For many of us, nature doesn't represent serenity; it's an unwelcoming place where we have to hide who we are. Pattie Gonia wants to change that.
male satin bowerbird forages both the forests and suburbs of Australia in search of the color blue — berries, discarded bottle caps, plastic straws — and arranges his finds around a pile of sticks. When a female visits him, the male hops around her flamboyantly in a mating ritual, screeching and showing off his kaleidoscopic hues.for hiking up the Rocky Mountains in 6-inch heels, brings up when I ask her what nature and drag queens have in common.
When I think of what an environmentalist looks like, someone like Pattie Gonia — with her full face of makeup, teased wig and declarations of queerness — doesn’t register. Environmentalists are supposed to look like Greta Thunberg and their work is supposed to resemble raising their voice atBut Pattie Gonia frolics in fields in elaborate dresses made of camping tents while educating her followers about the.
Even the most open-minded person might ask, how does a drag queen, a person typically endemic to big coastal cities, find themself in the mountains of Colorado? Like many queer origin stories, Pattie’s began with a moment of defiance. In a previous life, she walked the Earth full time as Wyn Wiley, a photographer from Nebraska.
The photos from that party made it back to Wiley’s hometown, and in the weeks that followed, friends silently walked out of their life during what they describe as a “very sad time.” Wiley decided to combine the freedom they found in the outdoors with a newfound sense of rebellion and took the shoes they’d worn as Ginger Snap to the Colorado mountains as a final “fuck you” to everyone and everything that had hurt her.
Pattie encouraged me to challenge deeply rooted ideas of where gay people are “supposed” to exist. “What I find often is that people go to cities to find that queer community, but it’s often limited to bars, drug culture, alcohol; and people are projecting their own trauma on each other and are often repeating harmful patterns,” she tells me. “Nature for our mental health is one of the most healing things that anyone can do.
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