Far from the Tree: Andrew Solomon

A gay child of straight parents, Andrew Solomon’s homosexuality was considered a diagnosed illness. As a journalist reporting on the growth of Deaf Pride in the 1990s, he began to consider illness and identity as a continuum with shifting boundaries. Spurred by the disability-rights movement and empowered by the Internet, he saw that communities with such “horizontal identities” were, and are, challenging the societal expectations and the norms surrounding identity.

Their stories begin in families coping with extreme difference: Dwarfism, Down Syndrome, Autism, multiple severe disabilities, or prodigious genius; children conceived in rape; children who identify as transgender; children who develop schizophrenia or commit serious crimes. The adage asserts that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but in Solomon’s explorations, some apples fall on the other side of the world.