Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

Hiding in the dark culvert, saint snakes at my feet, I sensed the cultural blades of conformity passing overhead, mowing down displays of difference and diversity. Saint snakes helped me wait the mowers out, allowing me enough time to grow into my own form.

From the intimacy I developed with creatures of the culvert and the forests sprouted the resolve to accept my whole self, however slowly, even when social binaries threatened to cut off my watery limbs.

nature”

invokes a great divide,

this partitioning is a cultural choice, not a scientific fact.

I like blurring the line between human and nature because I believe we, as a species, have become profoundly lonely in our self-enforced isolation.

“kincentric” ecology is the understanding that ecological networks are composed of fellow beings, not just static others.

“queer” is a call to action, charging us to reject the many binaries that shape our current reality to the detriment of everyone.

the term can also be used more broadly for anything that complicates our ideas of what is “normal” versus what is “deviant.”

Queer theory asks: What has been categorized as normal, and why? How does the structure of our society—in the forms of race, gender, religion, orientation, ability, and even species—reinforce this categorization?

Human exceptionalism—the myth that nature is there to be dominated, that the human species is superior—has alienated humans from nature, literally paving the way for the destruction of our companions.

While many things about our human bodies and behaviors make us distinct from other species, it is unscientific hubris to build a hierarchy out of these traits. This hubris is what has thrust the planet and all its inhabitants into crisis.

philosopher Báyò Akómoláfé says, “postapocalyptic peoples” already among us.

These are queer people who survived the AIDS epidemic, who lost their friends, lovers, icons, and mentors in a neglected and demonized public health crisis.

All of us have special gifts that are beautifully suited for building community, demonstrating resilience, solving problems, or fostering joy.

If the plantation demonstrates domination, competition, and greed, then biodiverse landscapes and queer, Zoroastrian, and kincentric ecologies show us cooperation, generosity, and abundance.

While many of today’s scientists are not homophobic and may even be queer themselves, the bedrock of so-called Western science is largely composed of the thought patterns, value systems, and priorities of eighteenth- to twentieth-century Europe.

Society has inched toward greater acceptance of queer people, but few scientists have meaningfully incorporated explorations of this topic into their research programs or classrooms.

So much of queer advocacy has been centered around the assertion that we are “born this way.” And while I, of course, believe that many of us are—what if some of us are not? Would that make us, me, any less legitimate?

This is what I call “queer-informed education”—an education that aims to speak plainly about biology, eliminate shame around the body and bodily functions, teach careful decision-making for relationships and personal health, center consent and autonomy, and foster a practice of mutual care and respect for other types of bodies, orientations, and ways of being. I believe queerness, in its most expansive sense, has something to teach all of us, no matter how we identify.

One of the lessons I learned from my grandfather and from queerness is to make a mess of categories, to make a mess of anything that demands unreasonable, stifling cleanliness.

How we treat swamps is an indicator of our societal health. We carry out our worst impulses on them. I don’t believe we will prioritize their protection or celebrate their existence until we can see, collectively, the swamp inside us all—and until we can see the human condition reflected in the swamp.

The memories and the thoughts that had felt shameful started to reorganize themselves. They transformed into wonder and possibility.

In this way, they help create their own world. They move and slink through soil and wood and bodies of host animals, shaping them and, in a way, becoming them. I saw myself in fungi, another amphibious being.

Bound up in the advancement of taxonomy, however, was the European project of social hierarchy and colonialism, and to reflect on the field’s history without grappling with this reality is irresponsible. Reckoning with and repairing the evils of colonialist legacies in science is essential for scientific growth.

What kinds of knowledge can flourish when we celebrate queerness? What kinds of living can we better see when we view the world through two lenses, with double vision?

Affixed conspicuously to the side of each is a twelve-inch gold-plated copper disk, containing the sights and sounds of Earth and its inhabitants: the Golden Record. Conceived of by documentarian Ann Druyan and her lover, the astronomer Carl Sagan,

My mind was filled with items from the semester’s to-do list, but the crow voices cut through the static and refocused my attention.

What if we realized that we are, quite often, being spoken to? What if we believed our fellow species—the plants, the animals, the fungi, the microbes, and even the planet herself—are possibly seeking something similar? To be sensed for who they are, to be heard, to be known, to be seen? What if we leaned in and felt how the world is brimming with reciprocal sensation; what if we learned the languages that are already fruiting and bleeding out around us; what if we knew that all sorts of ears are always perked and twitching, that around us are a million noses inhaling pheromone vapors and throats projecting songs across the interspecies chasm?

I collect things that feel like gifts, imbued with a little extra magic.

As a queer child I learned to hide in these places, to find refuge from a harsh social climate. Now I reject the idea that nature must be huge and mighty to be adored, to inspire awe, to be protected.

I desperately sought protected spaces where I could be unseen, where I could temporarily forget the sprawl and degradation around me and spiritually convive with other life.

Disappearance—from both social media and so-called real life—can be protective, generative, and even liberatory.

Queerness has a tricky relationship with invisibility; to be in the closet implies a paradoxical combination of safety and oppression. The closet offers a shield from the hostilities of homophobic society, but of course this comes at the excruciating cost of being able to move, freely and entirely, through the world. There has been pushback from within the queer community against the obligation of “coming out,” which can be seen as a spectacle performed for the heteronormative gaze. “Coming out” can also reinforce the idea that straightness is the baseline (i.e., people usually don’t feel obligated to announce being straight). Visibility is often sought by marginalized people in the struggle for basic rights and resources, but progress in this area comes with the thorns of commodification, appropriation, and gentrification.

Alternatively, community time has a queer quality. Queerness, in this sense, means to be unconstrained, subjective, ephemeral, relational, subversive. Queer community time moves like a whisper network. Linearity gives way to forking, splitting, and recombining. Time doubles back on itself, multiplies, disappears. Queer community time is scalp-tingling déjà vu; it’s the fruiting of morels after a thunderstorm. Queer community time is the formation of critical mass for direct action. Queer community time is an uprising.

I think often about what Robin Wall Kimmerer describes as “becoming indigenous to place”—to intentionally and intensively bond to an ecology, to be a steward and a student of the species around you, regardless of your ancestral origins. After you establish such a bond, how could you ever say goodbye?

To see your own biology mirrored in the body of a mysterious, metamorphosing, magnetotactic being is magic.

As a corollary to “becoming indigenous to place,” I like to think of “becoming queer to place.” To be “queer to place” would mean that no line can be drawn between you and the wet earth around you. To be “queer to place” would mean that many things can be true at once: that you can be a migrant and still belong; that you, like every other being on this planet, can be full of unresolvable contradictions and still find acceptance. Becoming queer to place requires an active and humble commitment. And who better to turn to for inspiration than the eels—not as symbols but as teachers?

“Sit spots,” as they are commonly known, are natural places (though not necessarily remote) that one cultivates a long-term relationship with.

“Spring ephemerals” are plants that appear briefly each spring, usually before most other vegetation has awoken. In my part of the planet, the ephemerals include spring beauties (Claytonia virginica), bleeding hearts (Dicentra spp.), bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), and species of Trillium. In deciduous forests, as in the northeast, these plants evolved to grow during a period of reduced canopy coverage, when more sunlight reaches the forest floor. After rapidly growing and producing a flower, the plant goes to seed, its leafy tissues wilt, and it retreats to a dormant state until the time comes to do it all again.

I am constantly in awe, in a terrible kind of way, that to be alive today—almost anywhere—is to exist in a world of poisoned water. There have always been parasites and pathogens that can foul water and make humans sick, but that we must also constantly assume the water around us has been contaminated heavily by industrial waste, sewage, or runoff is a dystopia we’ve been habituated to.

Some of the hemlocks around me are stressed by the wooly adelgid, a sap-sucking and aphid-like insect that established itself here in the 1950s. They appear as white, cottony spots along the hemlock’s branches and needles, causing death throughout the northeast.

In a cultural sense, too, the past several hundred years of queerphobia have demanded that we stay nimble, light-footed. Whether it’s cruising in a city park or hatching an underground nightclub, queer gatherings are often cryptic, word-of-mouth, and fleeting. This remains true even with growing acceptance in heteronormative culture. When queerness is perceived as cool, others will want a piece of the pie. What was edgy, provocative, and daring is co-opted, and so we get used to staying a few steps ahead and saying goodbye. Much like mushrooms or spring ephemerals, the most memorable and special queer spaces—I prize the memory of “Dreamland,” a series of Syracuse dance parties I attended in my midtwenties—are those that last only a couple sessions, months, or years, existing as a glimmering moment in time, before retreating out of sight, rearranging themselves, and emerging elsewhere when the season is just right.

Time should be community time, set to the rhythms of all your neighbors, biological and celestial, and marked with cycles of daylight, sugar, and song.

In an age of increasing informational overload, our attention is split and splayed, our energies bleeding out in all directions. When you resist this, even briefly, and channel your awareness into active listening, you are giving both yourself and your company a gift.