Brazilian documentary filmmaker Daniel Gonçalves and his editing partner looked for other films exploring the topic of sexuality and disability, but they couldn’t find any, so they made their own.

“Acsexybility” is Gonçalves’ second feature-length documentary (his first was “My Name is Daniel,” his autobiographical work attempting to trace the origin of his physical disability, which affects his motor skills) and focuses on deconstructing the stereotypes that people with disabilities are asexual. The film is being screened as part of the 31st San Diego Latino Film Festival this year at 4:45 p.m. today at the AMC Mission Valley.

“The idea of ‘Acsexybility’ came up during the editing process of ‘My Name is Daniel’ … there’s a scene where I talk about my first sexual experiences in relationships,” he said during a Zoom interview earlier this week, from his home in Rio de Janeiro. “During the talk that me and Vinicius Nascimento (the film’s editor) had to build up this sequence in ‘My Name is Daniel,’ came the idea to do a film focused on this topic.”

They began working on the film in 2018, included interviews with 15 out of a total of 26 people with disabilities talking about their experiences and perspectives on the topic, and it premiered in July 2023 during Outfest LA, an LGBTQ-plus arts and entertainment nonprofit with film festivals for LGBTQ stories and creators. Among the goals they have for the film, include celebrating the sexuality of disabled people and also raising awareness around the topic of sexual violence against people with disabilities, and better support and training for public agencies providing assistance to victims.

Gonçalves, who earned degrees in journalism and documentary filmmaking, is currently working on a feature-length documentary about inclusive education for people with disabilities. An active rock climber, he’s also slated to direct a Brazilian television series about people with disabilities who play sports. Shanna Katz Kattari is an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work, in the Women’s and Gender Studies department, and is director of the [Sexuality|Relationships|Gender] Research Collective. They are also nonbinary, disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent. Their work focuses on gender, sexuality, and disability, and they are a contributing writer and the editor of “Exploring Sexuality and Disability: A Guide for Human Service Professionals.” Gonçalves and Kattari each took some time to discuss the film, the topic of sexuality and disability, and the work to deconstruct the stereotypes that limit the humanity of people with disabilities. (These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. )

Q: What were you talking about in “My Name is Daniel” that led you to want to broaden that scene into a full-length film deconstructing the stereotypes that people with disabilities are asexual?

Gonçalves: I talk about how was my first kiss, and how was my first sexual relation, my first sexual intercourse and how I felt like a lot of, I don’t know how to say this in English, if it’s the same expression, but some kind of platonic love. I was talking about how all of this was and how I felt at that time. From the conversations I had with Vinicius, we looked for some movies talking about that, but we didn’t find anything at that time. We thought this could be a very interesting topic for a movie, so let’s do it. At that time, I talked with some friends that have another kind of disability, and asked, “Do you know somebody, anybody, who has a disability and would like to talk about sexuality with us?” We found some people and we did the interviews in 2018. I think from 2018 to 2023, it was like five years and these five years were important to the idea. I think the idea got stronger during these five years, you know? Then, the pandemic was important, too, for me. During the pandemic, a lot of people with disabilities started doing Instagram videos and I met a lot of interesting people online during the pandemic. Most of their interviews were shot in the second phase; we recorded them in 2022 and the pandemic was important for me because I think I wouldn’t have met these people without the pandemic.

Q: From your perspective, where does this particular stereotype, with regard to sexuality and having a disability, come from? What does it seem to be rooted in and why do you think it persists?

Gonçalves: These stereotypes come from the way people without disabilities see us. For society, a big part of society, having a disability is a bad thing and, because of that, they think we are not able to do a lot of things, including having sex and having a relationship. I have been dating for eight years with Dani [Nascimento], my fiancee. We are living together now. I traveled to a festival in Switzerland last week and I arrived in Rio [on Monday]. In the airport, I had asked for wheelchair assistance; I can walk, but there’s a long distance between the gate you arrive at and the exit of the airport, so I asked for wheelchair assistance. The guy who was pushing my wheelchair, he asked, “Where is your sister?” It wasn’t my sister, it was my fiancee. If you see me and Dani, it is very clear that we are not brother and sister. We are so different, but in the mind of a lot of people, I cannot have a girlfriend, or I cannot have sex, or I cannot have a date. I think that is the origin of this stereotype; people think we are angelic, we do not have desires and we cannot be desired, we don’t have desires and we are asexual. It is because of that, because of the way people without disabilities look at us.

I went to this festival in Switzerland and then I went to Portugal to visit my sister who lives there, and from Switzerland to Portugal, it was a huge difference in the way people deal with this thing. In Switzerland, people with disabilities can have sexual assistance [support for people with disabilities to explore and enjoy their sexuality]. I think sexual assistance is allowed also in Canada and in Australia, too; but in Switzerland, there is this person who works as a sexual assistant for people with disabilities. In Portugal, they are in another era of the debate, you know? Like in the 19th century, and I think this happens because Portugal is a very Catholic country and because of that, it’s much harder to talk about sexuality between people without disabilities, and to talk about it with people with disabilities is even harder than in a country like Switzerland.

Kattari: When we talk about disabled folks in a world in which capitalism is king, productivity and the ability, if you will, to be productive members of society (however society is defining that, which is usually working a certain number of hours, creating certain things, all of that), disabled people turn that on its head a little bit because we can be happy, engaged members of society, regardless of our level of productivity. They were already really challenging a lot of these norms around what people are doing and what people are supposed to be like; yet, at the same time, a lot of us had access needs that need to be met. That could be anything from ensuring our building has a ramp and a working elevator, to screen reader-compatible documents, to being in spaces that are not too bright or too loud or too sensory overwhelming, to having somebody wipe our ass or help insert our catheter, or literally get us out of bed in the morning. A lot of these things that we need to do to get these basic needs met, they make people uncomfortable. They challenge people’s beliefs of, ‘Wow, how am I supposed to see you as a colleague, as a peer, when you are also needing help in these ways?’ This is where this infantilizing comes in, is, ‘Oh, you need helping wiping your ass, therefore, you’re like a baby and because I can’t see you as a peer in this way, I have to put you in a box. You’re not what I’m used to.’

We see this with neurodivergent people all the time—folks who are not willing to make small talk because they don’t understand why it exists, or if you don’t make eye contact because it makes you uncomfortable. Again, we put them in a box where it’s like, ‘They just don’t know how to communicate. They’re not playing the game the right way.’ We see this across all sorts of groups, folks that don’t meet a lot of capitalist, White supremacist, cis-het [cisgender-heterosexual] patriarchal norms get put into this box of, ‘We are going to treat you like a child’ or ‘We’re going to say everything you do is too sexual.’ Sometimes, it’s the same thing because ‘We see you being sexual and we’re viewing you as a child in our mind, so therefore, that’s inappropriate, as well.’ So, a lot of where it comes from is our own minds are so tuned in and taught—at the ideological level, at the institutional level, at the interpersonal level—to view people on their ability to be a productive member of our capitalist society, that anything outside of that, we have to change our viewpoint around.

Q: What have your subjects in the film said about how this nonsexual projection has affected their own understanding of their bodies, personhood, and sexualities? And, are there discussions in “Exploring Sexuality and Disability” that get into how this nonsexual projection affects one’s own understanding of their body, personhood, and sexuality?

Gonçalves: The film was constructed like an umbrella. Imagine an umbrella, and this umbrella is the main theme of the sexuality of people with disabilities. Under this umbrella, these 15 people are talking about situations that are connected to this main theme, but their stories are not connected to each other. For example, there is a young girl that talks about how she feels unrepresented by the feminist movement, or how women with disabilities are not represented by the feminist movement. There is a guy that has Down syndrome and says that he’s had a lot of girlfriends, like five girlfriends, but until, like, two years ago he was a virgin because he and the girlfriends’ parents didn’t allow them to have sex. There’s a woman that talks about the first time that she went to the gynecologist, she was 40 years old. There is another woman, a blind woman, who talks about sexual harassment. She has had sexual violence, too, because of her disability—she didn’t see the guy who tried to rape her because she was blind. There is a nonbinary and pansexual person who also has a physical disability. All of these interviews, they are not connected between them, but they are connected under the umbrella of this main theme.

Kattari: Yeah, it comes up a lot, especially in the chapters I talk about sex education with young people. When people don’t see themselves in media, they don’t see themselves in the sex ed conversations that are happening (if they’re lucky enough to even be included in sex ed because a lot of young, disabled people are trekked out of classrooms during the sex education portion), then they don’t have the words, the language, the skill set to talk about needs and desires. It is especially true for disabled, neurodivergent people, and even more so for folks who are at those intersections of, say, queerness and disability, or transness and neurodivergence, where we just don’t talk about these things at all, despite there being a huge amount of overlap. We also see this if you are somebody that has a physically-related disability, or sometimes even neurologically-related, vision, hearing, etc., as a child, you might be pressured more by your parents or your guardians to let strangers touch you. Or, something hurts and you’re like, “I don’t want this,” and they’re like, “Well, doctor knows best.” Or, you’re supposed to do physical therapy and let this person touch you; that adults know better than you do about your body. So, suddenly, we have these incredibly high rates of sexual assault and sexual abuse in disability communities, and everybody is like, “Where is this coming from?” If we are not only not having these conversations around consent, around language, around bodies, generally, with young people, and then, on top of that, we’re telling them that their “no” doesn’t count, that they don’t have bodily autonomy, and that all of these adults in their lives know better than them about what should be happening to their bodies? I mean, it’s not shocking to me that then we end up in spaces where, not only are people with disabilities experiencing high rates of sexual abuse and sexual harm [the Disability Justice Resource Center, an online legal resource for protecting the rights of people with developmental disabilities, cites a report from Disabled World stating that “people with disabilities are sexually assaulted at nearly three times the rate of people without disabilities.”], but are also perpetuating them because we haven’t given them any models for what healthy sexuality and what healthy conversation and negotiation should look like.

Q: What does it look like, in practice, to reject those stereotypes? And, to construct an understanding and an acceptance of a reality that may be a complete contradiction of what’s been forced into the public imagination?

Kattari: I think, even something as simple as bringing up conversations around sexuality and desire with disabled folks is huge because it’s often something that’s not talked about at all. If you, yourself, are a non-disabled person and hanging out in a group of friends, don’t go to the one disabled person and say, ‘Oh, tell me how you have sex,’ but recognizing that people with disabilities have just as diverse sexualities as folks who are nondisabled. So, asking folks, “Hey, what are your desires? What are your needs, your wants? What are your challenges in getting them met?” We all have different challenges, we all have different access needs. So, for example, someone who has a history of trauma, their access needs around sexual partners are going to, maybe, look different than somebody who’s a wheelchair user, and maybe looks different than somebody who’s blind. Rather than assuming folks don’t have sex, we start by assuming that people are sexual beings and include them in conversations, invite them to [dating events], to kink parties or porn film festivals, or whatever else you’re doing around sexuality.

I also really invite folks to take a self-reflective look at what they are thinking about when they think about potential partners. Things like, do you swipe left on someone on a dating app because they identify as disabled, or because you can see an assistive device? If that’s something that you’re doing, even subconsciously, really ask yourself, where is that coming from? Who taught you that and is that actually true? Are you not interested in dating a wheelchair user, or is it just that you’ve never seen a movie that has a hot wheelchair user in it? You don’t see them on your TV shows, Victoria’s Secret fashion shows don’t tend to show disabled models, so how do we kind of deconstruct what our attraction looks like? If you feel overwhelmed by the idea of dating disabled folks, again, pulling that apart. Is it because you’re on a third floor walk-up and you don’t know how you would get someone to your apartment? Because that looks very different than, “I just don’t know what do with an autistic partner, so I would never consider that.”

Think about ways that you can lower barriers. If you are going on a date with someone, regardless of whether you know that they’re disabled or not, asking them if they need anything, accessibility-wise, when planning the date is just the best practice, generally. Someone might have a food allergy, someone might say, “I don’t have a car, so it needs to be on public transit.” Or, they might say, “I can’t sit at high top [tables], can you make sure the restaurant has low top service?” Even something as simple as offering that up front, rather than waiting for people to say, “Well, actually, can we switch the restaurant because that one doesn’t happen to have XYZ?”

Thinking about how there are so many ways to have hot, sexy times as a disabled person, so what are your needs? Do you need an ice pack while you’re [having sex]? Or, a heating pad because that makes things more comfortable? That’s fine, it’s OK to ask for that. People sometimes watch porn and think they need to do five positions every time they have sex, but stopping for a moment and saying, ‘What actually feels good to my body? What would I like to happen to my body? If I’m doing it by myself, how can I make that happen? If I’m doing it with a partner, how can I communicate that with them?’ If you’re playing with someone who is deaf, do you sign? If you don’t sign, are there other hand signals that you could learn so that you can talk during sex? If you’re playing with someone who’s blind, how do you describe what you’re wearing to be sexual? How can you make sure that they can experience it in a similar way to other people, even if it’s in a different modality? I think a lot of it is just that disabled people are so scrappy in order to get our needs met and we would love to have other people to be scrappy with us and to get creative about how we can have a fun time, too. Sex is supposed to be fun and engaging, and it’s not scary. It’s not something that’s supposed to be overwhelming, so if we can just make it a normal part of everyone’s conversation, it really shifts the dialogue.

Q: What is your goal with this film? What did you want to say to yourself, to others in the disabled community, and then to people without disabilities?

Gonçalves: We have an impact campaign that we’ll be starting in three months when the movie will have its release here in Brazil, and we have some goals for this impact campaign. The first one is to celebrate the diversity of bodies and different ways of feeling pleasure; the second goal is to boost the debate on ableism and its intersections with other forms of prejudice; the third is to promote the debate on the issue of sexual violence against people with disabilities; the fourth is to facilitate access to information and services on the education of sexual violence for people with disabilities; and to promote training and qualifications of public agents to provide better assistance to victims. These are some of our goals with the film, and what we would like the film to change in the society.

We are planning some screenings at foundations, and we have institutions that work with people with disabilities that we are planning screenings in those institutions to talk about sexual education and sexual assistance for women and men with disabilities. We are planning some screenings in public departments and in other places to prepare these agents to be better prepared to help, to respond to violence, to prepare them to receive these women with disabilities who have suffered some kind of sexual violence and help them. Imagine that a deaf woman who has been raped, a woman that uses only sign language, when she goes to the police office to make this report, the police office needs to have an interpreter that knows sign language to receive this woman’s report or testimonial. We are planning to use the film to start these debates, to start this movement on preparing these places to better receive these kinds of reports from disabled people.

Q: Your book also mentions being a work of “unbridled joy and passion” celebrating “disabled people as sexual beings” and offering suggestions on how best to support disabled people in exploring and affirming their sexuality. What are some of those best practices, especially for people who are outside of this community?

Kattari: Honestly, in addition to what I just mentioned, something as simple as following disabled content creators on Instagram or YouTube, or whatever platform you enjoy, so that you’re seeing disabled people and the things that they do, how they move through the world, is really helpful. Just like disabled people not seeing themselves in media means it’s harder for us to think about what we could look like in a relationship, what we could look like in a fun hook-up in a bar; also, if you’re not disabled and you don’t see disabled people doing these things, it makes it a lot harder for you to kind of flip that switch in your mind. The documentary, “Crip Camp,” on Netflix is a really phenomenal documentary that both looks at the history of the ADA [the Americans with Disabilities Act] and the 504 movement [a protest of about 100 disabled people in San Francisco to force the federal government to enforce Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973], but also around sexuality and disability. It doesn’t have to be as formal as a documentary, it can just be finding people who are disabled, who are doing sexual things.

One thing I want to mention is that if you’re successfully aging in our society, you will become disabled. Disability is one of these categories that shifts over time, so if you’re successfully aging, you will likely acquire disabilities or chronic illness because that’s what happens as you age. It’s also something that could happen more quickly with something like, say, a cancer diagnosis, or long COVID, but also a car accident or a skiing accident, or something on the job. So, when people invest in disrupting these ableist thoughts around sexuality, about who gets to be sexual, who is allowed to be sexual, they’re also supporting themselves in the longer run. They, too, one day might need partners who are going to be more affirming around disability and sexuality, so this really is not just a form of community care, which is important enough as is, but it’s also something that people should think about because if they still want to be getting it on when they’re 60 or 70, they, too, might need to be navigating these same conversations.