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There has been a strong lesbian presence in Paris for at least 150 years. Gay bars and night clubs flourished under the gilded city's starry nights thanks to the decriminalization of homosexuality during the French Revolution in 1791. However, in the 20th century, lesbianism was still seen as taboo in some circles. Nevertheless, Paris was the place to be if you were seeking a sapphic love affair. Going back to codes or signals, many lesbians and LGBTQIA+ members used flowers or fashion statements to catch the attention of other homosexuals. Carnations were popular among gay men and in places like La Monocle, the first lesbian bar in Paris, you could often see an handsome woman brandishing a monocle or witness the glimpse of an elegant lady with a violet in her hand. This meant, yes, I love women in that way.

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Shakespeare and Company, is a world renown bookstore located in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, France. But once, it resided a little ways away at 12 rue de l’Odéon. It was started in 1919, by Sylvia Beach, a small American woman seeking to be among a more liberated kind of people. Sylvia Beach was a lesbian and an advocate for liberating censored or banned media, often times carrying illegal literary works in her small Parisian bookstore and library. She had many friends still in America and championed social reform and sexual freedom. One of my favorite books, "No Modernism Without Lesbians" tells of her great feats and impact on the world. She is one of my heroes.

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Sapphics and queers alike are not strangers to fan edits. A fan edit usually manifests when an individual senses a queer undertone or queer coding and edits the respective media through the lens of sapphic love. In many cases, the filmmakers, show runners or authors actively discourage obvious queer declarations, thus the need for fan produced media. Usually, it is accompanied by a good, dramatic song. In this case with Ruth and Idgie, the film is turned into a highlight real with on real adjective to describe it, yearning. And with it, the gay agenda is solidified and the story of these two women has been made right again. Enjoy !SPOILER ALERT!

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idgie & ruth (fried green tomatoes) | ivy

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The novel does include the subject and examples of explicit racism, sexism and a corrupt justice system...just no homophobia. The effect is singular, I am still not sure how I feel about it today. The love story however, is remarkable.

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Strangely, queerness is not a subject of ridicule or debate, not from the author to the audience nor from or between characters. It is almost as if queerness was never an issue at all in society. Most quizzically, the narrator never confirms nor denies a romantic relationship or otherwise between our two main characters, Ruth and Idgie, it just IS.

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Speaking of symbolism, Fried Green Tomatoes, originally a novel published in 1987, is a unique tale for more than its subject matter. Taking place partly in the 1930's and the 1980's, in the heart of the Bible Belt. It was written by Fannie Flagg, a lesbian herself.

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Many marginalized groups such as queer folks, POC individuals and low-income families experience the effects of climate change in a more impactful way due to discrimination, homelessness and inaccessibility to necessary resources. During Hurricane Katrina, many trans people were turned away from shelters and abandoned. If that was not enough, a large portion of queer people face exile from their homes and families. Most times, they are on their own and can end up living in communities with higher flooding rates, fires and pollution. An unhealthy environment affects everyone but it will always affect the disadvantaged first.

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I think that in an academic setting, it can be easy to regurgitate the same events, historical moments, and dogeared articles. I would like to measure this assignment through cultural content that has helped to shape my own lesbian journey but many others. Through this specific content, there has been countless considerations of self, a spark of reflected recognition through the looking glass.

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My community is made of of people who have the tinge of something different and ancient yet new, the fear of being seen, they are the ridiculed, the hungry, the patient, the impatient, the criminal, the moralist, the novelist, the uneducated, the spineless, the confused, and those with the courage of their own convictions. In essence, there is seemingly a complete likeness to any other community, people or person. And yet, there is a distinct difference that strikes like a bullet through the heart, like an arrow finding its true and only target. It's in the way that we love, not who we love, but the way in which we do it. There is no way to describe it, only a way to express its feeling. It is a delicious and undigestible thing that has no path or design but settles in the narrow tubes of the heart, fluxing like blood and animates the hand that reaches out to touch the flux in another. It is something wholesome and spirited. Empathy encompasses every boundary and just when you think there is no mystery left, you remember a forgotten seed due to a wild flowering verdure.

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I love identifying as a sapphic woman because for one, it sounds fancy AF. For another, the derivative of the word - which we will get to in a minute - is as poetic as my love for femmes can feel.

There have been points in my life where I have felt more comfortable identifying as " bisexual," while at other times I have preferred " lesbian." Regardless of the label, it is my sapphic love that has remained constant.

Sapphic is also a less-often used term in the queer community, so if you're wondering what I mean by "sapphic," you're not alone. Prior to 2020, I couldn't confidently define it despite being openly queer.

What I've learned since is that while "sapphic" and "lesbian" are related terms, they are distinct from one another.

Sapphic is an umbrella term that includes lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual trans femmes, mascs, nonbinary folks, and cis women. Yet unlike these sexualities, "sapphic" strives to conjure an experience more akin to an intention toward attraction - one oriented less to any specific gender identity and more to the fullness of a potential lovers' humanity.

The term sapphic has a long history, one that dates all the way back to ancient Greece, and has become an umbrella word that refers to a wide spectrum of sexualities and genders. If you want to learn more about sapphic love and its intertwined history with lesbian identity, read on!

What Does It Mean to Be Sapphic?

At its core, sapphics can be lesbians, bisexuals, and pansexual people of a variety of genders. Trans femmes, mascs, nonbinary people, and cis women can all fall under the sapphic umbrella if the term resonates with them.

Being sapphic can mean different things to different people, and can depend on whom you ask within the community.

Victoria Williams, who discusses being sapphic on TikTok, says that for her, being sapphic is a culmination of her love for not only all women, but her woman.

"In my relationship, I have romanticized my own sapphic love beyond words," Williams told Them. "I've memorized her from head to toe, freckle to dimple. I've read, taken notes and devoured her heart and soul."

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Babe, it's a vibe. A hot one. You should try it.

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Emily Dickinson, is a sapphic icon in her own right. Emily Dickinson was a prolific poet who lived in the 1800's and although her genius was mainly completely undiscovered until the 1950's and beyond, her impact has been immense. Her muse, Susan Gilbert, the undying subject of all her affection. In every letter she addressed to her, over 300, she affectionately refers to her as "Sue" and you can feel it in every poem, like a word formed on a silent tongue, the outline of her name, in all of it's covert transparency. You see, many of Emily's poems and letters were never meant to be read. You can feel her yearning and her grappling to try and understand the limiting world around her through all it's beauty and the destruction that the modern world brings even when it brings liberation and freedom along with it. Her greatest passion, besides writing was botany. She collected over 420 pressed plant specimens. She used nature as well as flowers as allegories and metaphors in almost every poem she ever wrote that we know about. In later cultural references, we will come back to symbolism through plants in sapphic culture.

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Dickinson, an Apple TV original, is a biopic series that imagines the inner world of the complex and imaginative Emily Dickinson, with some modern twists. Following her teenage years and the blossoming love between her and Susan Gilbert, Emily's poems are utilized heavily and inspire subject matter. Of course there are not only liberties taken with the show through fictionalized subplots throughout the series but also the detailed unfolding of our main sapphic love story. We can only imagine what the real Emily and Sue got up to day to day.

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Eventually, in 1991, Fried Green Tomatoes was made into a film. Replacing the lesbian love story with a "best friendship", Ruth and Idgie traversed all the same trials and tribulations together as in the book...but as friends. The idea of a homosexual relationship deemed the film as unprofitable if these two women were in love. However, the director and actors secretly embraced the spirit of queerness in the film and it bursts through like rays of light for the rightly-trained eye. Throughout the film, queer coding or "signaling", something we will learn more about later, is prevalent. Scenes like the "honey in a jar" scene or the famous "food fight" scene were used as metaphors by director, Jon Avnet, for sexual intimacy. However, despite the lack of transparency, a generation of youths in the 90's and early 2000's recognized a kindredness with the queer themes and undertones and felt seen.

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Emily Dickinson's Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert A MUST READ!

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Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830-May 15, 1886) met the person who became her first love and remained her greatest - an orphaned mathematician-in-training by the name of Susan Gilbert, nine days her junior. Throughout the poet's life, Susan would be her muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her "Only Woman in the World."

I devote more than one hundred pages of Figuring to their beautiful, heartbreaking, unclassifiable relationship that fomented some of the greatest, most original and paradigm-shifting poetry humanity has ever produced. (This essay is drawn from my book.)

Susan Gilbert had settled in Amherst, to be near her sister, after graduating from the Utica Female Academy - one of a handful of academically rigorous educational institutions available to women at the time. She entered Dickinson's life in the summer of 1850, which the poet would later remember as the season "when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens."

Poised and serious at twenty, dressed in black for the sister who had just died in childbirth and who had been her maternal figure since their parents' death, Susan cast a double enchantment on Emily and Austin Dickinson. Sister and brother alike were taken with her poised erudition and her Uranian handsomeness - her flat, full lips and dark eyes were not exactly masculine, her unchiseled oval face and low forehead not exactly feminine.

"Best Witchcraft is Geometry," Emily Dickinson would later write. Now both she and her brother found themselves in a strange bewitchment of figures, placing Susan at one point of a triangle. But Emily's was no temporary infatuation. Nearly two decades after Susan entered her heart, she would write with unblunted desire:

To own a Susan of my own
Is of itself a Bliss -
Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord,
Continue me in this!

A tempest of intimacy swirled over the eighteen months following Susan's arrival into the Dickinsons' lives. The two young women took long walks in the woods together, exchanged books, read poetry to each other, and commenced an intense, intimate correspondence that would evolve and permute but would last a life- time. "We are the only poets," Emily told Susan, "and everyone else is prose."

By early 1852, the poet was besotted beyond words. She beckoned to Susan on a Sunday:

Come with me this morning to the church within our hearts, where the bells are always ringing, and the preacher whose name is Love - shall intercede for us!

When Susan accepted a ten-month appointment as a math teacher in Baltimore in the autumn of 1851, Emily was devastated at the separation, but tried to keep a buoyant heart. "I fancy you very often descending to the schoolroom with a plump Binomial Theorem struggling in your hand which you must dissect and exhibit to your uncomprehending ones," she teased in a letter. Susan was science personified, capitalized - she would haunt Dickinson's poems for decades to come as "Science."

In a comet of a letter from the early spring of 1852, eight months into Susan's absence, Emily hurls a grenade of conflicted self-revelation:

Will you be kind to me, Susie? I am naughty and cross, this morning, and nobody loves me here; nor would you love me, if you should see me frown, and hear how loud the door bangs whenever I go through; and yet it isn't anger - I don't believe it is, for when nobody sees, I brush away big tears with the corner of my apron, and then go working on - bitter tears, Susie - so hot that they burn my cheeks, and almost scorch my eyeballs, but you have wept much, and you know they are less of anger than sorrow.

And I do love to run fast - and hide away from them all; here in dear Susie's bosom, I know is love and rest, and I never would go away, did not the big world call me, and beat me for not working... Your precious letter, Susie, it sits here now, and smiles so kindly at me, and gives me such sweet thoughts of the dear writer. When you come home, darling, I shan't have your letters, shall I, but I shall have yourself, which is more - Oh more, and better, than I can even think! I sit here with my little whip, cracking the time away, till not an hour is left of it - then you are here! And Joy is here - joy now and forevermore!

That year, in a Prussian lab, the physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz measured the speed of nerve conduction at eighty feet per second. How unfathomable that sentiments this intense and emotions this explosive, launched from a mind that seems to move at light-years per second, can be reduced to mere electrical impulses. And yet that is what we are - biomechanical creatures, all of our creative force, all of our mathematical figurings, all the wildness of our loves pulsating at eighty feet per second along neural infrastructure that evolved over millennia. Even the fathoming faculty that struggles to fathom this is a series of such electrical impulses.

The electricity of Dickinson's love would endure, coursing through her being for the remainder of her life. Many years later, she would channel it in this immortal verse:

I chose this single star
From out the wide night's numbers -
Sue - forevermore!

But now, in the dawning fervor of early love, forevermore collides with the immediacy of want. Midway through her spring outpouring, Emily suddenly casts Susan in the third person, as if beseeching an omnipotent spectator to grant her desire in the drama of their impending reunion:

I need her - I must have her, Oh give her to me!

The moment she names her longing, she tempers its thrill with the lucid terror that it might be unspeakable:

Do I repine, is it all murmuring, or am I sad and lone, and cannot, cannot help it? Sometimes when I do feel so, I think it may be wrong, and that God will punish me by taking you away; for he is very kind to let me write to you, and to give me your sweet letters, but my heart wants more.

Here, as in her poetry, Dickinson's words cascade with multiple meanings beyond literal interpretation. Her invocation of "God" is not a cowering before some Puritanical punishment for deviance but an irreverent challenge to that very dogma. What kind of "God," she seems to be asking, would make wrong a love of such infinite sweetness?

Four years earlier, during her studies at Mount Holyoke - the "castle of science" where she crafted her stunning herbarium - Emily had begun giving shape to the amorphous doubt about the claims of religion that had been gnawing at her since childhood - doubt she would later immortalize in verse:

It troubled me as once I was -
For I was once a child -
Deciding how an atom - fell -
And yet the heavens - held.

Facing her desire for Susan, her deepest fear was not punishment from "God" but that her wayward heart was its own retribution - as well as its own reward. She writes plaintively that heated summer:

Have you ever thought of it, Susie, and yet I know you have, how much these hearts claim; why I don't believe in the whole, wide world, are such hard little creditors - such real little misers, as you and I carry with us, in our bosom every day. I can't help thinking sometimes, when I hear about the ungenerous, Heart, keep very still - or someone will find you out!... I do think it's wonderful, Susie, that our hearts don't break, every day... but I guess I'm made with nothing but a hard heart of stone, for it don't break any, and dear Susie, if mine is stony, yours is stone, upon stone, for you never yield, any, where I seem quite beflown. Are we going to ossify always, say Susie - how will it be?

There is palpable restlessness in Emily's oscillation between resignation and demand, between love's longing to be unmasked and the fear of being found out. Later that month, she exhorts Susan: "Loved One, thou knowest!" - an allusion to Juliet's speech in Romeo and Juliet: "Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face."

By June, anticipating Susan's return from Baltimore in three weeks, Emily is pining with unbridled candor:

When I look around me and find myself alone, I sigh for you again; little sigh, and vain sigh, which will not bring you home.

I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider... every day you stay away - I miss my biggest heart; my own goes wandering round, and calls for Susie... Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say - my heart is full of you... yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me... I shall grow more and more impatient until that dear day comes, for til now, I have only mourned for you; now I begin to hope for you.

She ends her letter with aching awareness of the dissonance between her private desire and the public norms of love:

Now, farewell, Susie... I add a kiss, shyly, lest there is somebody there! Don't let them see, will you Susie?

Two weeks later, with Susan's return now days away, her anticipatory longing rises to a crescendo:

Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to?... I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot wait, feel that now I must have you - that the expectation once more to see your face again makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast - I go to sleep at night, and the first thing I know, I am sitting there wide awake, and clasping my hands tightly, and thinking of next Saturday... Why, Susie, it seems to me as if my absent Lover was coming home so soon - and my heart must be so busy, making ready for him.

Dickinson would frequently and deliberately reassign gender pronouns for herself and her beloveds, recasting her love in the acceptable male-female battery of desire. Throughout her life, she would often use the masculine in referring to herself - writing of her "boyhood," signing letters to her cousins as "Brother Emily," calling herself a "boy," "prince," "earl," or "duke" in various poems, in one of which she unsexes herself in a violent transfiguration:

Amputate my freckled Bosom!
Make me bearded like a Man!

Again and again, she would tell all the truth but tell it slant, unmooring the gender of her love objects from the pronouns that befit their biology. Later in life, in flirting with the idea of publication, she would masculinize the pronouns in a number of her love poems - "bearded" pronouns, she called these - to fit the heteronormative mold, so that two versions of these poems exist: the earlier addressed to a female beloved, the later to a male.

That insufferable spring, she had already declared to Susan that her "heart wants more." Twenty Augusts after they met, Dickinson would write:

Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits.

But when Susan returned from Baltimore on that long-awaited Saturday, something had shifted between them. Perhaps the ten-month absence, filled not with their customary walks in the woods but with letters of exponentially swelling intensity, had revealed to Susan that Emily's feelings for her were not of a different hue but of a wholly different color - one that she was constitutionally unable to match. Or perhaps Emily had always misdivined the contents of Susan's heart, inferring an illusory symmetry of feeling on the basis not of evidence but of willfully blind hope.

Few things are more wounding than the confounding moment of discovering an asymmetry of affections where mutuality had been presumed. It is hard to imagine how Dickinson took the withdrawal - here was a woman who experienced the world with a euphoria of emotion atmospheres above the ordinary person's and who therefore likely plummeted to the opposite extreme in equal magnitude. But she seems to have feared it all along - feared that her immense feelings would never be wholly met, as is the curse of those who love with unguarded abandon. Five months earlier, she had written to Susan:

I would nestle close to your warm heart... Is there any room there for me, or shall I wander away all homeless and alone?

She suspected, too, that she might injure - and not only herself - with the force of her love:

Oh, Susie, I often think that I will try to tell you how dear you are... but the words won't come, tho' the tears will, and I sit down disappointed... In thinking of those I love, my reason is all gone from me, and I do fear sometimes that I must make a hospital for the hopelessly insane, and chain me up there such times, so I won't injure you.

Even in her ardent anticipatory letter penned before Susan's return, she questions for a moment whether the love that stands as the central truth of her daily being is real:

Shall I indeed behold you, not "darkly, but face to face" or am I fancying so, and dreaming blessed dreams from which the day will wake me?

Now she had been awakened - not rudely, but unmistakably and irreversibly. In the anxious insistence of her entreaty is the sorrowful sense that Susan is slipping away from her - and toward Austin, who commenced an open courtship of her.

That summer, Emily Dickinson cut off her auburn hair.

The following autumn, Susan Gilbert married Austin Dickinson, largely to be near Emily, and they moved into the Evergreens - the house erected for the newlyweds by Austin and Emily's father, across the lawn from the Homestead, the house where the lovesick poet lived.

A corridor denuded of grass soon formed between the Homestead and the Evergreens as Emily and Susan traversed the lawn daily to see each other or to press into the other's hand a letter unpinned from the bosom of a dress. A "little path just wide enough for two who love," Dickinson called it. Over the next quarter century, 276 known poems would travel between their homes - some by hand and foot, but many by post. I have often wondered what prompted the poet to head for the mailbox and not the hedge, stuffing her sentiments into an envelope addressed to a house a stone's throw from her own. And yet the heart is not a stone - it is a thing with feathers.

"She loved with all her might," a girlhood friend of Dickinson's would recall after the poet's death, "and we all knew her truth and trusted her love." No one knew that love more intimately, nor had reason to trust it more durably, than Susan. Where Austin's love washed over her with the stormy surface waves of desire, Emily's carried her with the deep currents of devotion - a love Dickinson would compare to the loves of Dante for Beatrice and Swift for Stella. To Susan, Dickinson would write her most passionate letters and dedicate her best-beloved poems; to Susan she would steady herself, to her shore she would return again and again, writing in the final years of her life:

Show me Eternity, and I will show you Memory -
Both in one package lain
And lifted back again -
Be Sue - while I am Emily -
Be next - what you have ever been - Infinity.

Something of the infinite would always remain between them. Thirty years into the relationship, Susan would give Emily a book for Christmas - Disraeli's romance novel Endymion, titled after the famous Keats poem that begins with the line "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever" - inscribed to "Emily, Whom not seeing, I still love."

Some loves lodge themselves in the tissue of being like mercury, pervading every synapse and sinew to remain there, sometimes dormant, sometimes tortuously restive, with a half-life that exceeds a lifetime.

Their uncommon love, the splendors and sorrows of which I explore further in Figuring, would become the pulse-beat of Dickinson's body of work, which radicalized its era and forever changed the landscape of literature - a shimmering testament to the fact that love, longing, and the restlessness of the human heart are the catalyst for every creative revolution.

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Emily Dickinson's Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert

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Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830-May 15, 1886) met the person who became her first love and remained her greatest - an orphaned mathematician-in-training by the name of Susan Gilbert, nine days her junior.

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The series ran from 2019-2021. It felt groundbreaking at the time and still does, as lesbian or sapphic media has always been extremely rare. Queer people can find meaning in almost anything and in many cases, have to create media themselves. In this case however sapphic love wins the day and we have more than just symbolism.

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As a queer person, I have always felt a certain affinity with villains. Wily characters who aren’t afraid to deviate from the norm, pursue their passions, and dress however they want: yes please. However, these same traits that create an affinity for some of us damage others who are taught that anything other than the […]

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It is important for LGBTQIA+ individuals to see ourselves reflected in culture. However it's also important that the real life characters, the brave or silent ones, throughout history are remembered and honored too...

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Exploring the secret history of queer coded language

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From hankies to flowers, get the lowdown on some of the ways LGBTQ+ people have used coded language to connect with the community.

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Lets go to Paris...

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Pride month is here, so let's celebrate with some queer theory and intersectionality! This article outlines what queer ecology is and how it relates to the modern environmental and LGBTQ+ movements.
Note: I recognize that the word "queer" has historically been, and still sometimes is, used as a pejorative. However, many LGBTQ+ people have reclaimed the word to inclusively refer to themselves and their community. In this article, I aim to use the word "queer" to inclusively refer to the wide array of LGBTQIA2S+ people.
Queer ecology is a set of concepts that acknowledge the connections between ecology and queer thought. Among these concepts are the observations that society believes queerness to be "unnatural" even though many parts of nature are queer (yay for lesbian albatrosses!) and that injustices against nature and injustices against LGBTQ+ people have overlapping causes and solutions.

Bottom line: Queer ecology argues that ecology and queer theory are connected in v important ways.

Sexuality and ecology might seem like unrelated ideas, but in reality, they are related in loads of ways. Most notably, queerness and nature are connected through their shared positions in value dualisms in dominant Western society.

Here's a quick rundown for those who aren't familiar with dualisms-- Basically, society loves to characterize things in black and white terms. In these black and white comparisons, one extreme is inherently good, and the other is inherently bad. These groups of commonly referenced extremes are called "dualisms."

For example, popular western society believes that humans and nature are opposite from one another. In this " humans/nature" dualism, our society views humans as a good and powerful force and nature as an obstacle to be conquered. In this way, humans are "good," and nature is "bad." As a result, the natural world is often exploited, abused, and ignored (evidenced by our mounting list of environmental ills).

Another prevalent dualism is natural/unnatural. Although nature is exploited in the humans/nature dualism, our society often praises natural things over unnatural things. For this reason, natural things are aligned with the "good" side of the natural/unnatural dualism, while unnatural things are aligned with the "bad" side of the dualism.

Even though the natural/unnatural dualism directly contradicts the humans/nature dualism, these conflicting patterns of thought are present in so many places in our society. People praise natural foods, natural aesthetics, natural behaviors and so much more. Yet, simultaneously, we take advantage of nature itself by using too many resources, polluting and ignoring obvious signs of planetary distress.

So this brings us to the straight/non-straight dualism. In this dualism, our patriarchal society aligns being straight with being natural and therefore being inherently good. On the other hand, it aligns being non-straight with the unnatural and perceives homosexuality as inherently bad.

Combining the humans/nature, natural/unnatural, and straight/non-straight dualisms, we find that society perceives queerness as unnatural while also oppressing nature itself. In other words, our society thinks queerness is bad because it is unnatural. However, our society also readily exploits the natural world because it views humans as superior to nature.

As a result, non-straight people and nature share injustices brought about by our capitalistic and patriarchal society. The same systems that oppress nature also oppress LGBTQ+ people. This common enemy is what unites ecology and queerness.

Bottom line: Our society perceives being queer as "unnatural" and therefore bad. Meanwhile, the same systems that oppress queer people also exploit our natural world.

All this talk about dualisms and queer theory is a little abstract, so let's bring it back to Earth. Luckily, queer ecology is directly related to the modern LGBTQ+ movement in a lot of clear and tangible ways. Here are a few of my favorite real-world queer-environment connections:

Safe queer spaces

Throughout history, LGBTQ+ people have used geography to create safe spaces for themselves and their communities.

One of the most interesting examples of this is the " womyn's land" movement of the 1960s. As part of this movement, many lesbians built small rural farming communities to escape the widespread discrimination they felt in more populated areas. At the movement's peak in the late 1900s, nearly 150 rural lesbian separatist communities existed across the U.S. These women spent their time tending the land, growing crops, raising animals, and hosting other women for safe retreats or gathering spaces.

Today, some of the womyn's land communities still exist, while others have become obsolete. In other contexts, LGBTQ+ people continue to use geography to keep themselves safe. Almost every major city has a gay neighborhood, with LGBTQ-friendly bars, parks, bakeries and more. In these ways and more, many queer people use geography and their environments to create safe spaces for their communities.

Queer outdoor organizations

Another connection between queer ecology and the LGBTQ+ movement is the popularity of queer outdoor organizations.

Queer people are often excluded from traditionally "masculine" outdoor activities and survival education. To break this cycle, many nonprofits and influencers have created communities for LGBTQ+ people interested in ecology.

One of the most popular queer outdoor organizations is The Venture Out Project. This nonprofit hosts day trips and longer camping expeditions for LGBTQ+ people. During these trips, group leaders educate their hikers about topography, botany, water treatment and basic camping and survival skills.

Trips hosted by The Venture Out Project and similar organizations help LGBTQ+ people feel more confident traveling in outdoor spaces. Through these excursions, LGBTQ+ people can also form lasting friendships with like-minded nature-loving queer people!

Queer Animals

One of the most delightful connections between queer ecology and the modern LGBTQ+ movement is the public recognition and acceptance of same-sex animal behaviors.

One of the most well-known same-sex animal pairs is Skip and Ping, two male king penguins at the Berlin zoo. These penguins came to the zoo as a couple and began tending to an adopted egg soon after their arrival. Several other zoos (like Central Park Zoo and London Aquarium) have also reported same-sex penguin couples.

Although stories of penguin marriages and same-sex partnerships might seem like publicity stunts, these stories are rooted in very real animal behaviors. Outside of these public relationships, many animal species regularly exhibit same-sex behavior in the wild. Many dolphins, lions, walruses, bison, bonobos and more all practice same-sex coupling at some point in their lives. Members of some species, like albatrosses and swans, even stay with same-sex partners for life. In these cases, the same-sex birds often adopt abandoned eggs to start families together.

Of course, recognizing the frequency and validity of same-sex animal behaviors will not single-handedly bring about LGBTQ+ rights. However, discussing and normalizing same-sex animals may help disprove the myth that non-straight people and activities are "unnatural." Bring on the gay animal weddings!

Shared Position in Politics

The shared political struggles of LGBTQ+ allies and sustainability advocates is another key point of connection between queer ecology and the modern LGBTQ+ movement.

In the U.S.'s current two-party political system, the Democratic Party more clearly aligns itself with both LGBTQ+ rights and environmental advocacy than the Republican Party. (Pst! Many Republicans also care about these issues. However, Democratic politicians more clearly and effectively include justice for LGBTQ+ people and our environment in their platform and proposed policies.)

As a result, many liberal politicians in the U.S. recognize the shared exploitation of nature and the queer community, and they use policy to prove it. For example, a policy that seeks to create more sustainable food systems can benefit trans people who struggle with food insecurity and reduce land pollution from big ag. Policy proposals like this can benefit queer people and our environment simultaneously.

Bottom line: Queer ecology is present in the LGBTQ+ movement's reliance on space to foster communities, its nature-loving submovements, publicly gay animals and the shared political position of nature and LGBTQ+ people.

As I explained in Why We Need Intersectional Environmentalism, intersectionality is the idea that different types of injustice are sustained by overlapping systems of oppression. In our society, every living thing faces differing degrees of related inequalities based on their location, religion, race, sexuality, gender and more.

By this definition, using queer ecology to inform your intersectional activism is a no-brainer. We can all use queer ecology to make our activism more intersectional because the entire concept of queer ecology is intersectional.

By simply recognizing and discussing the connections between queer theory and ecology, we can incorporate queer ecology into our intersectional activism. Telling your friends (and representatives!) about the shared struggles of LGBTQ+ people and our environment can help more people understand these connections and fight against the systems that perpetuate them.

Bottom line: Discuss the connections between LGBTQ+ and environmental struggles with your peers and representatives!

How are you using queer ecology to be more intersectional? Let me know in the comments!

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Queer Ecology and Intersectional Environmentalism - Sustained Kitchen

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Pride month is here, so let's celebrate with some queer theory and intersectionality! This article outlines what queer ecology is and how it relates to the modern environmental and LGBTQ+ movements.

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( LGBTQIA2S+ is an acronym for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and/or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Two-Spirit, and the countless affirmative ways in which people choose to self-identify.)

© Panumas Sanguanwong / Greenpeace

It's no secret that climate change is affecting everyone on this planet, but what is often forgotten is the disproportionate impact on already marginalised groups including LGBTQIA2S+, particularly if they are also members of other marginalised groups such as low-income, Black, Indigenous, or people of colour. This is because these groups are more likely to experience poverty, discrimination, and violence, which in turn can limit their ability to access resources and adapt to the changing environmental and societal conditions on our warming planet.

Now more than ever, it's critical to understand the overlap between the climate movement and the queer movement, so we can take on these interconnected struggles together as a united movement.

LGBTQIA2S+ individuals are often forced to leave their homes due to family conflicts, threats of abuse or actual violence, which makes them experience higher rates of homelessness. They also tend to move to segregated locations to reduce the risk of discrimination and harassment from neighbours and landlords. These areas are often the most polluted, which causes many health issues long term and also make them much more vulnerable to natural disasters.

Furthermore, climate change exacerbates the pre-existing inequalities found in society such as housing and medical care, among many others, leading to trans and queer people being disproportionately affected during climate disasters and by the wider effects of climate breakdown on society.

LGBTQIA2S+ people excluded from disaster relief

In the US, research showed that LGBTQIA2S+ individuals have a 120% higher risk of experiencing homelessness. Despite only 9.5% of the US youth identifying as LGBTQIA2S+, they make for 40% of the homeless youth. While those statistics are already disproportionate, the percentages are even higher for the population of Black and Indigenous People of Colour (BIPOC) LGBTQIA2S+.

Homeless people and those with inadequate housing such as the LGBTQIA2S+ community will always be the most affected by natural disasters, temperature rise and polluted air. Not only are they often on the front lines of natural disasters, but they also often get refused the help and shelter meant to assist climate impacted communities.

For example, during Hurricane Katrina, trans people were turned away from emergency shelters, and the ones who did get in faced discrimination. One transgender person was jailed for showering in the women's bathroom, even after having permission from a volunteer.

Another example of this discrimination is found in India in 2004, when the Indian Ocean tsunami took place. The Aravanis, a group of people who do not identify as either male or female, were excluded from temporary shelters and official death records. This excluded them from many of the relief and reconstruction agenda's, giving them less opportunity to bounce back after the crisis.

In times of disaster, privilege works. These are only a few examples of how LGBTQIA2S+ individuals are systematically discriminated against during times of climate crises. They show the interconnectedness of the queer movement and the climate movement, and why we need to work together to do what's right, for ALL people and the planet we call our home.

© Greenpeace / Marten van Dijl

We are all connected in nature

Greenpeace might be best known for trees and whales, but we also focus on the interconnectedness of people and nature. Interestingly enough, the rainbow flag was even made with that idea in mind, as the green stands for 'nature', something we are all a part of. We fight for nature, and we fight for every single person, no matter their gender or ethnicity, or whom they choose to love.
Shanthuru Premkumar is the Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Safety Officer at Greenpeace Belgium and Lina Atanasova is a Social Media Intern at Greenpeace Belgium. They are based in Brussels, Belgium.

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The disproportionate impact of climate crisis on the LGBTQIA2S+ community - Greenpeace International

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Marginalised communities such as LGBTQIA2S+ are most affected by the climate crisis because they are more likely to experience poverty, discrimination and violence, limiting their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions.

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It doesn't surprise me that so many queer people become farmers, buy land or start a non-profit for food accessibility. Nurturing a growing thing can be so healing and affirming, especially in the aide for others. One of the ways I give back is by volunteering at Kindness Farms, here in Portland. Most of the staff and regular volunteers are queer and they even have queer hours! I hope to see you there!

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One of my favorite zyns about queer people growing their own food!

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I think that in many ways, the earth shapes us just as much as we shape it. Sapphics long for a better tomorrow for us all and in many ways, that starts and ends with the environment.

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“Hope” is the thing with feathers

BY EMILY DICKINSON

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

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When I think about globalization the word that comes to mind is empathy. Something about a conglomerate experience, especially with the aid of social media, brings you closer to what is going on in the world around you. The same can be said about LGBTQIA+ rights. We can see in real time how laws can affect people's lives and also how protests can change the status quo. In the U.S. we do experience a certain level of freedom in how we express ourselves. It can be eye opening to see how inequality is experienced in other places in the world from a first hand account on Tik Tok or Instagram, by someone talking in their room about what they go through. I can make many cases for why globalization is "bad" but in some cases it is helpful.

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YouTubers like ContraPoints, are famous for their video essays supporting trans and queer people and media. They dismantle hateful arguments and speak candidly about their experience. Without YouTube, so many people would not be exposed to such an easily accessible piece of media.

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Without globalization or the awareness of global inequality, we would not be able to hear perspectives such as this example, a queer persons guide to traveling abroad. It is explicitly unique of the times we live in today, that we can compare and contrast specific information over many different platforms, straight from a persons mouth or otherwise.

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Gay Travel to Dubai: safety tips, bars, clubs & gay friendly hotels

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Your gay travel guide to Dubai to help you plan a fabulous and safe trip based on our experience travelling to the UAE as a gay couple

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Historically, many members, if not most, of the LGBTQIA+ movement are anti-capatilistic. This not only stems from a community that has been considered a minority, therefore believe in an economy that is fair for all people but also due to a government that has actively tried to financially destroy member's ability to provide for themselves. For example, many queer people in America were either barred from getting jobs or fired from their jobs once they were found out. As we know, if you are not a straight, white, cis/het male, capitalism does not really work in your favor. As I have pointed out in other assignments, a high percentage of LGBTQIA members have been and are houseless and/or are in poverty.

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SHERRY WOLF is on the ISR editorial board.

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Despite anti-capitalistic beliefs, many argue that capitalism is what made gay right possible. Rainbow capitalism is when corporations use gay pride as a selling point or means to in end to spike employee satisfaction. Put in more expounded terms, money is king, therefore if money can be made supporting queer folks, so be it, even if these companies or corporations don't actually support the movement itself. Therefore, many believe that because of this "support" it enhances the acceptance of LGBTQIA+ members in society, benefiting those members.

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Dylan Mulvaney is an openly trans woman who documented her transition on Tik Tok and became an LGBTQIA+ advocate seemingly overnight. In 2023, she announced her deal with Bud Light. Many conservative fans were outraged and Dylan stated that she felt completely abandoned by Bud Light during an intense time of transphobic backlash. Eventually, executives had to take leave of the company and a major brand overhaul was initiated to win back long time customers. Between the extremes of early America's exportation of the idea all homosexuals and queers do not belong in the workplace and the belief that gay rights are a result of rainbow capitalism, the truth really lie somewhere in between.

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The track record between health, safety, state and the LGBT community has been and remains contentious. Situations such as gay rights, the aids epidemic and Stonewall have informed us just how dire the relationship between these two entities really is. It is important for us to remember these historical instances as we move forward into the future, especially for our transgender friends.

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America has been a country for almost 250 years. Gay marriage has only been legal for 10 years. Being gay has only been decriminalized for just over 20 years. The state has been long past due addressing LGBTQIA+ rights. This picture was taken in 2022 during the signing of The Respect For Marriage Act, allowing statuary authority for interracial and gay marriage.

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The Stonewall Riots in 1969 was a violent convergence of law enforcement and LGBTQIA+ members during a police raid on the underground gay bar called The Stonewall Inn. The police brutality during this event is infamous. The state used safety departments to enforce violence on queer members to control them and enforce bigoted laws at the time.

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Ronald Reagan and his administration, an infamously conservative administration, defunded public health agencies such as the NIH and the CDC. As a result, there was no budget for research of the AIDS epidemic.

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Right now, in the state of Florida, the Don't Say Gay bill is in full effect. Essentially, the bill bans educators from speaking to students about sexual and/or gender identity at school. This is unfortunate since lots of children are figuring out who they are and bans about a specific option having to do with being queer is the only limited topic. It furthers a shame narrative that queer people already have to subscribe to. In actuality, school should be a safe place where children can ask questions about the world and themselves without shame, wherever they are cis/het or queer.

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It is common practice amongst the majority of christian pastors and preacher to teach that homosexuality is a sin. This unfortunate belief has made its way into the general American lexicon of what is good and bad. Because of this and the role that Christianity plays in many people's lives is influential. Countless families have been torn apart and dissolved due to a lack of acceptance. Even our own government officials still debate whether permitting homosexuality through law is righteous or evil. Of course, there are protestant churches that accept queer people wholeheartedly and don't seek to change them but they are far and few between.

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Queer Americans strive for a better world for their community. They have since the beginning of civilization and they will continue for as long as it is needed.

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Why I chose my LGBTQ daughter over the Evangelical Church | Susan Cottrell | TEDxMileHigh

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Why US schools are at the center of trans rights