ConnexionThe founder of the modern environmental movement was queer. Why did it take so long to out her?
Boston University professor Lida Maxwell’s latest book, Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love, is many fascinating things all at once.
On one level, it is a slender biography of the great Rachel Carson, the author of the masterful 1962 environmental love letter, Silent Spring, and her loving relationship with Dorothy Freeman, a neighbor in beautiful Seaport, Maine.
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On another, it is a critique of capitalism’s ceaseless plundering of nature to generate private prosperity at the expense of humanity, something Carson identified more than 50 years ago, before many of our more recent environmental catastrophes.
Perhaps most profoundly, it is an exegesis on how queerness and the wild are deeply intertwined in a way that could lead us out of our current political and social malaise.
Sitting in her BU office surrounded by books and research papers, she looked the part of the well-regarded author and enthusiastic professor she is.
LGBTQ Nation chatted with Lida Maxwell about Rachel Carson, her previous work on Chelsea Manning, and the inextricable connection between queer love and nature.
It must be a difficult time to be a college professor, especially in women’s and gender studies. What’s life like on a college campus now in the midst of attacks from the Trump Administration?
The effects primarily concern research projects losing funding and an atmosphere of fear. I’m part of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, and we were asked to take down our Pride flag, which faced the street. The college administration stated that it was merely enforcing a long-standing policy on avoiding public-facing signage, but it’s obvious that the university administration is clearly trying not to antagonize the Trump administration. We have not actually removed the flag, and it has not been taken down. And faculty have mobilized around this issue.
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I would say the main change in my life is that I do less research now because I am more politically active on campus than I was before. I’m now the chair of our academic freedom committee. We’re trying to push back against this atmosphere we’re seeing nationally and here. Many of us got complacent under Obama and then Biden, and I think people are becoming more politically involved and engaged. That’s a good thing.
The Trump administration is tearing things down, which is awful. But it allows us to build back better. I hope we on the left can begin to envision what we want to create when we regain power.
You are also the author of Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling. Chelsea Manning was an Army soldier who leaked classified information and was convicted of violating the Espionage Act before her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama. She also came out as trans. How did you become interested in Chelsea’s incredible story?
I remember reading early pieces about Chelsea Manning, and these articles, like in The New York Times, referenced her gender identity and kind of pathologized it, framing it as part of what led to her feeling aggrieved and leaking documents.
And at the same time, I kept reading her defenders saying her gender identity and sexuality were unimportant to what she did, that we shouldn’t even be talking about them. And that didn’t seem quite right to me either.
I then read the transcript of the released online chats, in which she discussed her decision to leak documents. I learned that the editors at Wired had, in the first version of the chats they published, actually excised the parts where she was talking about her gender and sexuality. And I thought, I need to write about this.
Eventually, I came to see that Manning’s truth-telling about American war crimes was actually very connected to her truth-telling about herself, about her identity – her sexuality, her gender identity – because both her identity and American war crimes were things that were mandated to be secret.
I became very interested in her story, which led me to other people who had engaged in outsider truth-telling, including Rachel Carson, who was also criticized in these gendered terms.
I began reading Silent Spring and at the same time, I noticed a volume of correspondence between her and Dorothy Freeman. I ordered a used copy. My first thought was, Why do I not know about this? I saw the relationship with Dorothy being really significant in the writing of Silent Spring.
Why did it take half a century since the publication of Silent Spring, a best seller, for a book about her romantic life, her sexual identity?
Her biographer writes about her relationship with Dorothy Freeman. But people were very hesitant to call it anything other than a friendship, even though the biographer, I think, is pretty aware it was more than what we would usually consider a friendship.
As with Chelsea, many of her defenders believed she would be taken less seriously, seen as less critical, and that her credibility would be threatened if she were seen as queer. One outlet called Rachel a “nun for nature” after she died. And I think that was the way her defenders portrayed her, that she was this single woman who was devoted to the natural world.
Obviously, you think this take on her sexuality is wrong. Yet at the same time, we are trying not to reduce people to mere categories and develop a whole new language around queerness. You do a really good job of this, creating a spectrum: heteronormativity, queerness, infinite love. Yet at the same time, it’s still crucial for people to know she was a lesbian.
I usually don’t term her a lesbian because she didn’t refer to herself that way. I think “queer” is more on the nose. Was Carson’s sexuality non-normative? Absolutely. She was likely not a straight woman. That’s very clear. She had multiple intense relationships with women, including with her undergraduate professor, Mary Scott Skinker. Yet we can only say it was an intense relationship, because all their letters were burned. I try to use language that reflects the reality of the information at hand.
Why were they burned?
I suspect that they were being careful. Rachel and Dorothy burned their first year of letters. They were pretty romantic. In the archives, there are seven separate Christmas cards from the first year alone. The letters all contained phrases such as “my darling” but were unsigned. She also had a very intense relationship with her literary agent, a woman, for a while. Did she understand herself as a lesbian? I don’t think so. But I do believe that she understood that she was not a straight woman.
Was the relationship with Dorothy consummated?
I have no idea. We know that they were physically intimate and romantic. In their letters, there are many references to cuddling, hugging, and kissing. I’m not sure, in the end, that it matters, even though I understand people’s curiosity. I’m not sure that it matters in the sense that I think that whatever happened physically with them, their love was queer. They obviously called it love and saw it as a friendship above all others. So I’m really comfortable calling it queer, a queer love.
I appreciate your concept of queer love as more than categories and sexuality alone.
I see queer love as this experience of pleasure and meaning and beauty that exceeds our existing categories that describe what love is, which is rooted in this heterosexual experience, oriented around marriage and children and capitalist consumption. Rachel and Dorothy experienced their queer love as “wonder,” a feeling that things were so amazing they had no words to capture it. And for them, nature was a huge part of that. Their wonder at the beauty of nature – the fact that they found their inability to fully describe nature’s beauty as pleasurable – was what allowed them to see their inability to understand their own love, between two women, as beautiful instead of shameful.
But the essence of queer love is really in finding meaning and pleasure in these experiences of connection and relationship that stand outside heteronormativity and capitalism. And for me, everyone can access that – even people who are in heterosexual relationships.
How do we spread the beauty of queer love when heteronormativity locks people into a kind of misery? Everyone has queer love in them.
That’s such an important and difficult question. Finding meaning, pleasure, and joy in queer experiences and relationships often stands outside scripts of consumerism, marriage, and capitalism. I think the way it becomes accessible is through more storytelling about the beauty of queer love in concrete examples. My hope is that telling this story might alert some people to the fact that queer love is possible for all of us. There is a life that brings greater joy.
There’s an intersection between the queer and allied communities. People who don’t define themselves as part of the LGBTQ+ community yet feel liberated by it. For example, a father who supports his queer kid ends up feeling liberated from gender and religious expectations of his upbringing, of his community.
I hadn’t quite thought about it in that way, but I completely agree. I reflect on my own community in Jamaica Plain, outside Boston. Almost everyone here is an ally. So you feel the pleasure of not worrying that people are monitoring your gender or sexuality. We don’t have to follow social scripts.
In your Rachel Carson book, it’s the connection to nature that’s so important. But it also feels like the connection to community is even more important in queer love, given how much access we have to this life in cities.
Well, there’s lots of nature even in the urban, right? In the book, I discuss this moment in James Baldwin’s Another Country, in which two men walk to the stream, leaving the main road where they knew they would be harassed. And when they got down to this stream, it provided this different rhythm, this different kind of vibe – not controlled by social norms – that allowed them to explore their feelings for each other, to find pleasure in their desire for each other. Such natural “exits” from social norms exist everywhere. I mean, in cities, gay men have always found these natural places (parks, waterside wharves, etc.) where they can make sexual and romantic connections, and kind of be at a remove from being policed.
Not an easy thing to communicate to people living in red states!
It’s so hard. We live in a highly troubling media landscape where people are locked into channels that constantly mislead them about what constitutes a good life and what threatens it. Of course, there are things that can break through this, and I think the most potent is when your children or someone close to you comes out. That can break through the channels and change minds. It can be transformative for many people. But it’s still very, very hard to reach them.
I do think, though, that once you experience the beauty of queerness, it’s hard to unlearn that lesson. I grew up in Bakersfield, California, which is a conservative, agricultural area. In high school, I knew I was interested in girls, but I never thought it would be a possibility. It was just this kind of shameful part of myself. Then, when I went away to Wellesley College, I realized pretty quickly that this supposedly shameful thing was amazing. It was like, wow, I thought my queerness was the worst thing in the world. And it turns out it’s the best thing in the world.
Such an incredible gift, the queerness. And everyone should experience it.
I have a sticker on one water bottle that reads, “Queer liberation is for everyone, and it should be.”
However, I’m impressed by how easily young people exploring their identities can connect with different communities than I could 40 years ago. I had to find a hard copy of The Advocate at the Vassar College library and read it hidden in the stacks. Now you can find amazing influencers who help affirm who you are. Isn’t this why Gen Z is the queerest generation? And why are we seeing such a political backlash?
I draw hope from my students, who are deeply engaged with the world and care for one another. So maybe – hopefully – we are seeing in MAGA just an extinction burst of the right-wing as the next generation takes over.
Speaking of, since the publication of Silent Spring, there have been many species extinctions. The water level is rising, and carbon is skyrocketing. What would Rachel have thought of our continued environmental devastation all these years later? Have we not learned a thing?
She would find it almost unimaginably terrible. And I think one of the most troubling aspects of our current moment is the sheer number of ill-conceived policies. It’s so perverse–let’s subsidize coal, let’s discourage the development of wind and solar power. It feels like they’re almost accelerating, you know, almost accelerationist around climate change. My hope is that queer community, along with others, will see climate change as part of our struggle. Attempts to drive us into gender roles and into heterosexuality and into patriarchy are very connected to the desire to accelerate climate change.
Do you think people know who Rachel Carson is anymore? It would be great if your book led to a resurgence of interest.
Most of my students were unfamiliar with her. Hopefully, one gift of the book is just a reminder that there was this really important person who was actually queer, and part of how she did what she did was through the power of queer love that she and Dorothy created together, which helped her find the courage and motivation to challenge the chemical industry on behalf of better lives for everyone. And that she had a significant effect; we had regulations on pesticides and insecticides, and we had an EPA (until recently) in part because of Rachel Carson.
Let us remember how transformative queer love can be.
Chris Bull is editorial director of Q.Digital, publisher of LGBTQ Nation, Queerty, GayCities, Outsports, and INTO
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