In ‘Deaf Utopia,’ Nyle DiMarco Dreams of Integrating the Deaf and Hearing Worlds

Nyle DiMarco’s new memoir, “Deaf Utopia,” begins in the womb. The year is 1989 and his mother, Donna, is hours into labor, straining to communicate with the doctor as he prepares to perform a C-section. Donna is Deaf, but there’s no sign language interpreter present; it would be another year before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandated that hospitals provide them. So it was by reading the doctor’s lips and the notes he wrote out by hand that she gleaned that her newborn twins, Nyle and Nico, were both Deaf too, the fourth such generation in the DiMarco family.

The saga reads, at first, like the sort of origin story that might harden a Deaf person to the unforgiving world around them. But then Donna and her husband start to celebrate, giving the doctor a thumbs up as he looked on, perplexed by their reaction to news he’d expected to be ruefully received.

When Nyle DiMarco and I met in TriBeCa in March, I was curious about Donna, who features so prominently in his book, and from whom he appears to have inherited a certain chutzpah — as seen on “America’s Next Top Model,” which DiMarco won. Or “Dancing with the Stars,” which he also won.Or last month on the Oscars red carpet, where DiMarco, dressed in velvet double-breasted Armani, was nominated as the executive producer of the short documentary “Audible,” one of a handful of recent projects that reflect his devotion to the cause of Deaf representation.

“Being Deaf,” he says, “assigned me a battle. If my family were hearing and I were the only Deaf person, I don’t think I’d see the value in the fight. I wouldn’t see the value in advocating for my own rights, and I wouldn’t have learned it at home.”

It came as a relief to us both that we could meet without masks, which are no friend to the hard-of-hearing. DiMarco’s native language, and the one he feels most comfortable using, is American Sign Language, whose grammatical structure is often communicated with one’s eyes and mouth. And when he noticed me fiddling with my hearing aids, or craning my neck to more easily see his interpreter’s lips, we made light of how exhausting it would have been for either of us to conduct an interview with synthetic cloth over our faces.

DiMarco has appeared in ads for everything from jeans and swim suits to holiday sweaters. Magazines often shoot him in profile; his striking, leonine features call to mind the dreamboats of Old Hollywood, like Cary Grant by way of Versace. But good looks have been limiting in their own way. “After the show,” he says, referring to “America’s Next Top Model,” “I think people only saw me for face value. I don’t think people assumed there was any depth to me.”

But in the last two years, the most prolific stretch of his career, DiMarco could mostly be found behind the camera, producing two Netflix projects: “Audible,” which follows a high school football player at the Maryland School for the Deaf, and the campus docu-soap “Deaf U,” set at his alma mater, Gallaudet University. He also began developing two other television series based on decisive moments in Deaf history, like the 1988 student protests at Gallaudet, which successfully forced the installation of the school’s first Deaf president. Along the way, he found time to write his memoir, a cheerful but sobering account of his life so far, peppered throughout with a broad-strokes history of Deaf persecution and advancement.

Genuinely informative, and rather ambitious as far as celebrity memoirs go, the book’s hybrid structure came naturally to DiMarco. He does not see himself not as some kind of unicorn, that rare Deaf celebrity to gain a foothold in the hearing world, but as part of an intergenerational struggle. In “Deaf Utopia,” he recalls his mother’s ongoing disputes with his elementary schoolteachers, who rejected sign language in favor of oral instruction — a tradition with a particularly harmful lineage in Deaf education. His grandfather would later file suit against a hospital that made insufficient efforts to provide him with an interpreter during a stay in the ICU. And his uncle was denied employment with New York’s Department of Sanitation on account of his hearing loss, though they relented and offered him a job after he sued. DiMarco’s own resolve was tested throughout his childhood and then again on “America’s Next Top Model,” an experience he describes as “four months of pure probation.”

In the book, DiMarco recounts his time on the show’s 22nd season, beginning with an audition where an assistant assured him the show was prepared — excited, even — to accommodate a Deaf contestant. On it, though, he found himself disoriented by the cutthroat circus of reality TV production, where narrative designs for DiMarco often superseded his reality. Producers, assuming he was straight, made attempts to contrive romantic story lines for him (he identifies as fluid). And, in one competition, the show failed on its promise to provide a sign language interpreter, leaving DiMarco to wing it during a challenge that awkwardly required the models to pose with war veterans who had been injured in combat.

All of this was savvily edited — so when DiMarco cried on set, the audience believed he was overwhelmed by a sense of kinship with the veterans. But in reality, he writes, “I felt more rage boiling up in me — the same fire that burned in my mom’s belly as she dealt with the teachers and administrators at my school when I was young.”

DiMarco also writes about his physically abusive father, a Deaf man whose parents and schooling neglected sign language, he said, leaving him socially and educationally impoverished. DiMarco and his brothers would eventually change their last name, adopting their mother’s birth name, but after college he spent time with his father’s family, learning more about the forces that shaped his dad’s volatile personality.

“Growing up, I had tried to avoid thinking too heavily about it,” said DiMarco of the violent forms of punishment inflicted by his father, from whom he remains estranged. But while writing the book, he says, “I realized it wasn’t really his fault, that it was the system that had failed him.”

Weeks after we first met, DiMarco attended the Academy Awards for the first time. Serena Williams signed his name on the red carpet (“I still pinch myself,” he later texted), and at the Dolby Theater, his vision of a more inclusive and accessible industry appeared, by some measures, to crystallize. “CODA,” the American remake of a French film about the lone hearing child in a Deaf family, won Best Picture, becoming the first movie with predominantly Deaf actors to win the award. And in the bravura third act of “Drive My Car,” which was awarded Best International Feature, one actor, playing Sonya in a multilingual stage production of “Uncle Vanya,” performs a monologue from the Chekhov play in Korean Sign Language, communicating her character’s well of faith and despair without verbal speech.

People in the industry often ask DiMarco if there are characters in film and television he longs to play himself. “I’ve never really felt that there was enough representation for me to have an answer,” he explained. “And certainly, the representation that was out there wasn’t authentic.” In a business that pays lip service to the virtues of diversity and inclusion, he adds, “deaf and disabled is always, somehow, a different topic for a different meeting.”

In the utopia of his memoir’s title, though, DiMarco envisions the full integration of the Deaf and hearing worlds. There would be Deaf cameramen and grip operators; on his own projects, he strives to hire as many Deaf people in production as hearing. Movie theaters would offer showings with open captions, as AMC began doing at hundreds of its U.S. locations after the Deaf actor Lauren Ridloff appeared in Marvel’s “Eternals.” And deafness, as it’s often figured from a medical perspective, wouldn’t be a pathology, “something that needs to be fixed,” he says, but a difference worthy of embrace. “Many of us don’t want to be fixed,” he added. “Being Deaf has given us a community and a language.”

It’s no wonder he’s currently engrossed in George Chauncey’s 1994 book “Gay New York,” a social history of gay life in the city before Prohibition and the second World War, when a vibrant culture existed relatively unencumbered by the notion of the “closet” or the tyranny of normative sexuality. “It’s fascinating to see how that’s changed over time,” DiMarco told me. “We’ve built more and tighter boxes, as opposed to less.”

Boxes, to be sure, are not his thing. So now DiMarco finds himself a published author, the latest in a growing list of distinctions that include model, activist, and ballroom dancer. He’s “really, really nervous,” he says, but he betrays no stage fright, having spent much of his 32 years with a camera in his face. But now, DiMarco says, “I think people are going to be much closer to me than I ever expected.”