A Gay Innocent Abroad (November 1994)
By David Anderson
 
I went to Munich the second week of August for the International Fluency Association's First World Congress. I'm not a member of the association, but I gave a poster paper (a.k.a. show and tell) entitled "Historical Perceptions of Stuttering as Reflected in the Arts." About 400 to 500 people were there, including folks from Eastern Europe, Russia, and Australia.
 
Many of the big names in speech therapy gave presentations, and I attended a number of the sessions. SLPs are taking many interesting and oftentimes wildly creative approaches toward therapy. Two women gave a paper on the use of pauses in talking, basing it around Alice in Wonderland (quirky, but it worked!). A woman from Argentina who uses dance therapy with stutterers discussed her work. Luckily, she passed out copies of her paper because her English pronunciation was unorthodox, to say the least! Inspector Clouseau, phone hoeme.
 
An American researcher presented some interesting cross-correlations from a study on stutterers and appearance, and he found that positive impressions are more dependent on a person's appearance than on the fact that he or she stutters. Brush your teeth and comb your hair! The best presentation I attended was one by Paul Cooke of East Lansing, Michigan, who in his talk on self-maintenance issues threw out many excellent ideas.
 
Unfortunately, a fair amount of "voodoo science" was presented as real science. Several presentations gave reports of various therapies but didn't have any hard numbers or results of long-term followup studies. As all of us know, this is a recurring problem in stuttering therapy and research into stuttering. We can only hope that, as these kinds of meetings of the best minds working on the problem continue, higher research standards will come to be adopted as the norm rather than the remarkable exception.
 
Various social events helped participants get to know one another, among them a trip to a beautiful Alpine lake outside Munich and a night at the Hofbrauhaus to see Bavarian dancing and yodelers. The only hassle I got about my speech during the conference was on our trip to the lake from a waiter who thought he was being cute. I stumbled on "lamb" (L words were my bete noire this week), and he said they didn't have that. Ho! ho! Slap. He was giving us poor service in general anyway. I was sitting with faculty from Northwestern University, and everyone's favorite eminence grise Hugo Gregory (who stutters) finally got exasperated, chased him into the kitchen, and told him off. Reportedly, the guy said, "That's no way to talk to a waiter!" He didn't get much of a tip from our table.
 
There certainly wasn't a visible gay presence. One fellow remarked to me that "there are a lot of gays in the field," and I was tempted to say, "Too bad they aren't at this conference." A few presentations talked about society's perception of stutterers. Frequently found associations are "unmanly" or "weak" or "indecisive" (hmm, what does that remind us of?). A German theater therapist gave a paper similar to mine but drawing mainly on German novels, and he found these associations to be prevalent in the works he discussed.
 
One question I had that everyone else seemed too polite to ask was "What happened to stutterers during the Nazi era?" So I finally popped the question. I was told that German researchers don't ask and don't tell. However, a therapist in the 1960s reported working with an adult who had been castrated by doctors because he was a severe stutterer. They didn't believe in psychological causes, of course (in their opinion, a decadent theory whipped up by a cigar-smoking Jew in Vienna), and since it must have a physical cause, they didn't want the bad gene passed on.
 
I had been to Germany several times before, and my German is good enough to get around. I've always found Germans to be very accommodating and almost too willing to speak English. After the conference I traveled by train up to Dresden (where some of my ancestors supposedly came from) and Leipzig (Bach's hometown) for a few days. Most people's second language there is Russian, not English, so I was able to use my German more, and everyone seemed delighted I knew their language (and there weren't hoards of American tourists like in Munich). I'm sure they thought an occasional block or hesitancy was just my searching for the right word. I frequently getthat reaction when I go to Europe, and the other person inevitably politely switches to English, trying to be helpful.
 
I've been told that foreigners are less tolerant of stutterers, but I've never found that to be the case. If you have a chance to go abroad, certainly don't let your speech stop you. People are nice the world over. Do your homework and learn to say "hello," "please," and "thank you," and you'll get along great.
 

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