intimate Encounters is an erotic and groundbreaking photographic series that challenges the common misconception that people living with disabilities aren't sexual. By allowing men and women to participate in the creation of their own sexual imagery, Belinda Mason-Lovering investigates the relationship between sexuality, disability, body image, and the myths that surround living with a disability.
Original Airdate: Sat. Aug. 23, 2003 @ 11:30pm
Repeats: Sun. Aug. 24, 2003 @ 11:30pm
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Belinda Mason-Lovering Producer Journal
“Intimate Encounters”
I realize that sexuality and disability is a taboo subject when David Cunningham, who has cerebral palsy, openly talks about jerking off, watching porn, and fucking his sexual surrogate. I begin to feel slightly uncomfortable during Belinda Mason-Lovering’s photo shoot when David, completely naked, is carefully removed from his wheel chair and placed on the cold ground. He looks vulnerable to me and it bothers me that I feel this way. Why is it strange for me to hear about David’s sexuality and to see his naked body? Why does my desire protect him overshadow my desire to see him as a sexual being?
Once again, I become conscious of the effect of our standardized notions of beauty and sexuality on our minds. We live in a culture that sees a very narrow bandwith of sexual expression. Our sex symbols saunter over runways and pose seductively in the ever-ubiquitous Playboy and Playgirl type magazines. David’s naked, somewhat disfigured body, his openness, courage and determination to express his sexuality radically challenge our culturally-determined paradigms. And these paradigms are reinforced by the “out of sight of mind” attitude we have towards disabled people’s bodies and their sexuality.
And yet we are all participants of our culture’s sexual and beauty norms. I am moved, for example, when Denise Beckwith who sits next to her crutches, emotionally talks about how she wore make-up for the first time during Belinda’s photo shoot. She explains how she had always seen herself as a tomboy - tough, independent and boyish. Belinda’s photo softened and feminized her. It made her realize that she could be ‘beautiful and sexy.’ She became conscious of a side to her that was yearning to be expressed.
Belinda’s photos attempt to capture a moment in time, along each participant's life journey. Her images are “intimate encounters” with the personal emotion and struggle of people with disabilities. They celebrate the diversity of sexuality, sexual expression, beauty and body image. And to use the words of some of its participants, they tangibly illustrate that “sexy is a state of mind” and that “sexual being is defined by spirit, not body.”
Michelle Melles
Segment Producer
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