The Art of Being Loud: Waymon Hudson on queerness, deafness, and building a bigger room

CHICAGO, ILL. - By Michael Oboza, Special to GoPride.com

During my final year as a volunteer photojournalist, I made it my mission to recognize everyday legends in our LGBTQ community and give them their flowers. I am grateful to acknowledge Waymon Hudson, a deaf musician, advocate, queer writer, and published essayist. Thank you, Waymon, for your time, wisdom, art, and legacy.

Surviving is an age-old art form with its own beatitude, and Waymon Hudson’s early life demanded that art form immediately.

"Small Southern town, big on Jesus, with very firm opinions about what a boy was allowed to be," Hudson recalls. "I was not that boy. Everyone could tell. So could I."

Navigating those early expectations meant developing a survival strategy rooted in concealment.

"So before I came out, I wasn't living so much as managing," he says. "What I said, how I moved, how much of me showed on a given day. You learn young in a place like that that the truest part of you is the part you're supposed to keep in a drawer, and you get good at it, because getting good at it is how you stay safe."

That instinct to adapt came at a steep personal cost.

"What I didn't know was that I was learning a skill: making yourself smaller so a room stays comfortable," Hudson explains. "I'd have to unlearn it more than once, and I had no idea yet how expensive it would turn out to be. So 'before' was careful and quiet. A lot of watching other people just exist while I did math. Not tragic, I want to be clear. There was joy in it, there was my grandmother, there was a whole inner life nobody could legislate. But it was small on purpose, because small felt survivable."

Self-awareness and living your truth mark the beginning of a profound journey, and for Hudson, stepping into that truth transformed everything.

"Loud. Finally, gloriously loud," he remembers. "Coming out was the day I stopped managing and started building. I got into activism because being quiet had never once protected me, so I tried the opposite and watched who it scared. My voice worked a lot better pointed at the people trying to shrink me than swallowed. Political, personal, creative, all of it opened at once. I started writing like I meant it, and taking up the room I'd spent two decades apologizing for."

Then came a sudden shift that altered his world again.

"And then, years later, I went deaf."

Hudson is candid about the reality of that transition, refusing to dress up the experience in easy platitudes.

"I want to be honest about that, because there's a tidy version where it was just another challenge I rose to, and that version is a lie," he says. "It was devastating. It took my music, my voice, the whole way I understood myself. Nothing about it was inspirational while it was happening."

Yet the internal strength he built during his earlier journey provided the foundation to navigate this new terrain.

"Coming out had already taught me the one thing I needed: that a thing the world treats as a defect can be the exact thing you build from," Hudson notes. "I'd learned it once with my queerness, so when my deafness arrived, I had the muscle. I just had to point it at something new. Being Deaf and being queer aren't the tragic footnotes to my art and activism. They're the instruments I make it with. They're the lens. How I write, how I make music, how I read a room, how I see the whole world. Not despite. Through."

When looking at the wisdom gained from this intersectional journey, Hudson breaks down three enduring lessons.

"Three things, and I learned all of them the hard way, which is the only way I seem to learn anything," he says.

The first principle focuses on genuine community.

"Find your people," Hudson urges. "Not the ones who tolerate you. The ones who love the whole thing, the queerness and the disability and the difficult and the loud, and never ask you to file any of it down. Chosen family isn't a consolation prize for the family that couldn't manage you. For a lot of us it's the main event. Go build the room you actually want to live in, and fill it with people who never make you audition."

The second principle is an invitation to occupy space unapologetically.

"Find your voice," he continues. "If a room won't have all of you, that room is too small, and the fix is not to shrink to fit it. Go build a bigger, better room and let the small one wonder where everyone went. Don't accept less than you deserve because somebody told you deserving was above your pay grade. It isn't. Push."

The third principle addresses self-worth, particularly when confronting ignorance from both outside and within one's own communities.

"Know your worth," Hudson insists. "The world has a lot of opinions about queerness and disability, mostly that they make you less, or something that can be set aside for later. And here's the part that stings worse: you'll sometimes hear it from inside your own communities. Queer spaces that forgot about access. Disability spaces that go a little pale when you bring the queerness. Being both can make you too much for the very people who were supposed to be yours. So tattoo this somewhere you'll see it: your worth is not up for a vote. Ignorant people mistreating you is information about them. It has never once been information about you. Don't let anybody hand you their small opinion and call it your reflection."

Ultimately, the wisdom we leave behind is the most vital part of the work. For Hudson, these insights are practical tools built from experience to help illuminate the path for others.

"That's it. Find your people, find your voice, know your worth," Hudson concludes. "Not because it makes a nice poster, but because I needed all three to still be standing, and I'd like the next kid doing math in the back of a room to get them sooner than I did."