Sign Language - Sexuality
Communicate About Intimacy
One of the most important things that need to be communicated in sign language, especially for adults, is sexuality. Books are available with sex signs, and a few signs are available on the web and in regular sign language dictionaries.
Sexual Sign Language Books
One book that focuses solely on sex signs is Signs of Sexual Behavior: An Introduction to Some Sex-Related Vocabulary in American Sign Language (compare prices) Another book, that appears to be out of print and unavailable most places, is Signs for Sexuality.
Sexual Sign Language Online
Here are selected sexual signs and their sources from the Sign Language Word Reference Guide at About Deafness/HOH:breast ASLPro.com
condom Handspeak.com *
intercourse ASL Browser
penis ASL Browser
sex Handspeak.com*, ASL Browser
sexy Handspeak.com*
vagina ASL Browser
* = Paid site
Sexual Sign Language Videos
The Captioned Media Program has human sexuality sign language videos:
- TECHNICAL SIGNS: HUMAN SEXUALITY (TAPE 22)
- TECHNICAL SIGNS: HUMAN SEXUALITY (TAPE 28)
1941-1945 World War II - Hundreds of Deaf people in United States were active “on the home front” during the war to build bombs, bullets, planes, and tanks in defense industries. Deaf people worked in all capacities. Some were professional chemists; some were young men and women with no specific skills who came in from the surrounding farms. At least 40 companies reported in various newspapers that they were highly satisfied with their Deaf workers.
1964 Robert Weitbrecht, A Deaf man introduced an invention to help the Deaf to speak on the phone. The invention was an electronic device called an acoustic coupler that enables typewritten communication over the telephone through the use of a teletypewriter (TTD). In 1982, there were over 150,000 TTY sets in the U.S. Not only are they in Deaf people’s homes, but in many public places, businesses, airline reservation desks, police, fire departments, hospitals and schools. Because of this invention, Deaf people can now one step closer towards equal enjoyment of the technological luxuries and necessities of modern culture.
1980 Phillis Frielich was born February 29, 1944 in Devils Lake, North Dakota. There were nine children in her family who were all Deaf including her parents. She attended School for the Deaf in her area, and later went to Gallaudet College. She loved acting and performed in several productions. After graduating from Gallaudet in 1967, she joined NTD where she met her husband, Robert Steinberg, the company’s technical director. Later, her husband worked as a professor at the University of Rhode Island in the theater department where Frielich met Mark Medoff, a playwriter. It was the first time Medoff met someone that was Deaf. He found out that there were no roles in the theater for Deaf actors. He decided to write a play for Frielich. He named it Children of Lesser God. Frielich portrayed Sarah who was a young deaf charwoman who works at her old school and her husband as James, a speech teacher. After the play was presented at an NMSU workshop it was brought to Los Angeles and underwent some changes. It was a smash. In 1980 after being on Broadway, it won Best Play, Best Actress (Frielich), and Best Actor (Rubeinstein). In 1981, Frielich received the Theodore Roosevelt Rider Award from the Governor of North Dakota. In 1984, she played in Hands of its Enemy. In 1985, she was in a TV movie called Love is Never Silent. In 1991, she became the first Deaf person to be elected to the Screen Actors Guild Board in Hollywood. 
1994 Heather Whitestone was the first deaf person who won Miss America. Oral Deaf woman is admired for her personal achievement and her platform of encouraging Deaf and hearing people to set their goals high and work to achieve them. Speech vs. sign clouds her reign for a while, but she calms the storm by stressing individual differences and “it (speech) worked for me, but it does not work for all Deaf children.”
Laurent Clerc, 1785-1869, was a Deaf student who studied under De L’Eppe and Sicard. He graduated from and taught at the Royal Institution for the Deaf in Paris. He met an American, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. “Gallaudet had numerous opportunities to observe the brilliant work of Clerc, whom he called “a master teacher.” Clerc accepted Gallaudet’s offer to open the first School for the Deaf in the America. Clerc and Gallaudet arrived in the America and raised the needed funds to open a School for the Deaf. “In April 15, 1817, their mission was accomplished successfully and the first America School for the Deaf called First “Home” of Connecticut Asylum was established at Hartford, Connecticut. Clerc went on to become the most important influence on the education of the Deaf in the first half of the nineteenth century. His career as a teacher in America covered 41 years.”
Alice Cogswell, 1805-1830 - At the age of two years, she become ill with “spotted fever” (cerebra-spinal meningitis). This illness took her hearing and later she lost her speech as well. When the Hartford School for the Deaf was to be opened, Cogswell was first on the list. On the campus of the present American School for the Deaf at Hartford stands a beautiful statue of Gallaudet and Cogswell.
Horace Mann, 1796-1859, was a believer in state school. In 1837, he became secretary of the first Massachusetts school board. “Two years later, he brought about the opening of the first American Teacher’s Training College at Lexington, Ky.” He went to Europe to visit schools for the Deaf and was amazed to see how well Deaf children were lipreading and using speech in the German schools. Returning to America, he published a report of his findings. This interested parents who began to demand speech for their Deaf children.
Amos Kendall, ?-1869 - “In 1856, Kendall wanted to found a small private school for the Deaf in Washington, D.C. made contact with the Gallaudets.” The new school was called Kendall School and Edward M. Gallaudet, the younger son of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was given charge of the new school. “After seven years, Congress refounded the school as Columbia Institution,” with Gallaudet as the president. “In 1894, the preparatory department was named Kendall school, to retain the name of the original founder.” The Institution was renamed Gallaudet College in honor of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. In 1864, this college became the first and only Institution of higher learning in the world exclusively for the Deaf.
Laura Redden Searing, 1840-1923, was born in February 9, 1840 in Somerset, Maryland. She became Deaf at the age of 10 when she contracted spinal meningitis attack, which also impaired her speech. This made her develop the habit of writing when she communicated with people. Her “pad & pencil” became her constant companions wherever she went. Laura worked hard having her speech understood but she never mastered lipreading and preferred her pad and pencil. After she graduated from Missouri School for the Deaf, Laura became an assistant editor in 1859. This talented woman began a long successful career as a journalist, biographer & poet. The highlight of her becoming an interviewer was when she interviewed President Lincoln, General Grant & General Garfield. During the Civil war, a young reporter was sent to Washington DC to cover the news for the St. Louis Republican newspaper. The writer of these war stories was “Howard Glyndon.” Some of the people who read the St. Louis Republican knew that “Howard Glyndon” was a woman & none of them knew that she was also Deaf! Her name was Laura Redden, the first Deaf woman to succeed in the field of journalism and literature. When the Civil War ended, she went to Europe where she learned French, German, Italian and Spanish. Laura also wrote for 2 New York newspapers, The Sun and The Times, in her spare time. Laura Redden Searing died on August 10, 1923. Her achievement as poet and journalist was recognized by her peers. She was included in the Dictionary of American Biography (1928) and her poems were featured in several anthologies of American literature.
Alexander Graham Bell, 1847-1922, was born in Scotland, second son of Alexander Melville Bell who taught diction and elocution (visible speech). Bell also could teach the same and was invited to Sarah Fuller’s School for the Deaf and later to the Clarke School. He was a convinced supporter of lipreading and speech in the education of Deaf children. In 1872, Bell opened a training school for the teachers of the Deaf in Boston. Having a lot of opposition from the big Deaf schools using silent methods, he soon gave it up. Bell started experimenting hoping to find some mechanical means of making speech visible and to develop amplification. During these experiments, Bell was led to the invention of the telephone. He received many prizes for his work and using this money, Bell founded the Volta Bureau in 1887. Bell believed “that Deaf children should be educated orally and in day school situations.”
Thomas Alva Edison, 1847-1931, was the Hard of Hearing Inventor of the phonograph, the incandescent lamp, the first electric light, the basic elements of movies, plus so much more. What many people are not aware of, is the fact that Edison had had hearing problems from childhood on. This hearing loss caused him some difficulty in school. In addition, he reportedly lost more of his hearing, becoming technically Deaf, in his early teens. The cause is not definitely known - it could have been a result of early childhood illness or the result of a “boxing” of his ears by a rail conductor, possibly a myth. While as an inventor Edison was involved with several things, ironically one of them was motion picture development. It is ironic that a person with hearing loss would have been so involved in the development of an entertainment mode that has largely been inaccessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing for so many years.
William E. Hoy, 1862-1961, was the first Deaf professional ball player in the major leagues starting in 1887. He is created with inventing the arm signals used by home plate umpires. “This signal became the tradition that has continued to this day.” He called “Dummy Hoy”. He was first in the hearts of his fellow Deaf Americans in the realm of sports and in 1951, the American Athletic Association of the Deaf established its own “Hall of Fame” honoring Deaf athletes by popular vote the first Deaf person to be enshrined in the “AAAD Hall of Fame” was William E. Hoy.
First Electric Hearing Aid - Some claim that Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, developed in 1876, was conceived as an electric hearing aid for his mother. The first electric hearing aid may have been the Akoulathon, designed in 1898 by Miller Reese Hutchinson of the Akouphone Company in Alabama. The carbon transmitter was enlisted for uses such as the telephone and the electric hearing aid, which became commercially available in 1898. Hearing aids make sounds louder, either by mechanically funneling sound to the ear more directly or by electronic magnification. The first amplified hearing devices contained a battery-operated carbon transmitter and earphones. In 1898, the Akouphone Company marketed a carbon table model hearing aid that sold for $400. The carbon-type hearing aids gave amplification near the low end and the middle speech frequency range. The carbon transmitter was replaced by the vacuum tube in the 1920’s, and later produced the first transistor-based hearing aid. Smaller, more powerful and stable, all electric hearing aids used today are based on transistors. 
Charles Michel De L’Eppe, 1712-1789, was born in Versailles, France. He was a priest for 25 years then later became interested in teaching the Deaf. In 1760, he started a shelter for the Deaf in Paris and started teaching Deaf children in school conditions in Truffaut, France in 1762/63. There he lived with them, attending to their physical needs, supplying food, clothing and shelter as well as education.” In 1776, he published a book “Instruction of Deaf and Dumb using Methodical Sign.” He also wrote a dictionary primarily as “The Dictionary for the use of Deaf Mutes” and contained “more explanations than signs.” He was “famous in all of Europe for his work with Deaf mutes.”
Abbe Roch Sicard, 1742-1822, was chosen by the Archbishop of Bordeaux to be trained by De L’Eppe to be a teacher of the Deaf and then appointed him director of the school. Sicard opened the school for the Deaf in Bordeaux, France in 1782. In 1792, the September Massacres of the French Revolution broke out and Sicard was imprisoned and almost lost his life. He was in hiding for two years but during that time wrote a book “Theory of Signs,” an elaborate dictionary of signs.
Samuel Heinicke, 1727-1790 - Heinicke’s methods were strictly oral. He strongly opposed using sign language. He got interested in the Deaf after meeting a young Deaf mute boy. After reading Amman’s book “The Speaking Deaf”, he started to teach the boy. Heinicke was very successful; the boy learned to speak, lipread and write. He was so pleased and he decided to teach other Deaf pupils to understand oral speech as well as written communication. In 1778, he opened the first Oral School for the Deaf in Germany. He is known as the “Father of the German method.”