Why We Need More Queer Sex in Climate Fiction; Or, on Rereading Rachel Carson

Almost one hundred years ago, a young English major named Rachel Carson signed up for an intro-level biology class to fulfill her science requirements at the Pennsylvania College for Women in Pittsburg. She had always loved writing; she’d been submitting her work for publication since she was just eleven.

But with biology, she found herself captivated not just by the subject matter but by Mary Scott Skinker, a “perfect knockout” of a professor. Enough to change her major—and alter the course of history.

“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized,” Carson would eventually write in her best-selling book Silent Spring (1962), which is known for inspiring the global environmentalist movement by revealing the existential threat of the pesticide DDT. Carson’s impact was so far-reaching that even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (the EPA) credits her for its own existence.

It’s hard to imagine what our current understanding of humanity’s impact on the earth would look like if not for her—and without the original spark ignited by Skinker.

This intersection of love and knowledge raises a crucial point: we are shaped by our experiences, including our romantic relationships. Carson’s work never discussed queer themes explicitly, but it’s hard to ignore the influence her queerness had. For example, her early books were about the ocean, which she only saw for the first time thanks to a fellowship she got in order to be closer to Skinker after graduation.

And in climate fiction, which builds on Carson’s work by imagining the future she warned us about, queerness becomes a radical act of resistance. As we confront the consequences of climate change both in real life and on the page, queer relationships embody the idea that pleasure, desire, and love are essential to envisioning a future worth fighting for.

Queer sex, lacking a reproductive imperative, serves the radical purpose of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. It’s a beacon of hope that points to the future. A doomed society doesn’t have room for such endeavors.

It would not have been safe, or legal, for Carson, who died a few years before the gay liberation movement, to live her life as an out queer person. It certainly would have hindered her success. That said, it’s not possible to consider that same success outside the context of her life. We are shaped by who we love and how we love them. As many have posited, Carson’s love for the earth was likely informed by her feelings for the woman who first taught her about it.

Queerness is often discussed in relation to climate change in theoretical terms. Mankind’s inclination to exert total control over the earth and exploit all of its resources becomes a metaphor for patriarchy, while heteronormativity under capitalism has largely driven our culture of overconsumption (would we even have a fast fashion industry if not for the pressure on women to constantly dress for men?).

But when we get too academic about queerness, we risk separating it from the lived experiences that give it meaning. Carson’s queerness was not merely metaphorical; it was a profound part of her existence. Throughout her life, she formed other deep relationships with women, but one stands out as being her great love: Dorothy Freeman, her neighbor. Once they met, the two found they couldn’t stop thinking about each other, engaging in a lifelong love affair documented in passionate letters.

Their intimate correspondence revealed not only their affection but how their connection informed Carson’s perspective on the natural world. Among the many topics covered in their letters, one frequent subject was how much they had in common, and the wonder of it.

“They seem to have lived two strands of the same life, long ago unearthed by some cruel chance and only just now entwined into wholeness,” Maria Popova recounts in the wonderful Figuring, which explores how various historical figures influenced each other.

The idea of interconnectedness is echoed in Silent Spring, which Carson wrote over the course of this relationship and published in 1962. In it, Carson made the point that a poison that kills the insects also kills the birds, the animals, and—eventually—the humans who so carelessly used the chemical in the first place.

“In nature nothing exists alone,” she wrote, in one of the book’s most iconic lines. Thanks to her letters, we know Carson wasn’t alone, either.

Mapping queerness onto Carson is a modern interpretation of her work; other than the passionate affair revealed in her letters, she never published anything explicit about her love for women. But because of the letters, it becomes impossible to separate the art from the artist, so to speak. Inspired by the beauty of the earth that she experienced alongside women she loved, she wrote towards a better world.

It’s not unlike what José Esteban Muñoz described in the queer theory classic Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. His concept of queer futurity posits that queerness, propelled by love and longing, pushes us away from the “prison house” of the present and toward a more utopian future.

“Ultimately,” Muñoz writes, “We must insist on a queer futurity because the present is so poisonous and insolvent.” The use of poison here evokes Carson’s writing on DDT, these two great works intersecting not just because of their authors’ queerness but in that we must imagine new ways of being if we are to get out of this shit show alive.

And for Muñoz, this kind of futurity is specifically about queer desire, sex, and pleasure; moments of “ecstatic time,” which are “signaled at the moment one feels ecstasy, announced perhaps in a scream or grunt of pleasure, and more importantly during moments of contemplation when one looks back at a scene from one’s past, present, or future.”

If queerness is key to a better future, so too is queer sex. How else can we imagine a future where humanity survives, other than to focus on sex—what we survive to do?

When writing my most recent novel, The Shutouts, a cli-fi story that serves as a follow-up to my last one, Yours for the Taking, I created a world of worst-case scenarios lit deliberately by the love between the surviving characters, most of whom are queer. They are friends; they are mothers and daughters; and crucially, they are lovers and ex-lovers. They get to know each other through sex in derelict buildings on the sides of ruined highways, as they forgive each other on a journey to find safer grounds, and as they fall in love while trying to find food in a barren land.

Their country is on fire and yet, as they struggle to survive, they continue to desire each other, and because of that, they’re able to imagine a future. They’re able to want a future.

It’s more important than ever to make sure queer stories—in all their beautiful messiness—are told. With a second Trump presidency on the horizon, it’s impossible to ignore the hatred and bigotry once again spewing from the world’s largest platform.

One way to imagine a less poisonous future is to write it. Queerness pushes us towards a bright light, yes, but if we don’t spell out what that actually looks like, sex and all, we’re self-censoring and getting in our own way. Conservatives would very much like for there to be less queerness in books (please see book banning), which is as good a reason as any to make sure there’s more.

Trump’s day one promises include an assault on climate progress—he wants to gut the very same EPA that Carson’s work inspired—and bodily autonomy, from reproductive rights to rights for trans people. I wonder what Carson would have to say about it, though her existing words remain startlingly prescient: “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance,” she wrote in Silent Spring.

Control of our bodies, too, fits this description. A conservative agenda that aims to strip us of our bodily autonomy is arrogant at best. Mostly, it’s devastating. There are infinite ways to feel devastated right now. I’m more interested in finding room for hope alongside the devastation, as both deserve our attention.

After spending a night with Dorothy, her neighbor-turned-paramour—thirteen hours, to be exact—Carson wrote to her in a letter: “I am certain, my dearest, that it will be forever a joy, of increasing loveliness with the years, and that in the intervals when being separated, we cannot have all the happiness of Wednesday, there will be, in each of our hearts, a little oasis of peace and ‘sweet dream’ where the other is.”

Climate change fiction, just like life—Rachel Carson’s, mine, and perhaps yours—is better when there’s more queer sex. Not as plot device, not as spice, but as a radical insistence that queer pleasure always has value, even—especially—as the world burns around us.

Contemporary queer authors have more freedom than Carson did to examine this on the pages we publish. And publish it, we must, because it tells readers that pleasure, however marginalized, is a worthy pursuit. It’s worth surviving for.

______________________________

The Shutouts by Gabriel Korn is available via St. Martin’s Press.