Most of my old hiking companions from Los Angeles are queer. Now I have Goldie, who takes breaks while we walk, just to jump up and kiss me. She places her paws just over my heart.

On refusal, rest, and resistance.

I spent my adolescence trying to be a boy. I wasn’t very good at it, but I tried really, really hard. I didn’t wear bright colors, I didn’t listen to pop music, I didn’t even style my hair until I was 17. I certainly wasn’t the kind of person to dress in drag. And yet I was. And yet I did. Because when I was 16 I won a drag show in Florence.

Considering the discomfort my friends and loved ones experience when we travel together, or when I share what I think are unremarkable experiences of microaggressions or discrimination, has helped me understand the degree to which I’ve normalized things that are not normal.

I didn’t expect us to create a Blood Moon Healing Circle Ceremony. It wasn’t on the emailed itinerary. Why did we even feel the need to create it? Two words: intergenerational trauma.

Melanie was born on August 5, 1982. I know this because I fell in love with her in fifth grade.

In the span of a few hours, in two different Indian airports I experienced a spectrum of responses to my gay trans self that would serve as a microcosm of not only my trip, but of my entire queer experience. There are no guarantees, so I’m learning to be my own safe space.

Hey there science nerds! This is like taking high school biology all over again! Except this time when we explore nature, it’s going to be truly, deeply queer.

My hunting experiences from youth to adulthood, in relation to my life as a black, queer woman of color.

“I had dreamt about my new sister that very night. An almost spiritual connection. Perhaps my mother could have sensed, then, that I felt the same as her; that I would grow to feel the same. That I had inherited that bond, that tether; that we shared that, too. But how could she have known? How could she understand that her son could ever carry that weight?”

The Quaker Aunts were the stuff of family legend, fearsome women in sensible shoes. Did one of them really smuggle Jewish children across the Alps before World War II?

Black LGBTQ+ people may not be well-represented in mainstream environmental organizations, but we’re creating our own interventions that center the most marginalized among us. If you’re wondering what true environmental justice looks like, meet these five Black LGBTQ+ people who put in MAJOR work to protect Earth.

There’s a look I get from black and biracial women on the trail. And there’s a look I give black and biracial women. It’s recognition: “I see you. We’re the only ones like us out here.”

I could carry that heavy canoe further than any of the other teenage girls on my trip. I could carry that canoe, because that meant I didn’t have to carry my grief and my mom had to carry her own weight, because I wasn’t home.

“It took me 14 years to recognize with certainty that I was a dyke. I wish I could say it was about the intellectual complexities of sexuality and gender, or that I was afraid of being different. Those were factors, but not nearly as pressing as this: I thought dykes had bad style.”

If the ferns in my garden have survived the last few thousand years, then they have witnessed genocide and forced removal, tornadoes, the filling in of wetlands. Our acts of maintenance are political decisions. What we narrate and what we nourish set up the futures we are willing to fight for.

Perhaps he would have loved me enough. I’ll never know, and my eschatology doesn’t include a heaven from which re-embodied souls watch over our earthly lives. All I have is speculation about how he might have reacted to his daughter’s bisexuality, and to his daughter not being precisely a daughter at all.

We all sat in a big circle. We were asked to share. I told them that I’d recently moved back to Seattle, only a month ago, after having been gone for about seven years. My mom died a very violent death here, I said.

I claimed to be a kid who “just loved birthdays,” when what I really loved was a socially sanctioned reason to shower my crushes with affection.

“To understand my relationship with this symbol of masculinity, we’ll have to start with my journey of queerness I had no idea I had embarked upon until I was turning 28, the sleeves of my buba — the tailored Agbada shirt — all rolled up to my elbows and my fingers rubbing down on the clit of a girl I had only met a couple of times prior to that moment.”