Lena: [00:00:00] Welcome to the poly culture podcast.
Gabriel: [00:00:02] A show where we discuss all kinds of culture from permaculture to pop culture.
I’m lena Greenberg. i use they them pronouns
Gabriel: [00:00:10] I’m Gabriel Coleman. I also use they them pronouns. This episode, we are going to be talking about queer cultures.
We’re going to dig into what it means to study queer ecology and what it means to be queer in the outdoors.
Lena: [00:00:25] Soon we’re going to chat with lee brown a researcher and systems person based in london but originally from california with a background of living in former marshland and thinking about how ecosystems fit together or don’t
Gabriel: [00:00:40] and then later we will talk with Alice reordering and Jonathan Williams, who are creators of queer out here, which is an audio scene for queer people to experience the outdoors recorded and make things and experience them together.
What exactly is queer ecology?
Lena: [00:00:56] I dunno gabriel you’re the one in grad school you want to start us off
Gabriel: [00:01:01] First, I want to say that in, in prep for this, we read a couple of texts. We read some just primers on what query cology is by Catriona, Sandy lands, Bruce Erickson and Kaitlin doke. Sorry, if I mispronounced any of your names, we enjoyed your texts and we’ll link them in the audio description.
If you want to find out more. Generally what all three of these pieces were saying is that there’s like these three different ways to think of queer ecology. The first one being queer behaviors in biological reproduction.
do you want to say more about that?
Lena: [00:01:33] I think queer behaviors in biological reproduction is what straight people think of when they think of queer humans. And that’s often the beginning and. End of discourse about queerness outside of conversations that happen amongst queer people. And. I think often gayness and queerness is seen primarily in the context of sex and reproduction. And it’s not as often transposed onto him.
Culture or cology outside of queer communities. So I think a part of what we’re trying to get at today is, what happens when you take this idea of queerness and bring it beyond the framework in which we usually hear about it. In which, a person identifies as queer or a person identifies.
Themselves, the people that are attracted to that makes them queer. But there’s so much more to queerness than that. Of course.
Gabriel: [00:02:24] Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Like this biological reproduction focus is very like gay penguins. And stuff like that. And it’s very important and cool. Isabella Rossellini’s, what’s it called?
Lena: [00:02:38] The videos where she pretends to be animals reproducing
Gabriel: [00:02:41] porno green porno, Isabella Rossellini is green.
Porto is very like this first way of looking at queer ecology, looking at how different. Organisms reproduce and saying, wow, this is so much more varied than man meets woman penis in vagina, that kind of stuff. So it is important, but yes, there’s a whole lot. That’s deeper than that.
Lena: [00:03:08] And I think there’s also been a tendency to use queerness in sexual reproduction of non-human animals as a way to justify that, quote unquote, realness of human queerness, which I think is. Inside out or backwards
I think queerness is a lot of things. And among them is holding complexity, being uncategorizable. And existing in this process of being made and unmade, which is just a lot less linear or simple than heterosexuality, or then single species relationships, or there’s just so much more than the way in which we have normalized identity and relationship in this.
Capitalist racist, hetero, patriarchal world. And. I think that queer ecology seeks to peel back the curtain and say, actually, there’s not a super clear boundary between any of the things that we use to categorize, nature and culture and human and natural and straight and different, and all the boxes we used to.
Build the world that we think we know.
Gabriel: [00:04:10] Yeah. Yeah. And also queerness is so much more than sex, which is what you’re saying, but as a queer person who has sex, but is not all about sex like there’s so much more to me that is queer then.
Who I have sex with and how I have sex. And so to narrow it to this biological reproduction thing is a little productive, but luckily there are a lot of other ways that query called you manifests. The other, the second one that comes up is queerness in relation to environments. So like how homosexuality heterosexuality, queer gender identity relate to constructions of space.
The intro the book query cology. That’s called a genealogy of queer ecologies by Catriona Mortimer, Sandy [00:05:00] lands, and Bruce Ericsson. They opened with this narrative about Brokeback mountain, the movie by Angley and how it’s about these men going into nature to discover their homosexuality.
And like being able to escape from the domestic ideas of heterosexual coupling that exists in urban spaces and in the home. And so this is another question of queer ecology is like, how is, how are natural spaces influenced by. Ideas of natural spaces, how are they influenced by heterosexuality and ideas of,
I don’t know, normative sexualities,
Lena: [00:05:45] I think also ideas of like dominance and submission, which feel. Obviously very connected to the sort of predator Bray model of looking at ecology, which we know is so such a small part of the story and that actually everything in a given ecosystem, unless it’s like a hardly invasive species actually does have a place.
And that most things, most components of a given ecosystem hold many roles. And that is very queer in and of itself. It’s that the dead tree that becomes a nurse log isn’t, like feminine submissive, because it’s dead. It’s actually it’s a home that enables the wellbeing of countless organisms and also will decompose and take another form and holds many identities and many roles.
And. Shakes the foundation of, our pretty linear ideas of predator and prey and dominance and submission.
Gabriel: [00:06:51] Yes. Yeah. The other example of this like queerness in space, at least human queerness in space is like cruising. That’s what a lot of folks talk about. And Jose Esteban Munoz in his book, cruising utopia.
And in a lot of his work has discussed like cruising as a way of claiming and remaking space outside of these heteronormative constructions cruising, being the practice among queer people of going out into parks, often urban green spaces to solicit sex. Which I think through sex,
Lena: [00:07:36] which, and I think that interacts in a lot of ways with both, constructions of what is nature and isn’t nature.
If it’s an urban park and also interacts with this experience, which we’ll talk a bit more about later of. Urban spaces seeming queer because those are spaces in which a lot of queer people have been able to be more safely out and queer than in rural spaces or, supposedly natural spaces.
But then there’s also the inherent queerness of ecology and the natural world. And I think it’s, as with queerness, it is neither. It is neither here nor there. And cruising is. I think a little window into the complexity of, how queerness interacts in space, across urbanness and ruralness and business and naturalness
Gabriel: [00:08:29] yeah. Yeah. And that’s the third. A way of understanding queer ecology. What you’ve been alluding to, I think is like looking at queerness and the understandings of ecology as like metaphors for each other, how does queerness reflect the natural world and how does the natural world reflect the queer experience?
Lena: [00:08:49] Yes, that brings us very nicely to our conversation with Lee Brown, who has been studying Pete and which they argue and which I think we both agree is perhaps. One of the queerest parts of ecology. So lee
Leigh: [00:09:04] hello? Yes. I am Lee Brown eye use they them pronouns. And I have spent the past year and a half getting really into peatlands. And how queer they are and their kind of histories of providing refuge to people and species, more than human species that are, Excluded from other spaces, or well adapted to the kind of conditions, that peatlands offer.
My work has delved into chronicles of exploration and surveying that recount the drawing of lines and borders and the defining of bodies of water, as opposed to landed areas and the. Designation of certain [00:10:00] wetland areas as wastelands as of no value as needing to be drained in order to have value.
Lena: [00:10:07] And I think we recognize that designation as the installation of a sea wall or the draining of the swamp land or the land filling of that kind of. Interstitials zone which then provides a surface and a boundary to use when dividing up that piece of land to sell and build on
Gabriel: [00:10:25] Yes. just how that the homestead act, the creation of territory is on indigenous land and the further parceling up into blocks and then lots for sale.
I also wanted to point out that commodities don’t transform significantly that transformation is a kind of querying the fact that things can and do change and that in changing, they ruin the systems that. They’re built on
Lena: [00:10:51] and the word transform is queer in itself as is the transformation of identities and bodies. It literally means across shape.
Transness and trans people and transformation are all about changing a form that maybe as was once thought to be solid or in place. I think there’s a direct line between the transness and transformational experience of being a not cis this person, as well as transformation of place and space and ecosystem is. Shifting from one thing that it might have been thought to be, to being something else.
Lee do you want to talk a little bit about pete maybe read something that you’ve been writing for your dissertation
Leigh: [00:11:35] I do a lot. I wrote islands of peat called batteries are dislodged from the swamp rise and float in the Okefenokee believed to mean land of trembling earth to the Creek people when tree roots anchor it again, it is called a house situated in a continuum of witness, which I just love.
The Oak of Nokia is a huge. Ecological kaleidoscope and about the batteries that sink and rise again, there’s this continual shifting in swampy wetlands that is very like hybrid and liminal by nature. And I think that is not irrelevant to the kind of home it has been throughout history to fugitivity
Gabriel: [00:12:20] I feel like the traditional. Way of thinking ecologically about this is to think, okay, this is a peat bog, a swamp, and these batteries will rise and form houses. And then enough of them will form and then it will turn into a Prairie and all the water will go away and then there will be trees and then it will be a forest and then it is done changing and it is in its peak state.
But as you implied there, there’s no like linear narrative like that.
Leigh: [00:12:51] I have been raised and schooled. To think of sustainability and restoration and remediation and conservation as linear processes.
And this exploration has poked holes in that rhetoric and notions of linear progression. Particularly, because as people have noted who are looking at the great dismal swamp at the border of what we would refer to as Virginia and North Carolina, severe subterranean fires have. Carved into the land, creating depressions, changing the topography and the hydrology leading to more Marsh like conditions.
Some thousands of years ago it was more marshy. So it’s return to this Marsh state is. A kind of echo of it’s more distant past still Holocene past, I think, but not what it has looked like in the last 500 years, which I think is the timescale that many restoration and remediation projects are concerned with because that’s the period of time in which.
Oh, white people and settlers have
and degraded environments to such a high degree. And so I’m just, and I think re other researchers doing restoration work are all so confounded by what. To use as a baseline. In these environments and there’s a kind of longer term shifting, especially with anthropogenic impacts. That raises questions for me that I’m not intending to answer, but rather to sit with and encourage others to sit with. About what we do with the damage. Especially when, there are species that are thrilled by the Marsh conditions.
Lena: [00:14:45] There’s a swampy ecosystem. That’s from what I understand, and one of a kind just outside of Mexico city called such MILCO, it’s an amazing freshwater swamp that early arrivals to the [00:15:00] area had shifted by scooping of the sludge at the bottom of the swamp. And. Anchoring it in place by planting trees and.
Creating probably house like structures. Like the swamp houses, you just mentioned Billy. And it was one of the most ecologically rich areas and one of the most fertile farmlands. Cause it was, the sludge that made up the soil and these anchored islands. So T Milko.
I think also is one of the only, only homes to axolotl, which are one of those species that love ecosystems like this. And. Are neither adult nor child they exist in this between state. So they don’t fit into categories. So around the world, each bog, each swamp, each uncategorizable ecosystem has its fugitives. Which two cannot be categorized
Gabriel: [00:15:51] lee. Can you talk a little bit more about fugitivity in swamps, both human fugitivity and non-human
Leigh: [00:15:59] I’m thinking about how Pete itself and the histories of peat, forming swampy, wetlands express a kind of submergence in a material sense, which we’ve already talked about in the sense of organic matter, building up, not fully decomposing because of an anoxic conditions and also in the sense that.
Swamps. And I’m looking particularly at the Southeastern us from the 17th century up to the 20th were places to inhabit and hide away and pass through in the face of chattel, slavery, and removals of indigenous people, all of the chaos of colonization and. In terms of the histories
william Bertram traveled through the swamps of the Southeast and. Wrote that colonial armies and cartographers alike found themselves lost, sunk and sick.
There were people who could inhabit them, navigate them and inhabit them. I’m looking at the stories of Marinol the Marine communities that formed after people fled plantations particularly in the great dismal swamp.
But this author. Golden writes that Marinol has a unique form of opposing slavery. Not simply because morons commanded space in ways that refuse the system altogether, but because they created viable alternatives to the system in wilderness spaces, which were simultaneously black refuge and white refuse.
Gabriel: [00:17:19] Yeah, I. I am really interested in the history of Maroons of black and indigenous people. Being able to escape into these spaces that were both undesirable by white settlers and inaccessible to them,
Lena: [00:17:36] the army just couldn’t get there.
They were too afraid.
Gabriel: [00:17:39] Yeah. And I love, I. It makes me think of queer space, which is another topic I want to talk about is like what makes a queer space? And I like that in these cases of human refugees, it’s the space that is accommodating to those who are in need of refuge and resistant to oppressors.
Leigh: [00:18:01] I knew first about the Marine communities in the great dismal swamp. And then I realized that indigenous folks also made use of the swamp for a similar reason. So there’s this swamp in.
One of the Carolinas, the four holes swamp. And I found that as another black water swamp, once that was once a sanctuary for the notches and a number of Tuscarora people did not leave for New York upon. Removal, but remained in the alligator river, swamp in North Carolina, after removal, further South and Georgia, the creeks met at the swamps of South Georgia, where they maintained community and informal government.
Muskogee Creek means dwellers in the swamp. Into at least the 18 hundreds, if not the 19 hundreds, there were still settlements by Seminoles in the Okefenokee swamp. So there’s like a many centuries long history of inhabitation of the swamps as places of refuge. At the cusp of colonization into the 20th century.
Lena: [00:19:11] In the next state, over the Seminole took refuge and what we now call the Everglades during the Seminole Wars and we’re able to find a way to stay there despite. That regime of removal.
makes me wonder about tribes whose the land spans borders there’s a false division between amidst a place that is just one place that is supposed to be.
A refuge or reserved, and then thinking about nonhuman species, the migratory Jaguar corridor from central America to South America that is hindered by borders that are fortified with walls and poachers. And there are all these kinds of material obstacles to [00:20:00] migration patterns that are much older than those borders and that.
There is a means of creating refuge for those non-human species that requires the dismantling of borders and acknowledges that refuge is also refuge from the violence of falsely dividing, an ecosystem into segments that have nothing to do with geography
Leigh: [00:20:22] You can understand the resilience of a peatland or health of the peatland at scales other than the landscape scale. So at the very small scale of a single Spagna
Moss.
Leigh: [00:20:32] If a mouse is under stress, it will bleach becomes white reflects light. It can come back, but only if the conditions are right, then you have a community. These are like a few SPAG numbs clumped together. They might also have their own mechanisms of resilience by turning into clumps that are tightly packed or loosely packed.
And then you have. Units of landscape and that whole system may expand or contract over time. So there are all these interacting scales. And of course we know that’s how ecosystems work. There are lots of scales of activity and lots of things you can look at.
To understand its function and health and interrelations and so on. But I just love that in a peatland there’s so
much,
Leigh: [00:21:15] there’s so much of a spectrum in how the organisms and the. The peatland as
a whole
Leigh: [00:21:21] expresses itself and regulates itself and so on, it’s truly so queer.
Gabriel: [00:21:30] This was fun.
Lena: [00:21:31] Thanks for joining us, Lee.
Leigh: [00:21:32] Thanks so much for having me.
Lena: [00:21:34] So next up, we’re going to chat with Jonathan and Alice of queer out here we are at here is an audio ezine, it’s a sound collection of experiences of being queer. Outside and queering the outside. Gabriel introduced me to clear out here a while back, we submitted a piece to them that we made together while biking in the New York city.
Marathon route before the runners got started. And so we’re very excited to chat with jonathan and ellis about what it means to be queer out here.
Gabriel: [00:22:05] So we’ll see you after the interlude.
Alysse: [00:22:07] I’m Alice, I use she her pronouns and I’m originally from France, but moved to the UK. But 10 years ago and rediscovered the outdoors there and do a lot of cycling and walking and wild camping kind of thing. And coded queer out here with Jonathan.
So with square out here, essentially, we we want to explore the, those from a queer perspective. Is the tagline and it’s essentially what it is in a nutshell. So we ask people to send us submissions rather than us talking. It’s about people’s interpretation of the outdoors from a queer perspective.
We keep it very wide, so it can be a field recording. It can be a poem. It can be just someone chatting with a friend about camping trips that they add. It’s open to interpretation as, as wide as we want. And it could be as well about what does it mean to be queer in the outdoors, or it could just be, I’m doing this thing in the outdoors and they just happen to be queer.
Jonathan: [00:23:00] Hi, I’m Jonathan. My pronouns. Are he him or they them, I’m Australian living in the UK. Outside of queer out here, which I co-edit Alice, I have the very exciting job of managing a database in the school. But other than that, I’m usually creating, crafting walking, sticking my nose in places.
A little bit of light trespass in here and there.
Lena: [00:23:25] Very cool. Can relate to sticking my nose into places. I love a good fence hop now and then. So I think both of you alluded to this, but I’m wondering if you can elaborate on what does queerness or being queer mean to you and then further, what is it to be queer outdoors?
Alysse: [00:23:42] Yeah. Being queer, is it something I didn’t particularly use to think about growing up. Growing up and moving to different environments that have realized that being queer, , Can, to do some extent, being different from the gnome.
There was, a culture and an understanding. From people like me, from people who identified as queer and there was a shared history,
and I think for me, a lot of being queer and queerness is about that community where there’s a lot of different people from all sorts of backgrounds but there is something shared there. It’s a space where you can just be yourself and you don’t have to worry about presenting a certain way or thinking about what you’re seeing, but at the same time, it can also a place that can be quite isolating. I think for queer in the adore, for me, there’s always that duality of safety, it doesn’t really matter. But as well of, I don’t know, like people make a lot of assumption and is it safe to correct them or not?
Jonathan: [00:24:39] Yeah, I think that’s quite interesting. That kind of idea that there’s a duality.
On the one hand, the trees are not going to mis-gender you and the river doesn’t give a shit who you are. You’re going to go home with on the other hand that is an isolated place and also. People’s access to that.
That kind of space is very different depending on who you are and where you are [00:25:00] in the world and what your identity is. It is your sexuality or your gender identity but it’s also about being in a network of other queer people and being connected in some way to people who have either similar experiences of identity to you, or at least relatable experiences of identity to you.
Gabriel: [00:25:16] Yeah, I really love that idea of building community. Also as a way of thinking about the outdoors and environments differently, like how a traditional, maybe scientific way of looking at an environment is that there is, dominance and submission and there’s. Predation and all of these like very mechanical dynamics.
But I feel like applying my personal lived experience of queerness to the same ecosystem, collections and communities of different species interacting and cohabitating. ,
Jonathan: [00:25:49] Do you feel like that? So a queer way of looking at nature?
Gabriel: [00:25:54] I think so. I, because I connect it back to my experience as a queer person. What other thoughts do you both have about what it is to queer the outdoors or queer environments?
Jonathan: [00:26:06] going back to that idea of being places that you’re not meant to be, sometimes I feel that’s quite relatable or mappable onto a queer identity generally.
I guess I’m finding space where space has not been given to you and finding connections to spaces and places and. And people and also animals and, the environment and built environments that are not necessarily the ones that you’re meant to be having.
Alysse: [00:26:34] I think it’s not something I necessarily put forward or advertise on social media that I’m queer. It’s not some things that are hide, but it’s just it’s just something that I am, but it’s not something that define everything that I do.
I guess being out, out there into claims that space. And that also. Maybe helping to change the definition of the outdoors. I think because you see a lot of like when you look at the outdoor traditionally, you’re going to see in the big landscapes and mountains and, all sorts of wild places.
But I think the outdoors is also back your garden. And to some extent, just even a bit of greenery through the cracks on the pavement. And I think that’s where maybe. Also being queer can sometimes shift how you look at things because you’ve had to shift how you look at things and your experiences is different.
Lena: [00:27:22] I think that really resonates with me as both a queer person and as an outdoors person, I feel like my experience of being queer is not as much to. Like shout from the rooftops that is my identity, but rather as a kind of. Opportunity to just be a person and a person is an animal and animals respond to each other outside.
If I walk through a park. The birds know that I’m there. And I know that the birds are there and we are in relationship. And so to me, this experience of queerness is so much more about really ch relationality. I’m thinking about all of these old train tracks in New York city that are not train tracks anymore.
They have not had trans on them for decades. And now they are like parks because they’re full of trees and wild growth. And also they are not parks and they are not public, but they are still outdoors and they’re still ecosystems that are alive. And so I feel like a lot of the, a lot of the ways I feel my own queerness are present in.
The experience of a space like that, that just, isn’t quite one thing. And isn’t quite one, it’s not one relationship. It’s in fact, a set of relationships.
Gabriel: [00:28:30] Yeah. I like the idea of chosen family when applied to two inter-species relationships.
Jonathan: [00:28:36] Yeah. Or spaces even. Maybe it’s slightly like the immigrant feeling as well. Like both Alice and I are not from the UK originally, but being able to build your, relationship with your surroundings.
Fresh is something that I think also in some ways relates to. What can be a kind of a typical queer narrative of growing up, leaving, getting to be queer somebody somewhere else. And building up that network of of people in that instance, but also in terms of like your relationship with a particular area, like that’s, an yeah.
Interesting thing to think about just generally, if that does map onto. People’s narratives of their own queerness and of moving if they do move and which way they move, because that kind of the narrative that a lot of people have is right. You grow up in the country like I did, and you moved to the city like I did.
And you become more and more queer. Like I did that. I’m like, what does it mean to, to move back into the country? Which I have also done over here.
Gabriel: [00:29:35] How did you two first encounter each other, and how did you decide to create this project queer out here?
Jonathan: [00:29:43] If you want the long story. It was that I think both of us were involved with the micro adventure community. People could go out and sleep. On a Hill overnight and then go back to work the next day and have a micro adventure. And I think you had tweeted about a micro adventure that you had done. And I remember going to that blog post and you [00:30:00] had a recording in it.
I think it was of a church. And I was just like, I was absolutely captivated because I’d done. I’d worked with sound before at university and through music and stuff, but I hadn’t ever really thought very much about field recordings. And I just remember seeing, like reading this little blood post and listening to this field recording and just being like, ah, this is amazing.
So right from the start, it was with sound that anyway, that’s I think that’s how we connected. I possibly stalked you for a bit and I was like, you ain’t fun on Twitter.
Alysse: [00:30:35] Oh, yeah, I’d forgotten about that, but yeah. I did used to take a microphone quite a lot in micro adventures. So we made through the outdoors and sound.
So it feels like we’re out here with like inevitable. But essentially we sorry, talking about the lack of representations of queerness in the outdoors, there were, there was content out there and that you could find a blog post, or you could find a specific podcast interview or was it might’ve been a videos, but it was always isolated.
There was never anything with, this is what we do. This is a bad. Being queer, and this is about the outdoors. So we looked around trying to find something and we couldn’t come up with anything. So we thought we’ll do something. Since we were both into audio, we just thought we’d do it that way.
Jonathan: [00:31:19] Yeah. In some ways it was quite selfish. We were just like, we want to hear these stories. Okay. Let’s pay people to send them to us.
Lena: [00:31:27] So now that you’ve been at it for a while, would you say the goal of the podcast is visibility? Is it archiving? Are you building an argument?
What’s what do you see as the work of queer out here?
Jonathan: [00:31:40] Like we say, only half jokingly that we do it because we want to hear the stories and this is the only way to get them.
We want to hear them, because we want to feel like we’re part of that network of queers and queerness that, that I mentioned before. And so the way I think that we go about building our issues reflects the kind of network that we want to be part of. So it’s one that makes an effort to be inclusive.
It makes an effort to listen to voices and stories that are not like ours. And it’s one that appreciates Like place as much as people, as much as creativity. So it’s we have field recordings, we’ll have conversations, we’ll have sound art and music in it. And it’s also a network or kind of a connection that encourages experimentation, hopefully.
So I guess as we are doing that, we are creating an archive of the present. But we, I guess we’re doing it in a way that, we’re not just an aggregator of content with the keywords. Gay and hiker or whatever. It’s like something we’re trying to build something that’s a little richer and messier and more interesting, I think.
I wanted to ask you actually, what you meant by. Building an argument.
Gabriel: [00:32:52] Okay. I was thinking about this kind of thing that we were talking about earlier about what it means to be queer in the outdoors. The podcast or the Xen. I think to me, like shows that we are queer out here, there are queer people who will, who loves the outdoors and that’s an argument in itself.
I just think about all the different Alice, as you were saying, like the experimentation, there was a piece in one episode that was like this, like making out in a hammock.
Jonathan: [00:33:23] Yeah, the poem. Yep. I remember that
Gabriel: [00:33:27] Just blew my mind that this was a way to experience queerness outdoors in this very like erotic beautiful way.
And so I think another argument that I see coming out of the podcast is that there are so many different ways to be in an environment to be outdoors. I’m wondering if there are purposeful things that you go in trying to say and trying to show, or is it more like the content comes, people submit things and you’re like, Oh,
Jonathan: [00:33:56] We do sometimes suggest to people that they could use an optional theme, because I think sometimes people find it easier to start if they’ve been given some instructions. But the number of people that actually contribute stuff to any theme that we put out is minimal.
It’s always really quite a fun time, once we’ve closed the submissions and we’ve got a certain number of submissions and we think about how we’re going to curate the journey through them.
So you know how we’re going to move from one to the next. And how does this speak in relation to this one? What are the connections, there’s always. Ways, one piece that we just like, I don’t know where to put it, like often it’s like really strong by itself, but we just don’t really know how it connects to other things.
We have over the last five issues or what have you, the majority of our contributors have been white. So we’ve always said that we encourage black and indigenous and people of color to contribute. But we have, we think that we haven’t been active enough and obviously we haven’t been because our content has just, 80.
To 90% of people have been white who’ve contributed. So this time [00:35:00] around we’ve done, we’ve had a two. Month window where only BiPAP people can submit. And we’ve spent our two months asking for suggestions, going out and finding other content contacting people and asking if they’d be happy to contribute or for us to use excerpts of their work.
Which is something that we will continue to do going forward. If we don’t get more BiPAP contributions, because. It’s pretty shitty, really to have a mostly white audio scene about queerness, because all we’re doing is talking about white queers, whereas there are a hell of a lot of other people out there with different and interesting stories and, different perspectives that we should be highlighting as well.
Lena: [00:35:40] We spent a bunch of time talking about this in the first episode of polyculture. This, whitening of the idea of nature and of culture and of wilderness. And obviously the environmental movement, especially in the U S was so incredibly white and based in values, brought about by white supremacy culture.
And it, it doesn’t surprise me that this. Trend is happening in the submissions. And I think speaks to the world we live in which like white people have been claiming the outdoors and also destroying the outdoors for centuries. And naturally there is a legacy to contend with there.
Jonathan: [00:36:27] Yeah. It’s something that obviously we haven’t got right yet, and we’re going to continue. Working on we, we’re hoping that, w we’re putting in the work to actually make sure that we’ve got more contributions and more voices that are from people of color. So hopefully once we’ve demonstrated that we’re hoping that maybe more other people will feel more comfortable contributing as well, because I think there’s also potentially that that barrier where, you know, like if.
If I see a call out for things for creative pieces about the outdoors and it doesn’t specify. That it’s for queer people that I might not submit to that. So I’m guessing, if I can’t look back through the archives and see that there have been queer people represented before, then why would I feel like that’s a safe space for me to put my ideas out there.
And I guess it’s probably similar for us as well, too, if unless people can look and see that, that those voices and those people and those creators have contributed before and. To be able to see how we’ve respected, hopefully the work that they’ve sent in, then why would they trust us?
Alysse: [00:37:36] Yeah. Every time with every new issue, we talk about it and we, think, we haven’t done very well, but equally we haven’t searched very well.
But it’s definitely our job to make sure that we welcome it in.
Jonathan: [00:37:51] Yeah. Earlier when I was saying that we’re trying to, build the kind of network that we want to be part of, that’s part of how we’re doing it, as well as, we pay contributors because we think people should be valued for what they create, even though it’s not very much. And yeah, I think, it would be very easy to create a Xen or a podcast like queer art here and be, or try to be quite apolitical about it, but I don’t think that’s what we are like. I think even though. We don’t editorialize very much, we’re not necessarily building a political argument. Big political argument. I think that our politics do underpin what we do and hopefully as our politics get better and we are better aligned with it, we’ll end up with a better audio scene at the end of it.
Lena: [00:38:35] I love the voice you just used to signify this sort of what reads to me is as if very fake, openness and accessibility being a political is like not being racist. Like that’s not being anti-racist and you’re not actually being apolitical. You’re just ignoring the thing at hand.
So I think there’s a lot to be said for moving at the speed of trust, which you both alluded to, like why would BiPAP creators trust this outlet? If folks don’t see similar other people who have similar identities participating in this community, but yes, the work of building the network we want to be a part of is such needed work.
And I think there’s so much room to build community across like decades and centuries old rifts in a place in the outdoors and talking about the outdoors and talking about queerness, which are places and identities that reject extractive frameworks and racist frameworks that have driven.
The segregation that’s so inherent in culture, I think.
Gabriel: [00:39:40] Yeah, I think I, this is one of the reasons why I love queer out here is that you two are so embodied in your values. Just with the paying people thing, the fact that you’re like, we don’t have funders, but we’re going to pay people for our work because that’s what matters. And with being two [00:40:00] white folks, making a podcast, it’s so easy for organizations, especially I think in environmentalism, which has been so white to just say.
Oh we don’t have nonwhite contributors, we tried, but it’s fine. Fine. Like I know we’ve all probably worked with organizations who have said Oh we
Alysse: [00:40:20] tried our best.
Gabriel: [00:40:22] So for you to be like, if we, if this continues to be the majority white venture. It fails as a project like to make that strong of a statement and commitment and to do the work that it takes to build that trust is I think a model that more organizers and organizations should be following.
Jonathan: [00:40:44] Thanks. Yes. Yes. People should be doing that. Like it doesn’t necessarily deserve cookies. It just should be. Oh, it is. It’s one thing that, at the end of every issue we sit down and we have our debrief and one of the questions we always ask ourselves is, do we want to make another issue? And this time at the end of issue five, when we looked at it and we’re like, w. Consistently failing to represent, more people who are not like us really.
We were just like we are not going to put out in other issue. That is not representative. So if we don’t get the pieces, then we’ve got to look for the pieces. And if people don’t want to have those pieces in our publication, then we won’t put out another one, but that’s just as simple as it is.
Which is, unfortunate. Obviously I, we think that it’s important to have queer. People talking about the outdoors, but if it’s only queer white people there’s already five issues of that. So people can listen to that.
Lena: [00:41:40] I really like how clearly your process is aligned with both the experience of being a queer person and the experience of being outdoors.
You it seems like you start doing something, it’s not immediately obvious what the end product is. It’s not immediately obvious which path you take. Sometimes you go out looking for snow buntings and you see a red tail talk instead, and it’s still really nice that you saw red tailed Hawk.
And that’s what I’m hearing in your process, which, which makes me want to hear a little bit more about how the work of producing queer out here has. Shaped how you move through both outdoor and queer spaces and communities?
Alysse: [00:42:22] I think, for me is it’s having different voices that I get to hear. And being challenged in, in some of my thinking and, having grown up in the white, Catholic, very traditional country a lot of my upbringing was not presenting me with anything different some than the norm and different Sam, you know what I was seeing in everyday life, a lot of it was just hidden from sight because I wasn’t navigating in any different spheres.
It makes me think a little bit in, in what Jonathan was saying earlier about, you knows the trajectory of, being queer, being raised in the countryside, moving to the CT. And for me definitely design this idea of I moved to the city and I got disconnected with the outdoors there and found it.
Back afterwards. Queer arts here is in a sense, helping me keep challenging myself and keep thinking in different ways and how I approach the outdoors and how I approach queerness. Think. All the time, my definition of queerness as definitely widened.
Jonathan: [00:43:27] I would say that bringing it back to a much more kind of personal level. I think being, being part of queer art here, and part of a more audio based community has really changed the way that I move through the outdoors because I listen a lot more.
I get. A lot more joy out of all kinds of different sounds and all kinds of changes in sounds that I didn’t necessarily notice before, which is an interesting kind of parallel, in some ways to like hearing about identities and people that you weren’t aware of before. I spend a lot more time listening to.
Beautiful natural sounds sure. The stream trickling, but also the gutter trickling and also the downpipe trickling and also, the weird sound of the, the fence railing that like bangs against the other thing.
And I think that also makes me slow down a little bit, and I think that’s much more sensual engagement with the outdoors is also, I don’t want to say it’s necessarily a queering of the outdoors, but I think that there is a way of. Engaging with and being part of an outdoor space.
That is, again, not necessarily the way that you’re taught to be in an outdoor space, that you’re not necessarily taught to linger at a gutter and listened to it, listen to a drain or whatever it is, but it is Something that I spend a lot more time doing now.
Gabriel: [00:44:57] I love that. I love, [00:45:00] yeah. I think the more you listen, the more you listen, the more you hear going back to your search for broadening the demographics of queer out here. Like the more you search, the more you find.
I think that’s a good place to leave it. This has been really lovely. You two are so amazing. I feel like I could talk to you all for hours.
Jonathan: [00:45:20] Yeah. It’s been really great talking to you as well. And I’m really looking forward to listening to more episodes of polyculture as it comes out.
Alysse: [00:45:28] Yeah, absolutely. It’s it’s been a lovely time
Jonathan: [00:45:30] yeah. Thanks for getting all intelligent on us
Gabriel: [00:45:35] anytime.
Lena: [00:45:37] So again, here we are, again,
Gabriel: [00:45:39] after both of those lovely interviews with all those lovely people and we want to bring up.
A thread that came up throughout both conversations, which is that of the personal experience of being queer and how that relates to queering things, querying, ecology, queering, sound, all these things.
Lena: [00:45:58] Yeah. I think the bit that jumped out at me that all three of the people we interviewed talked about and that. We’ve talked about a lot. Amongst the two of us is this idea that each of our own experiences of being clearer is the thing that equips us to queer the verb, other things. And, I don’t really think anybody’s straight, which is probably a different conversation, but I do not think that straight people can be queering stuff because.
This experience of queerness and of clearing yourself, I think is the, that that’s the practice, that’s the way you learn to queer other things. And, from what Jonathan was talking about to listening to the drain pipe, to what else is talking about, and reclaiming certain ideas of the outdoors and, to what Lee was talking about and, being able to see the inherent queerness of Pete.
All of these are ways in which those folks, individual experiences as being queer people and wearing themselves was almost like the ideological precursor to queering other stuff outside of their own selves.
Gabriel: [00:47:08] to appropriate a RuPaul is um, if you can’t queer yourself, how the hell are you going to queer something else?
But yeah like this super power that we have as queer people is that we see ourselves as outside of binaries and stuck between things and. I think there’s something different between understanding this in-between this theoretically which you can do, hopefully by listening to these interviews and reading about Korea, ecology, and like feeling it in your body and feeling yourself caught between things.
Lena: [00:47:47] I think there’s also in addition to the, between ness there’s another piece, which is. Being of many. I remember when I came out to my mom and I told her that I was using they them pronouns. She said something about how at least in English, and obviously this is different. And in every language and the ways in which we are clearing language to suit nonbinary and outside of the binary ideas is different all around the world.
But in English, at least we use what was formerly, thought of in the mainstream as a plural pronoun to refer to one person. And my mom said something about how, you know, now I I had a superpower, which is that I could be more than one person at once, which is how it feels to be a queer person, a trans person, someone who, you know, not only is in between things, but of many things at the same time.
And every day when I wake up, I feel different and it’s not. Like, I feel more endless, like one of the binary genders, it’s I feel a whole different combination of things that make up what it is to be human. And I am not like this singular identity of being SIS doesn’t work. I actually am a bunch of different people.
Gabriel: [00:48:59] Yes. Yes. Very sensate,
Lena: [00:49:02] very sensate.
To be discussed in a future episode.
Gabriel: [00:49:05] Oh yes, absolutely. Queerness coming from personal experience also makes the like discipline of queer theory, an anti discipline. Because as you heard in these interviews, there are moments where our personal experiences. Don’t come into conflict with each other, but like my personal experience will move into a different place than yours or Lee’s or Jonathan’s or Alice’s.
And those like contradictions and resonances, open up new avenues for seeing things and for tying things together.
Lena: [00:49:42] And I think to that point the discipline of queerness and queering is born of that constellation of.
Knowledge that comes from a lot of different fear. People having a lot of different experiences of being queer as the academic in the room, you can probably speak to this better than I can, [00:50:00] but my understanding of, what is traditionally thought of as a discipline is a pretty rigidly outlined area of study.
And it is one thing and you have to fit into the thing in order to be, a practitioner of that discipline. Whereas. The only qualification. I think you need to be a practitioner of the anti discipline of queer study and queering is to queer yourself.
Gabriel: [00:50:26] Yeah. Like we’re attempting to come at this from a sort of academic standpoint and yes, we read some texts before we.
Went into this, what are primary sources? We’re relying on our own stories and the stories of other queer people that we know which is yeah, completely radical within academic tradition, and not something that everyone is about, but we’re queer we’re here. So
Lena: [00:50:54] I think that. Trust of our own truths, even as those truths, diverge kind of challenges, this idea that, information is only valued or deemed true.
If it can be validated by peers through peer review and that, all of, all of us queer folks. Are constantly validating and affirming each other’s queerness through our shared experience of fairness. And also recognizing that each person’s queerness is independent and unique, but like how do, how would you peer review, a study of fairness when it inherently relies upon this sort of divergence and difference at its core?
There’s no one single truth, which I think also can serve just to go back to the idea of queerness as metaphor for ecology and vice versa. Queerness and ecology serve to break down categories. And we know that categorization specifically of identity has been weaponized in a huge chunk of human history and that.
In fact, it’s this idea of objectivity and the idea of categorizing people by race and by gender to, borders and geographic identities, all of those are, based in this idea that there can be an objective kind of truth and an objective kind of identity, which is in itself rooted in white supremacy culture.
Gabriel: [00:52:17] And I also think there’s this categorization of spaces. As nature as cultural spaces, as urban, rural wild civilized and personal experience shows us that everyone who moves through a space who occupies the space has a different experience of it.
And they bring their personal experience of all the other spaces they’ve been into to that space. They’re moving through.
and. that’s like another way where queerness bleeds into environmental thought.
Lena: [00:52:51] I wonder if we could go so far as to say that there is such an overlap between. Queer thought and ecological thought and theory that, not only are they metaphors for each other, but they can also kind of stand in for each other. And that actually queerness is ecology. Is queerness is ecology.
Well,
Gabriel: [00:53:13] Yes, they’re both. They’re both embracing contradiction and complication.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the polyculture podcast goes your
Lena: [00:53:23] podcast. Next time we will be talking about monocultures.
Gabriel: [00:53:27] Yeah, as we’re going to do two episodes on agriculture when I’m monoculture and then the next one on permaculture,
Lena: [00:53:38] I thought you were going to say poly culture.
Gabriel: [00:53:40] No, that’s in the title. It’s too confusing.
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