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I’m aware that I’m a little late to this topic. I didn’t learn of Berne’s passing until late August, and it took me a few weeks to have the wherewithal to start writing something about it. Weeks later, enraged by the latest bout of bad-faith “science” from our nation’s capital, I finally have enough vitriol in my blood to fuel a sharpening of those words.
Patricia (Patty) Berne died on May 29, 2025. I never had the pleasure of meeting her. We were not friends, or even in the same social circles. Hundreds of miles separated us. But nonetheless I felt grief, pain, and a bit of emptiness.
Immediately, I turned back to Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty, the documentary that introduced me to Berne, Leroy Moore, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and what Disability Justice actually looks like. I’d like to walk you through some of my reflections on that documentary, as a way of honoring her legacy.
Table of Contents:
Who was Patty Berne?
I love Leroy [Moore] and I love my body, and there are no spaces where we get celebrated.
I am not an expert on the life, personality, or works of Patty Berne. In fact, for many weeks, that prevented me from fully committing myself to this post. Who was I to talk about this figure?
In the end, I realized that you don’t need qualifications to mourn a loss, nor do you need to be an expert on that person. You just need to have care and a desire to make sure someone is remembered.
Here are some of the fact-y things about who Berne was: she was the co-founder and executive/artistic director of Sins Invalid, a performing arts collective uplifting the work of disabled artists. In this position, they touched the lives of thousands. As part of that work, they were also one of the creators of the disability justice framework that I, and many others, use in our work. She also used her voice to support sexual violence survivors, Palestinians, Haitians, and more.
As another note: I despise the traditional academic standard of referring to a public figure only by their last name. It also, at times, feels odd to call someone by their first name when I’ve never met them. But Patty Berne was known to many as “Patty,” which is why I alternate using both forms here.
Sins Invalid: who needs shame anyway?
The documentary I mentioned above was one I first watch in the fall of 2022, as part of a school course. To say I cried would be an understatement. Never before had I seen a celebration of the crip form. Never before had I seen anything but negative interpretations of the value of our twisted, broken, mangled, malformed bodies.
There was no place that we could celebrate our bodies as beautiful and disabled and hot. So we decided to start Sins Invalid.
I don’t think nondisabled people will ever truly understand the power that Patty brought to this space. For what seems like eons, disabled bodyminds have been infantilized, seen as undeserving of sex, undesirable, ugly, broken. Any attempt by a disabled person to express sexuality or sensuality was immediately shut down, at best.
In the performances in this documentary, I saw so many crips finding joy in their bodyminds, their desirability. And for the first time, I saw my bodymind as something that was desirable.
It was really amazing working with Patty because it was a switch from having to take care of everyone else’s stuff to feeling taken care of and nurtured as an artist. — Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
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Sins Invalid was not a space for one artist to put forth their work—as remarkable as even that would be. It was a space for so many people to come together, to share a vision of liberation and beauty, in a way that they had never been able to before.
Most artists with disabilities have not had a chance to incubate their work publicly.
The publicity is a huge part of this. I don’t know who made up the audience of Sins performances. It could have been primarily disabled, or entirely nondisabled. The vital thing is that an entire audience got to experience the revelations and visions of the artists.
If you’ve never been in a theater, there is a magic shared between the performers and the audience. An immersion, connection, and shared commitment that you simply can’t replicate anywhere else. Theaters have also historically been sites that are very inaccessible to disabled people. Bringing that magic to crips, both on and off the stage, is a gift I’m eternally grateful for.
I feel like I’ve been rambling here. Perhaps I have been, and I don’t think Berne would mind that. After all, their work was about leaving behind shame and embracing the messiness that is inherent in our lives.
A lot of what I do as director is give the performers and the entire space, the entire theater, a place where we are essentially controlling the terms of debate. We’re orienting the gaze, we’re determining what and how we’re being perceived.
Unsafe desires
“Is this desire safe?” the voiceover asks as Rodney Bell and seeley quest traverse the stage. In this segment of the show, titled “Sacred” and written by Berne, two dancers explore the messiness of desire, revealing to us just how unsafe it can be. Crucified by his own longing, the piece—and the documentary—ends with Bell suspended in an unsettling red glow.
That one line carries more weight than I can convey in 1,000, 2,000, 20,000 words. Nondisabled people want you to believe they’re stronger than us, that they are the pinnacles of health. If you want to see how fragile their image really is, confront them with this reality: the only way to totally avoid disability is to die young.
As the eugenics movement of the 20th century (and the 21st), and countless other laws, studies, and groups have proven throughout history, the existence of a thriving—even healthy—disabled bodymind is a threat to the social hierarchy.
For so much of our history, the last thing anyone wanted to think about was the idea of crips procreating. Who would want to make more of us? And why would we have sex, if not to have a child? Pleasure was something for adults to partake in, and certainly we are not that.
Our desire is radically unsafe to the nondisabled normate. It is a threat to their very being, an existential question they don’t have the capacity to answer. But Berne is going deeper than that. To only read that layer would be to assume her work is always meant to consider the nondisabled first.
Part of the beauty of Sins Invalid is that it’s something about us and for us. When Berne asks “is this desire safe?”, she’s asking: “Is any desire safe? Is this desire, where one contains so much more power than another, where one may be abusing the other, where carnal passion takes us to unforgivable places, safe? Is desire safe for our bodyminds?”
And what of our spirits? Can something unsafe to the body, mind, bodymind, be the balm we need to get through the day?
As its title suggests, there is something deeply sacred in this desire. It is not a clandestine, perfect depiction of true love. It is all the raw feeling that comes from both desire and the intricacies of the crip form.
I may have an answer to Patty’s question: No, this desire is not safe. And that’s why it’s so beautiful.
Patty Berne touched so many lives. She gave a microphone to the voices history wants to silence. She co-created the foundation not just for a movement, but a framework for our liberation. She understood the value of not working alone.
With so much good done in this life, I can only imagine that she will be treated well in the next one. Patty, I hope you’re living out your wildest crip dreams right now. May our souls meet again one day.
Do you have other things about Patty Berne you’d like to share? Questions about Sins Invalid or Disability Justice? You can leave a comment down below, or scratch a message into your crutches with a dull rock. And if you liked this post, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.
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