This post was submitted by Michael

As I stated in my introductory column last week, I have been an environmentalist since high school, and was surprised to find when I came out that there is not a large overlap between the environmental and queer communities.  I had assumed that other queer folk would have had experiences similar to mine:  questioning sexual identity and attraction at an early age resulting in a process of questioning other norms, generating more progressiveness in queer people in general.

This was not what I found when coming out of my shell and trying to meet queer people and explore gay culture.  Instead, I discovered a culture based on instant gratification and self-satisfaction at the expense of all others, including “friends.”  If the queer people I met couldn’t treat their actual friends with kindness and compassion, how could they embrace the seemingly abstract concept of being friends of the Earth and treat our planet as something precious, to be respected, instead of another source of endless pleasure, just another resource to be tapped.

It’s likely that the story of why there are few environmental queers is analogous to why mainstream gay culture itself is currently less than progressive.  In general queer people, and perhaps especially gay men, are robbed of the joys and pains of exploring sexuality and relationships in their teen years.   Those years and years of repression, self-denial and living in fear of being discovered cannot easily be undone.

(As a gay man, I can’t speak for queer women and trans-folk.  I have a sense that lesbian culture tends to be more progressive, possibly resulting from the general acceptability of intimacy between girls, whereas masculinity and bravado prevent boys from showing affection, including that brought on by nascent homosexual desires, to one another.  See below for my theory how childhood repression results in lack of progressiveness. I invite any trans-folk to suggest how the trans-experience makes them more or less likely to be progressive.)

It’s very true that in many situations one must take care of themselves before they bother to take care of others.  Just like the pre-flight check-list statement of putting on your own oxygen mask before assisting others with their masks, you must look out for yourself before you have the capacity (or even the ability) to help other people.  In the above example, if all the adults put oxygen masks on the kids before themselves, you could end up with an airplane full of dead adults (since the kids can’t reach the masks to put them on the adults).  So from this perspective, it makes sense that queer people would be less likely to be stewards of the environment:  they’re too busy putting on their own masks.

It’s my opinion that the approaches that most of us take when we do finally come out and begin to make up for lost time, the masks we put on, do little to heal the actual wounds but instead only treat the symptoms.  To extend the metaphor, we’re wearing the oxygen masks when instead we need to team up and plug the hole in the side of the plane.   While it might be different for the 14 year-olds coming out today, those of us not lucky enough to grow up in gay-friendly times and places are most likely filling our lives with distractions that solve the short-term need for comfort and pleasure while ignoring the longer term need for healing and community.

So that’s my working theory:  queer people in general are less capable of caring about the Earth because they are too busy trying to make up for lost time.  They can’t be true friends of others and the planet because they are spending all their energy making sure they’re getting their needs met.  However, it’s my opinion that the approach people take — the self-centered, self-satisfaction approach — does little to heal and does everything to perpetuate the damage to our individual psyches.  If we are running around looking after ourselves at the expense of everyone else, then everyone is constantly being hurt by everyone else, undoing all the self-healing we try to apply.

The solution to all this mess — to this constant game of self-satisfaction while shitting all over one another and our planet — is for everyone to start caring about everyone else, the planet included.  Imagine a world where everyone is looking out for you.  Really.  Close our eyes and imagine that everyone in your community has your back.  You can stop spending so much time looking after yourself, because everyone is doing it for you.  That frees up so much time and energy for you to start caring about others as well, and that includes the planet we call home.

It’s actually a known economic fact that multi-actor systems reach optimal solutions when the actors work with one another instead of against.  This concept is what won John Nash his Nobel prize in Economics.  The movie about his life,  A Beautiful Mind, used a very simple example to describe this theory.  Four guy friends are at a bar, and five women walk in, one of whom is a 10 and the others are 8s.  Standard economic theory at the time dictated that all 4 men should vie for the affections of the most beautiful woman, with a potential pay-off of 10, and the rest of the guys would end up with the 8s.  Nash suggested an alternative theory, that the four guys should court the four 8s.  The general concept being that each guy is more likely to end up with a date for the night than under the traditional theory, where all fight against each other for the 10 and no one will get her, so then they then court the 8s who would likely be pissed at being everyone’s second choice.  Chances are, he reasoned, that all 5 women would walk out together, leaving the guys dateless.   Screw my description, and watch the video yourself.

This is where community-building comes in, where TNG comes in.  How can we understand each others needs and work together better towards a common goal if we don’t know one another and what each other’s motivations are?  How can we colaborate and work towards a better society and a cleaner planet if we are struggling against one another all the time?  The first step towards living a greener life is for us to shed our sense of entitlement, the making up for lost time, the desire to self-actualize at the expense of our friends, neighbors, fellow humans and mother Earth.  Once we move beyond only looking after ourselves, we can start caring for one another.

This is what I try to do.  This it my motivation for creating spaces, online and in the real world, where queer people from different backgrounds can interact and find commonalities.  We can only benefit from working together, and we can only work together if we know one another.  If you are even the least bit interested in breaking out of the cycle of self-gratification at the expense of others, start visualizing all members of our community as allies.  Ask yourself how your actions contribute or detract from that community.  Try to recognize and appreciate when others’ actions benefit you.  Work on the realization that either we all win together, or no one wins at all.  Then tune in each Monday for more theory and practice on creating a queer green community.

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