“[B]ut what if belonging isn’t a place at all, but a skill; a set of competencies that
we in modern life have lost or forgotten.” — Toko-pa Turner
In the fall of 1998, Matthew Shepard was murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, the
same year I fell in love with a girl for the first time and realized I was queer. I was
in 8 th grade. A year later, the film Boys Don’t Cry came out, which was based on
the life and murder of Brandon Teena, a transman who lived in rural Nebraska.
It’s only years later that I can appreciate the psycho-spiritual effect these high-
profile events had on me and an entire generation of LGBTQ2+ millennials
(Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer or Questioning, and Two-Spirit). It
reinforced the narrative that queer and trans people weren’t safe in rural areas,
participating in rural life-ways. Everyone knew that to find acceptance and
community, you eventually migrated to the cities, you found your way to the gay
bars and clubs with their promise of connection. Although it’s changing now, rural
queer culture has historically been hard to identify.
When I decided to through-hike Vermont’s Long Trail with my girlfriend
when we graduated high school, I was privately haunted by the story of Rebecca
Wight and Claudia Brenner, Appalachian Trail hikers who were stalked and shot
at their campsite…while making love. Wight—who died—was also a biracial
woman of color. In all these cases—of Shepard, Teena, and Wight—their killers
had seemed to have a few things in common—they were white men enraged at
the revelation that their victims were queer or trans and they felt at liberty to
fatally harm them. I honor the gravity of inviting the stories of these young queer
ancestors into my reflection. It is worth emphasizing that these were some of the
first queer stories I ever heard—and certainly the first queer nature stories.
Stories like this impact us in ways that aren’t just psychic—they are mythic. The
moral of the stories appeared to be that being way out in the woods is dangerous
if you’re queer. I eventually realized that bad things that happened to queer
people in remote places are connected to an enduring toxic pioneer mentality
that saw anything and everything it encountered in the “wilderness” or on the
frontier as its own for the taking. When you encounter hate in the backcountry,
not just as a queer person but also as a black and/or indigenous person, for a
moment the frontier materializes, right between your body and the person who
sees you as ‘other.’
We live in a society where trans identity has recently been a matter of
public debate—in the form of whether trans people should be allowed to use the
bathroom of their choice. Patronizing attitudes toward gender-neutral pronouns
are common. We then also live in a society that has never been in greater need
of ways to affirm trans and queer identity in the very arena in which they have
been historically denied—in nature. This is part of what is behind the mission of
Queer Nature—the ‘organism’ that I have been co-visioning with my spouse
Pinar for over three years. Through Queer Nature, we create spaces for
QTBIPOC (queer or trans black and indigenous people of color) and white
queers to learn various place-based skills and survival skills—which range from
things like basket-weaving and spoon carving to wildlife tracking and first aid.
Even though it appears to be didactic, we interpret and enact this work as
transformational and ceremonial—potent emotions and acknowledgement of
spirit and soul are welcome and are part of the framing of the spaces.
When possible, we offer courses where the tuition is sliding scale or
subsidized with grants. This is because emotional, social, and financial barriers
prevent queer folks, QTBIPOC, and women from accessing spaces to learn land-
based skills. Historically learning these skills has been the provenance of
communities that aren’t welcoming to these populations or actively erase their
existence—e.g. rural hunting communities, the Scouting movement, or the
military. Though the latter two are changing, progress has been glacier-slow.
Furthermore, these communities are founded upon the piracy of knowledge from
First Nations people, a process we seek to interrupt. One of our most important
ongoing questions is how to teach ancestral skills in culturally humble ways while
on stolen land. Some of our de-colonial practices are naming whose land we are
on, and researching first names of rivers and mountains, or the first names of
keystone animal or plant species that show up in our curriculums. When teaching
a certain craft, we give examples of analogous technologies that derive from
European cultures, to disrupt the selective pedestalizing of First Nations cultures.
***
As dusk started to fall on our fire-making workshop, the air around the fire
pit began to fill with the spicy aroma of smoldering cedar wood. Various folks,
many of them pierced and tattooed twenty and thirty-somethings, huddled in the
proximity carving or practicing operating wooden bow-drill kits that my spouse
and I had been coaching them on how to build throughout the day. One of the
participants, a queer graphic designer who lived in Denver, was on the verge of
making a coal—that magical moment where the wood dust created by friction
heats up to the point of ignition. They stopped to catch their breath and we all
were transfixed by the chaotic tendrils of milky smoke drifting from a small pile of
dark dust next to their fireboard. The smoking heap of dust soon glimmered with
orange—proof that it was forming into a coal, and the tension in the air was
palpable. The student gingerly poured the coal into a nest of papery cottonwood
bark and began blowing on it to conjure the next step in the pyrotechnic
algorithm: flame. When the flame finally sprouted from the bundle of tinder, the
student grinned widely. No one could have told them how satisfying that
experience would be!
The mythos of making fire is so rich and self-evident that it’s hard to put
into words. Fire’s symbolism is complex—associated in its domesticated guises
with hearth and community, creation and birth, but also with control and
civilization. As an LGBTQ2+ community, we carry wounds associated with every
one of these facets. One way we have been disempowered is through the deep-
seated narratives, perpetuated by religions, nations, and medical theories, that
our ways of being—whether erotic or somatic—are unnatural or at best aberrant.
Learning how to make fire as queer folks is not just about learning a vital survival
skill, but about incarnating these symbols of home, creation, and control in queer
space, which naturally re-stories them and invests them with new meaning and
subversive power.
In queer space, learning ancestral survival skills—like how to make fire
without matches or how to blend into the forest and evade detection—are
initiatory ceremonies in and of themselves because when we engage in them, we
enact both communally and individually the axiom that we can survive. Unlike
how these skills have been framed in Western popular culture, we don’t learn
them because we are afraid of the so-called wilderness and need to conquer and
control it, but because we don’t want to rely on the human world for our sense of
sovereignty. We want to build relationship with our other-than-human kin, with
wood grain, with stone and rivers, with songbirds and herbs. We want to bind up
our own liberation with that of theirs. We want to have nature’s back, and we
have the sense they’ll have our back in return. That’s always how we’ve
survived—by finding each other in community, and standing together—like
antelope or prairie dogs, we get the power of the herd. In the various contexts
I’ve been a part of where survival skills are taught, I’ve rarely seen more
teamwork than in the groups that bless Queer Nature classes with their
presence. People who come to our workshops often aren’t interested in doing it
all themselves. We’ve all gotten plenty of practice with ‘going it alone.’ We know
better than to romanticize the lone cowboy or commando.
The bedrock of our pedagogy is the skill of awareness. Based on our
experiences of living in our bodies and studying the arts of survival as well as the
arts of council, we have learned that the most important survival skill is what we
do with our attention—which often looks like listening with multiple senses.
Listening is also a medicine for trauma—so what magic might happen when we,
with our various layered identities, engage in a practice of listening and being-
listened-to by the more-than-human world? We hope it will lead to belonging—a
dynamic state of being embedded in webs of accountability and intimacy with
other species and the earth. For many of us, belonging is an act of resistance.
Note: Originally published in Circles on the Mountain Issue #24 (2019)