In 1967, the US Vocational Rehabilitation Administration (VRA) awarded $331,000 to the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre Foundation to fund a new company, the National Theatre of the Deaf. Endowing such an enterprise was bold, but not entirely unprecedented for this federal agency tasked with restoring disabled Americans to productive employment. Founded in 1920, the federal–state vocational rehabilitation program, or VR, ascended to institutional and ideological prominence during World War II and maintained this position well into the 1960s and beyond. VR distinguished itself not only through positing competitive employment as the solution to disabled Americans’ dependence on the state, but the specific means through which it would restore the disabled to productivity: the multidisciplinary expertise of physicians, psychologists, physical therapists, and rehabilitation counselors who collectively sought to render rehabilitants employable through a series of therapeutic interventions. Whereas disability activists focused on combatting the structural barriers disabled workers experienced in the labor market, “rehabilitationists” emphasized the imperative for disabled people to acclimate to existing work environments through individual physical and psychological transformation.

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Andy Warhol was being an asshole. At least Ron Whyte thought so when the two artists crossed paths at a Soho gallery opening in the early 1970s. It's unclear what offense Warhol committed, another incident whose details have been lost to the historical record. But if Warhol had not behaved badly that fateful evening, Whyte—a queer and disabled playwright—might never have removed the “cosmetic glove” covering his “withered” left arm and hurled it at the visual artist, enabling the glove to make its own “contribution to modern art.” The famed artist, Whyte claimed, would go on to copy this assault by prosthesis in Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973).

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