Notes from a Queer Cripple is the raw, hilarious, and fiercely tender disability justice sex-ed you didn’t know you needed. Andrew Gurza cracks open the myth of “inspiration porn” and instead offers us the messy, joyful, deeply human reality of being queer and disabled—and looking hot while doing it.

Reading this felt like getting a voice note from a friend at 2 a.m.—equal parts confessional, gutting, and horny. Gurza’s voice is frank, flirty, and radically vulnerable. They open with their own definitions of disability and ableism, and from there, the narrative unfolds like a love letter to his disabled queer self—a self shaped by rejection, survival, and eventual erotic reclamation. I found myself underlining passages about the heartbreak of being excluded from queer community due to inaccessibility, and then smiling through misty eyes at the fierce joy they reclaim through sex, community, and crip wisdom.

Gurza doesn’t sanitize anything—thank god. He shares everything from learning to masturbate in his disabled body to how mobility aids can be part of sexual intimaxy. They don’t ask for pity; they ask us to do better. To talk about access needs in the bedroom. To make queer clubs accessible. To stop treating disabled sex as shocking or inspirational and start treating it as real. He reminds us that time spent convincing able-bodied people that disabled folks are desirable could be better spent...well, actually having sex.

At its core, Notes from a Queer Cripple is an urgent call to queer community: practice access intimacy, not just in theory but in the thick of our desire, our dancefloors, our dating apps. Gurza is asking us to stretch—not out of guilt, but out of love.

This book cracked something open in me. It’s one of those reads I’ll come back to, especially when I need a reminder that queer disabled joy isn’t some shiny exception. It’s a right. It’s a practice. And if we’re really about liberation, it has to be collective.

📖 Read this if you love: candid memoirs, radical disability justice, queer sexual liberation, and authors like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Eli Clare, or Mia Mingus. 

🔑 Key Themes: Internalized Ableism and Sexuality, Queer Community and Access Intimacy, Disabled Pleasure and Body Sovereignty, Reimagining Desire and Disability Representation.