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People Feature
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"Ironically," Tellalian says, "there's a nondisabled criteria that applies to disabled talent." She adds: "Someone like me would not be acceptable. I'm not thin and my spine is curved. ... They want someone who looks like they used to walk, someone who's not all scrunched up and drooly. They want the disability in name but not all the stuff that comes with it."

One person who doesn't shy away from physical difference is legendary photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, who is renowned for his stylized nude portraits of amputees, hermaphrodites, pre-op transsexuals, dwarves and other people with bodies that are deemed freakish by most. When a mutual acquaintance introduced Witkin to Tellalian at the 1984 Biennial at the Whitney (where some of his work was on exhibit), he was artistically smitten. Tellalian was wearing black lipstick and a winged silver leather and velvet hat covered in blue bunny fur from Patricia Fields. "I looked like an Edwardian nightmare," she says cheerfully. Witkin says that he "saw her face and lips and I'd never seen anybody like her. She was just unique." He asked if he could photograph her, in the same hat.

Until now, leers from drunken men and thoughtless remarks from people who liked her face but felt it was "too bad" she was in a wheelchair were the closest thing she'd received to compliments on her physicality. Witkin's aesthetic interest in her constituted the first time that Tellalian had ever felt herself so overtly regarded as a thing of beauty. And she was impressed with how Witkin's work "emphasized the strength of disabled people. They're not coming off as pathetic creatures." She also found some of his photographs macabre and humorous, a sensibility that appealed to her. During a follow-up conversation, Witkin remembers, he discerned that Tellalian was "an incredibly intelligent person, very sensitive. She was very exotic, with a sense of wisdom and profundity that came through pain."

"Woman in the Blue Hat, New York City" (1985) now hangs in Tellalian's living room. Clad in only undergarments and the crazy hat, Tellalian sits before a weird pastoral backdrop with her hands clasped, her legs drawn up in a way that seems at once self-protective, prayerful and tender. Her semi-fetal pose suggests vulnerability, but also great inner calm. You can barely see her eyes; her lips are slightly parted.

For several days after she first received the portrait, "Every time I walked by I had to look at it. I called everybody up and said, 'You've got to see this,' so I had a big parade of people coming in and out for a week. Someone once called it kind of 'Mona Lisa'-like."

When I ask Witkin whether he'd ever considered shooting Tellalian in her chair, he answers emphatically in the negative. "I hate wheelchairs. Why didn't Frank Lloyd Wright design a wheelchair? They're disgustingly ugly." Besides, he says, "when (Tellalian) thinks of herself, she thinks of herself as a woman -- not in a wheelchair, I'm sure. If you take a woman out to dinner, you don't look at the wheelchair."

Unfortunately, Tellalian counters, most men do, and don't like what they see. "They don't see [the wheelchair] as a nice car to drive around in. They see it as some sort of mechanical monster that impedes their own manliness." She supposes that's why the graphic artist who came to her apartment at night for over three years never consummated their relationship or took her out in public. The two would often stay up till the wee hours of the morning talking, and the man even "swore undying love" to Tellalian (who reciprocated in feeling), but he declined sex. "He was there all the time: 'I worship you.' That made it that much worse. You worship me but won't sleep with me? That's really nice. What was the big line he gave me? 'I don't sleep with anyone I respect.' That's a copout! Why not just say, 'I don't want to do it with you,' and then I could say, 'Leave'? Instead he perpetuated [hope] in little ways -- gifts and deep glances and heartfelt talks." Eventually Tellalian confronted the man, saying she suspected her disability was the true reason he didn't want to sleep with her or go out with her in public. He denied it.

She is sure his denial was bogus: "I can tell when the disability is an issue and they don't say it is. Anybody disabled gets a sixth sense about those things." But she says that similar evasions from others have taken their toll: "You start questioning whether you're even thinking straight or not -- whether anyone's saying anything truthful or not."

Plus, she says, many disabled women are caught in a Catch-22, since many of the few men who aren't turned off by the chair are just after "a freak fuck." Has Tellalian herself encountered any potential partners who tried to fetishize or exploit her disability? "No, I'd like to!" she jokes. "Where are they?!"

After the demise of her quasi-romance with the graphic artist, after she began to work for herself as a talent manager, Tellalian began doing phone sex for a few agencies to earn some extra cash and channel her creativity simultaneously. "Since my self-esteem was so low, I figured it was one way I could regain my power -- pretend I had sexual power over someone else. And it helped me tremendously," she says. The work left her with a residual affinity for dirty pillow talk.

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