Pride 2021 spotlight: Queer Nature
This group seeks to promote queer culture’s embrace of nature.
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Throughout the month of June, we’re highlighting organizations and initiatives that advocate for greater outdoor access among the LGBTQ+ community. Today’s feature is Queer Nature, a group that teaches naturalism, survival skills, crafts, and more to LGBTQ+ individuals.
Indigenous cultures have a long history of celebrating queer and gender non-conforming members of their communities. Such individuals were often looked to for their wisdom, offering perspectives from both masculine and feminine points of view and viewed as community leaders.
Queer Nature, founded by Pınar Sinopoulos-Lloyd, draws on this rich indigenous history of celebrating and uplifting queer voices to create “ecological awareness and place-based skills as vital and often overlooked parts of the healing and wholing of populations who have been marginalized and even represented as ‘unnatural.’”
The focus of this group is less on outdoor recreation, as these activities often are not safe spaces for LGBTQ+ individuals. Instead, the organization bases its curriculum on naturalist knowledge, wilderness and survival skills, natural crafts, and other nature-centered skills as a way to reclaim the outdoors for queer folx.
To help keep costs of their programs low, you can donate to support their efforts.
