Are you mobile? - that's an important question at Gayromeo. Mobile, in gay dating parlance, means getting out of the flat late at night, into the car, quickly to a date, even in the countryside when the bus has long since stopped running. For Janis McDavid, the answer is clear: yes, I'm mobile! Although the 23-year-old has neither arms nor legs, he does have a Mercedes Sprinter. Janis steers it with a joystick attached to the driver's seat, on the left at shoulder height, where Janis has a super-short arm. This allows the keen driver to accelerate, brake and steer - and set off on a date at any time.
Only sometimes the other people don't want to. Or more precisely: they don't want to when they find out that Janis was born without limbs. "I once had a really nice Gayromeo chat," he reports. When Janis mentions his disability, the conversation takes a 180-degree turn. "He started insulting me in the worst possible way, saying that I was totally stupid and couldn't do anything," reports Janis. No arms, no brain, so the logic goes. "I quickly ended the conversation," says Janis. "But it was so intense that I was still thinking about it for a few days afterwards."
The best antidote to bullying in gay chat rooms is good friends. Janis told them about the incident. "When you talk to a lot of people, you quickly realise that what my chat partner has written is completely irrelevant." Janis now also posts full-body photos of herself. "People who can't handle that don't even click on me. Then I don't have to deal with people like that." Janis pauses and adds: "Actually, that's exactly the kind of attitude that people don't like in other people: I'm cutting myself off. But I think that's the more practical way here."
Fortunately, the mob chat was an exception. But prying eyes are part of everyday life. Wherever Janis appears, he is the centre of attention. As soon as he rolls his wheelchair over the ramp out of the Sprinter, all eyes are on him. "I can never pick my nose outside because someone would see it," Janis jokes. The Hamburg native can't really understand the fixation on his body. "One has red hair, the other has no arms. That wasn't a big deal for me. If the conditions are right, I can do all the same things as other people." And that's why Janis does what a 23-year-old does: he studies economics in Witten, does an internship at IBM in Berlin and is also involved in the gay and lesbian youth network Lambda. He enjoys travelling through Europe during his holidays. In the summer, he was in Barcelona with friends.
Janis has trained himself to be independent in small steps. First step: going to buy chocolate as a teenager without his parents and asking a customer for help. Next step: going to the bus alone and asking the driver for a ramp. "It's very difficult the first time," says Janis, "but as soon as you get a positive reaction from other people, it makes you stronger." Even more ambitious: going to a gay party in Bochum for the first time. Discos are not good places for a wheelchair: dark corridors, dense crowds, crowded men. "You have to expect to be bumped into," says Janis with a laugh. "But that doesn't stop me from going."
Even though he has no arms or legs, Janis goes to school, work and parties and, of course, has sex. Going to a party in a wheelchair? That impressed one guest. "It's great that you're getting out and about and not just sitting on the sofa at home," he praised Janis. He had to laugh as he told the story. "Anyone who knows me knows that I hardly spend any time at home." As Janis tells the story, he is sitting on an old plush sofa with curlicue backrests. To climb up, he has laid his head and shoulders on the edge and curled up on the seat using the muscle tension in his upper body. Relaxed and leaning back, Janis now explains in detail why he uses this piece of furniture so rarely. "Even if you don't have arms and legs, you still go to university, work and party," Janis emphasises. And of course Janis has sex: "A lot of people ask me that, but they're too shy to ask me directly," says Janis. He thinks asking is much better than fantasising. "People then get some kind of idea about my body - instead of asking what it's really like."
Janis wants to show as many people as possible what it's really like. That's why he reports on www.janis-mcdavid.de from his everyday life. "I want to show that you can have a completely normal life without arms and legs." An important topic on the website is mobility: Janis at the wheelchair trade fair, Janis as a test driver at the Rolli Power Dayswhere he tests wheelchair-accessible cars, Janis travelling in Vietnam. "When people see a wheelchair, they immediately think: the poor thing can do almost nothing," says Janis. "I prove the opposite with my journeys." So much for the question: Are you mobile?
Author: Philip Eicker
