Compare and Contrast - Gay vs. Deaf

This one has always really fascinated me.  I happen to have friends who are part of the Deaf culture, yet I'm not deaf.  On the other hand, while my orientation is gay, I don't really interact with anyone who is part of the gay culture.

This parallel is often seen as offensive to both groups.  The similarities are quite remarkable, though.  Many straight-oriented people view a gay orientation as a kind of reproductive disability, but the gay community rejects that view strongly.  Similarly, many hearing people view deafness as a disability, but the Deaf culture strongly rejects that view.  Many people believe their orientation is something they are born with while others feel it is realized later in life.  Many deaf people were born deaf, while others lost their hearing later in life.  In both cases, the culture mainly caters to the former.

A major debate in the Deaf culture deals with cochlear implants.  If a deaf person is treated so that they can hear, is that the overcoming of a disability or is it the loss of part of their core identity?  Is the act of getting a cochlear implant a betrayal of the Deaf culture and heritage?  This sounds like debates surrounding re-orientation therapies that have plagued the homosexual community for years.  It also could be connected to mixed-orientation marriages where a gay person can have their own children with a straight spouse.  Is that a betrayal of their gay community?

Despite all these similarities, there are some clear differences.  First, the Deaf culture uses ASL primarily to communicate.  They have their own language.  The gay community, on the other hand, uses English, and their language does not identify them.  It would be difficult for a deaf person to hide their deafness from hearing people around them, while it is common for people to hide gay orientations from the straight people around them.  These different situations produce very different types of challenges and concerns among the members of each community.  A closeted gay man, for instance, might feel psychological trauma for hiding their feelings from their family and friends, but a deaf man can't hide their deafness, and doesn't experience the same problems.  Rather the deaf man might feel more isolated among the hearing because of the communication barrier, which the gay man doesn't experience.

Differences like these make it dangerous to draw too many conclusions from a comparison between the two groups.  This can be said of any parallels drawn between the gay community and another group of people, yet both sides of the "gay-debate" constantly extrapolate too much from such metaphors.  These comparisons are fine to communicate ideas, but they have no power to prove debated points.  Any relying on these similarities as evidence of some kind is a logical fallacy.