I landed in Burlington, Vermont today. REturning to a beLoved home for the first time in 15 years. Embarrassing!? that I’ve been away this long. Not made time to come back. REkindle a key relationship that would shape and become my Queer Intimacy with Place. REmind myself of the state’s dapper geology. REcall unique ways of queering ecology and culture.
Vermont is the first place I chose to ‘make mine’. REmoving my queer, wild, aliveness from cement laden Dallas Texas, I nurtured parts of myself that were dying in the Lone Star State. I found mountains, water, quirky Vermont sensibilities and a deep connection to land.
By leaving, I REsisted the homophobic, heteronormative, hardness of north Texas. The prioritizing of logos, lavish lifestyles, and luxury cars. These were not my values. I needed to find my people and my place.
Burlington held me then, and holds me now. The past and present and future woven together. My queerness still ripening. Queerness, including my sexuality and orientation, also a broader challenge to imposed control.
My queerness has taught me how the heteronormative obsession with amatonormativity, gender roles, and accumulation of stuff impacts our ways of relating. Coining “Queer Intimacy with Place” (QIwP) has allowed me to prioritize my relationship with wildness, feel simultaneous deep loves of multiple homes, and decenter the “universal goals and assumptions that monogamous romance is normal and should be aimed at in preference over other relationship types”.
REsisting. Yes yes yes. My QIwP challenges that which is normal. When I moved to Vermont in 1995, my queerness took everything in, porous and wild. My QIwP held/holds me in safety, possibility, pulsing creativity, and a saturated erotic that I struggle/d to find elsewhere.
REvisiting. To return to a home. Vermont feels so good in its queering- a funky arty earthed blurring of lines, dispensing certain expectations of formality, transmission of knowledge (moving horizontally versus vertically), We live in a culture of predictability, control, and clear definitions. My QIwP is subversive. REvisiting my first adult home, I see myself in this place’s refusal of category and definition, pull toward collective rebellion.
REsisting/REvisiting. Queering lineage and linear time, my first intimacies with this place fold into the pleasures of this trip. I feel emboldened again to cultivate my queerness. What queerer flavors of intimacy can flourish when I celebrate QIwP?
When I claim QIwP I’m not branding or colonizing land. By naming QIwP, I’m not doing so as an act of authority or ownership. QIwP is an honoring. A collectivism that is queer, erotic, and subversive. QIwp is pleasure activism. The tapping and cultivating a creative pulse in and with place. I draw inspiration from the natural stewards and Indigenous forebears of place- their patient, holistic, and sacred art of observation the queerest of teachers.
REsisting/REvisiting. My QIwP was informed by Vermont’s unassuming way of being, the queerness, the daring subversion of capitalist utility. My QIwP found queer subcultures to forage in, deepening my queer bond with place. This land, like me, wanting to be heard, to be seen, to be known for what it is. Briming with reciprocal sensation, my QIwP asked/s me to learn the language of different, queerer landscapes.
I studied environmental justice at the University of Vermont. Co-learning about our impending climate catastrophe, creating intimacy in class and the field alongside subversive professors in the mid 90’s, I experienced my first heart break. I took in two mountain ranges of information about our greed, colonizer mindset, systems of exploitation, and belief in human exceptionalism.
REvisiting. This practice of seeking pleasure without explanation (as long as it’s not destructive) as Queer Initmacy with Place. And I notice the thorns of commodification, appropriation, gentrification, and exploitation are sharper in Vermont now. White wealth from big, eastern cities is changing the landscape and culture of this beLoved home. I’m left to consider, scientifically and ethnopoetically, how my QIwP challenges WSCP notions of ownership. Protective, generative and liberatory, QIwP is my version of what RWK describes as “becoming indigenous to place. Intentionally and intensively bonding with an ecology, becoming a student and steward of the species around you, regardless of ancestral origins.”
REsisting. When I boldly made Vermont my own in 1995, it was about escape (a decade plus passed before I could even visit Texas again). Also, claiming QIwP as practice and subversive, self-protection. My queer, trans mind-body-cunt deeply desired a radical knowledge of landscape. To know a place not being economically and environmentally ravaged. I was lucky to discover an unextinguishable curiosity about and commitment to belonging and community in myself. QIwP as cohabitation, reciprocity and kinship with the natural world.
REsisiting/REvisiting. And as a white person, I feels it’s always important for me to check myself. ‘Am/was I unabashady looking for magic? Expecting the place to recognize me back?’ Did colonizers first walk on land that wasn’t theirs and listen for magnets to click into place, and something to tell them with total certainty that they were ‘hom’e? I imagine not. Without knowledge of the landscape, and a indulgent belief in god given rights to overtake, settler colonial culture didn’t prioritize learning to speak the language of the land. REmoved from seasonal awareness and plant wisdom, they took.
REsisting.. Becoming intimate with place is not a singular experience. Growing up a fugitive of suburbia (I experience similar feelings of captivity and containment to this day when I go to visit my elder parents), I still feel the brutal privatization of land: habitats stripped, mowed, sawed down, obscenely lit up for the “owners’ comfort”. At a moment’s notice whole parcels are destroyed, no exclusion given to salamanders or webs of fungi that breathe and sex and slink through gaps in the soil. New “owners” are permitted to perform reverse alchemy into nothing what was once cacophonous, ecstatic, and completey not theirs.
REvisiting. To give someone or someplace your full attention is a sacred act. Sometimes this awareness yields moments of intuitive connection. Queer Intimacy with Place. QIwP. Slowing down, returning, listening. Touching over and over. Like constructive interference, a seiche, the phenomena of a standing wave of water oscillating, making combined amplitude of highs and lows much larger than individual waves on their own.
My Queer Intimacy with Place makes me stronger.
Thank you Vermont.