D.J. typed, ‘‘Do you think it’s even possible with my cerebral palsy for us to make love?’’
They met the following Sunday at D.J.’s house, while his mother was at church. They tried to kiss while lying down on D.J.’s bed, on the theory that it would be easier, given his impairments. But D.J. kept sitting up, and then he lowered himself onto the floor. Anna offered him the keyboard and asked if anything was wrong. Nothing’s wrong, he typed, he was very happy, but also overwhelmed — he needed a minute. Anna said O.K., and D.J. scooted out into the hall. ‘‘Look, whatever we’re going to do, you set the pace,’’ she told him. ‘‘You call the shots. This is all about what feels right for you. I just love being close to you in whatever way works for you and for your body. No pressure.’’
A few minutes later she was naked.
‘‘I’ve dreamed about this,’’ he typed.
At his request, she said, she pushed down his pants, loosened his diaper and performed oral sex on him. They never finished — ‘‘I was close,’’ D.J. typed — but they had tickets for a disability-related film festival at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were going to see ‘‘Wretches & Jabberers,’’ a 2010 documentary about F.C. produced by Douglas Biklen, the founder of the Syracuse institute.
A week later, Anna recalled, the couple tried to have sex in Anna’s office at Conklin Hall, with condoms, a blanket and an exercise mat. It didn’t work, and they ended up just sitting on the floor together, Anna talking and D.J. typing. Anna asked him if he might want to see some pornography, ‘‘to see what things looked like and different positions people used and that sort of thing.’’ She said she wouldn’t want to pay for porn or watch anything offensive, but that she would be O.K. with finding free clips on the Internet that depicted couples engaging in mutually pleasurable intercourse. He demurred, typing out that in his view the women in porn are being exploited, and that, besides, Anna was more beautiful than any porn star, and he really wanted to be thinking only about her when they finally made love.
The following Sunday in her office, it finally happened. D.J. ‘‘was very happy with what was going on,’’ she said in court. If he needed to say something, he would bang the floor, and she would pause to set him up with the keyboard. ‘‘It was a few hours from getting undressed to afterglow,’’ she said. When they were finished, he typed: ‘‘I feel alive for the first time in my life.’’
It’s not that Anna didn’t know of F.C.’s checkered reputation. But like many in that insular and passionate community of users, she thought the method had been unfairly pushed aside. Anna knew it worked, firsthand.