Chapter One for Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love

ONE

QUEER LOVE in SOUTHPORT

Rachel Carson grew up in rural Pennsylvania, but she always dreamed of the sea. Carson saw the ocean for the first time after she graduated from college, and it was a revelation. As a “beginning investigator” in the Marine Biological Laboratory, Carson spent six weeks at Woods Hole during the summer of 1929 after a mentor encouraged her to apply for the opportunity. Carson’s friend Mary Frye recalls that walks with Carson along the shore at Woods Hole during low tide “had a ‘mystical quality’ about them. Rachel would wander off by herself, silently watching the ocean, utterly captivated by the sounds, smells, and rhythm of the ocean as well as by the variety of the marine life all around her.”¹

Carson’s most famous book, Silent Spring (1962), was not about the ocean she loved. It was about the environmental devastation caused by unregulated insecticide and pesticide use. The title referenced the future possibility of a spring where no birds sing, because they have all been killed or rendered sterile by pesticides. Carson wrote that the failure of government to regulate industry had resulted in the deaths of birds and other animals, possible damage to the health of humans, and the pollution of rivers and streams and lakes. Yet the passion and feeling of the book came from Carson’s longstanding relationship with the ocean. She had become more and more herself in her relationship with the sea, and through her deep relationships with other people infused by oceanic life and rhythms. Silent Spring is a book about the devastating loss of the nonhuman natural world and its impact on meaning, beauty, and love. It is a book about how losing the diversity of the earth impacts our ability to become ourselves and to develop our own desires and loves.

Carson learned this lesson most potently on Southport Island, Maine, where she bought land and built a house with money she earned from her earlier, immensely successful book, The Sea Around Us (1951). She was attracted to Southport because of its incredible natural beauty and diversity of plant and sea life. However, Southport turned out to hold more beauty for Carson than she could have imagined. Once there, she met and formed a deep, lasting love relationship with Dorothy Freeman, who had a summer house with her husband near Carson’s home on the island. Her relationship with Freeman brought Carson to life in a new way.

Carson and Freeman met at Freeman’s initiation. Freeman wrote a letter to Carson during Christmas 1952, when she learned that Carson was building a house down the road from her family’s summer home. Freeman and her husband Stan had both read and loved The Sea Around Us and were excited about the possibility of meeting the famous author. Following a cordial exchange of letters and a brief introduction during the summer of 1953, Carson and the Freemans went on a tidepooling outing right before the Freemans left for the season. Carson and Dorothy Freeman formed an instant connection, and each wrote the other a letter before leaving the island. In a postscript to her letter, Carson wrote, “And here is your sweet letter. . . . I, too, feel a strong bond of common interests—and that we have the same feeling about many things.”² Perhaps anxious to confirm mutual interest in the blossoming relationship, Carson walked over to the Freemans’ house the evening before their departure, and left Dorothy with a kiss.

In some of her subsequent letters to Freeman, Carson describes the great beauty of Southport, imagining Freeman as her companion in the exploration of the island. Carson says, “The big September tides have come and gone, and every time I was down there exploring I wished you were there, too—you would have enjoyed it so” (AR 5). After telling her that she was sending her a snapshot of low tide (that wasn’t as low as it should have been), Carson said, “By the way, I think I see Dogfish Head [an outcropping of rock into the ocean right next to the Freeman cottage] in this picture. The near points are, of course, the entrance to Deep Cove, but I thought the dimly seen bit on the horizon might be yours. If so, I can wave to you at low water of springs, anyway.” Carson then went on to tell Freeman “the things you might have enjoyed most (as I believe I did),” which included “thick crusts of the coralline algae,” “tiny anemones living inside the empty barnacle shells,” and a “whole community of creatures living in” the crusts of algae and “under it” (AR 5). While Carson would certainly have noticed and enjoyed these creatures without writing to Freeman about them, she wrote in deep, excited detail because she was imagining Dorothy as her companion. And—as she said only a few letters later—she loved Dorothy. Carson wrote,

[A]s you must know in your heart, there is such a simple answer for all the “whys” that are sprinkled through your letters: As why do I keep your letters? Why did I come to the Head that last night? Why? Because I love you! Now I could go on and tell you some of the reasons why I do, but that would take quite a while, and I think the simple fact covers everything. (AR 13)

Carson was always a wonderful writer, and always wrote beautifully about nonhuman nature. But through her relationship with Freeman, her writing about nature became more vibrant, passionate, and urgent. When Carson met Freeman, she was finishing The Edge of the Sea, a book about the creatures who live along the shores of the ocean. Just a few months following their meeting, Carson wrote to Freeman, “Maybe the easiest way for me to write a chapter of my book would be to type ‘Dear Dorothy’ on the first page! As a matter of fact, you and your particular kind of interest and appreciation were in my mind a great deal when I was rewriting parts of the section on rocky shores” (AR 10). About a year later, when Carson was publishing The Edge of the Sea, she dedicated it to Dorothy and Stan Freeman, and she wrote to Dorothy Freeman:

When finally I became [the sea’s] biographer, the sea brought me recognition and what the world calls success. It brought me to Southport. It gave me You. So now the sea means something to me that it never meant before. And even the title of the book has a new and personal significance—the sea around Us. (AR 59)

The meaning of the sea, even for its celebrated student and biographer, changed and deepened through experiencing it with Freeman, someone she loved. So too did her relationship with Freeman deepen through sharing the sea and other forms of nonhuman nature.

It is no coincidence that Carson felt the courage and urgency to write Silent Spring through her relationship with Freeman. While Freeman worried early on that the topic was too dark—or at least much darker than Carson’s earlier writings on the ocean—the safety of Carson and Freeman’s love allowed Carson to risk her reputation in writing the book. At the end of 1962, Carson wrote to Freeman,

It has been such a mixed year for us both—joy and fulfillment in the Dream House built and lived in, and in Silent Spring published and making its mark. And on the other hand, the shadows of ill health. For me, either would have been a solitary experience without you, and I know you feel the same. (AR 420)

She went on, “Now, to you both, so much love and the hope that the new year will bring us all more joys than sorrows and renewed joys in being together—in belonging to each other.”

Carson and Freeman’s love helped Carson write the book, but their love was also the emotional core of why Carson wrote the book in the first place. Carson and Freeman especially shared a love of the veery, a species of thrush whose two-toned call creates a feeling of otherworldliness for the listener. Throughout the decade and more of their relationship (until Carson’s death from breast cancer in 1964), they would write about the veery’s song, about wanting to listen to it together, about searching for it and hearing it in special places. The veery was the voice of their love.

In her letters to Freeman about Silent Spring, Carson continually links her writing of the book to her relationship with Freeman and their shared love of the natural world—and, in particular, their shared love of the veery. Writing to Freeman in the fall of 1962, in the midst of breast cancer treatment, Carson said of writing Silent Spring, “It was simply something I believed in so deeply that there was no other course; nothing that ever happened made me even consider turning back. . . . I told you once that if I kept silent I could never again listen to a veery’s song without overwhelming self-reproach” (AR 408). Silent Spring was written to defend a vibrant world of nonhuman nature that helped deepen Carson and Freeman’s love and allowed each to become more and more themselves.

As is probably evident already from these excerpts from their letters, Carson and Freeman’s love was certainly romantic. It was also the central relationship of their lives, changing their life course in so many ways. They craved time and connection with each other and relied on each other in their darkest moments. Stan Freeman had an independent relationship with Carson and knew about the intensity of his wife’s relationship with Carson. As Dorothy Freeman wrote in a 1963 letter to Carson, “Stan knows that we love each other to a greater depth than other friendships” (AR 442).³

Carson and Dorothy Freeman each changed how they lived their lives (in practical and intangible ways) for the sake of their relationship, and they became more and more themselves through it. Carson was responsible for an unconventional family, including her niece and great nephew, and the Freemans became increasingly involved in helping her with her caretaking. Carson and Freeman developed their own language, in conjunction with their experiences in nonhuman nature, to describe their love: terms like “apples,” the “white hyacinth,” “stardust,” the “Dream House,” and the “Dream” became part of their lexicon. Whether or not their love was “homosexual,” to use the language of the time, it was certainly queer. It drew them out of conventional forms of marriage and family and allowed them to find happiness where their society told them they weren’t supposed to: in loving each other and the world of nonhuman nature.

When I began reading Carson’s writings, this is what I assumed I would find. However, the more time I spent learning about her relationship with Freeman, the more this conventional interpretation of Carson and Silent Spring began to seem off, or at least incomplete. In fact, there is something major missing from most accounts of Silent Spring and its impact: namely, Dorothy Freeman, and Carson and Freeman’s love. In a young adult book about Carson’s life, for example, Freeman is mentioned in only three paragraphs.⁷ Most other accounts portray Freeman in a supporting role as a good friend, with Carson’s writing as separate from her personal life.⁸ Most accounts of Silent Spring are, I am saying, heteronormative: diminishing the significance of the most important person and relationship in Carson’s life, because so often our standard stories of what makes people and relationships meaningful do not make a place for queer love.

When I say that standard accounts of Silent Spring are heteronormative, I mean that they assume and reinforce the idea that the normal, default form of sexuality is heterosexuality, especially as practiced through reproductive sex, marriage, and homeownership. While society tells us that sexuality is private, heteronormativity is reinforced publicly in many ways. Here are just a few of them: allocation of health and other benefits through marriage; mortgage tax breaks (that privilege people who choose and are able to buy a home over those who choose or must opt for alternative ways of living); being asked to choose one gender or another when doing something mundane like using a bathroom or filling out a job application (there is no heterosexuality without two distinct genders); and the culture industry of heterosexual romance that pops up in almost all novels and shows and movies, even if the main point of the story lies elsewhere. Heteronormativity is also reinforced through public omission: for example, when relationships like Carson and Freeman’s are portrayed as insignificant to Carson’s public writing and impact. With this kind of omission, we leave in place the assumption that being heterosexual, or at least not being seen as queer, is central to public respectability and impact.

This kind of public omission also reinforces the ideology of what I call “straight love”: that we find the meaning of our lives and our happiness in heterosexual marriage, with children, a house, and plenty of consumption. Most of us are taught the ideology of straight love from birth, and it teaches us to conform to heteronormativity. The ideology of straight love also serves an important role in capitalism for at least two reasons.⁹ First, it justifies the privatization of reproductive labor: we are told that it is not the responsibility of the state or the collective to provide care for children and the elderly, nor to cook for us, clothe us, and love us; it is the family, and especially women, who perform this reproductive labor, uncompensated, as a labor of “love.” Second, the ideology of straight love inculcates desire for a life of consumption: marriage, home buying and renovating and decorating, and childbearing/childrearing are incredibly consumptive activities. We are taught that our happiness in those events is often dependent on having the right kinds of objects (the right wedding venue, photographer, food; the right stroller, the right family trips, the right holiday cards—the list goes on). Yet as many feminist thinkers (from Lori Marso to Sara Ahmed to Lauren Berlant to Jane Ward) have argued, our attempts to live out the ideology of straight love rarely deliver this promised happiness. Instead, our efforts to fit our unique desires and pleasures and feelings into the boxes of heteronormativity often leave us feeling unhappy and dissatisfied. This is easily explicable: no one, and no one’s relationship or life, is as uncomplicated as the ideology of straight love suggests it should be. This dissatisfaction is part of the point, because then we turn to more consumption to make us feel better. As perhaps is obvious, the tight connection of the ideology of straight love with consumption is also bad for our climate because it ties our intimate happiness to unsustainable ways of living.

Same-sex couples are not immune to the appeal of pursuing straight love, as thinkers like Lisa Duggan, Michael Warner, and Jasbir Puar have so incisively argued.¹⁰ To the contrary, the (ultimately successful) pursuit of the legalization of gay marriage is one example of a broader turn to what Duggan calls “homonormativity” that has led many gay and lesbian people to seek inclusion in the status quo at the cost of “othering” other groups (think: immigrants, trans people, poor people of color). When I refer to the ideology of straight love in this book, then, I am referring to a damaging belief system of what a good life is, which many of us (of all sexualities) continue to desire, even as none of us can ever fully achieve it. To be clear, then, I am not saying that any actual relationship is straight love. Rather, this ideology of straight love is the belief that no one ever measures up to but that we are taught to seek to embody and constantly shame ourselves when it proves impossible.

When Carson’s story is told heteronormatively, we lose out on the opportunity to put this ideology of straight love in critical perspective and learn about how our queer feelings might not be insignificant or shameful, but beautiful and enlivening—both for our lives and for climate politics. If Carson and Freeman’s queer love helped them to become more themselves and empowered Carson to write Silent Spring, might their story teach us about how queer feelings might lead us to become more ourselves? Might learning about their queer love help us to habituate ourselves out of the unsustainable ideology of straight love?

While I was in the midst of writing this book, my love (Jennifer) and I went to an amazing exhibit of Jeffrey Gibson’s art at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The exhibit, entitled Infinite Indigenous Queer Love, featured diverse pieces (film, painting, beadwork, installation) by Gibson. The exhibition pushes back against the idea of straight love: namely, the idea that all love is the same and universal, that “love is love,” to quote a popular catchphrase. Love is not universal but infinite in Gibson’s art, and this infiniteness emerges out of his experience as Indigenous and queer. Always already outside of the ideology of straight love, Gibson’s art explores how this outsider-ness allows attunement to how love can constantly become something new, different, beautiful, unknowable. This is its beautiful infinity, that becomes visible once one lets go of the ideology of straight love. The practice of love in Gibson’s paintings, beadwork, and large-scale pieces expresses the sparkling joy and beauty of that experience, as well as its sadness and anger. Three very large pieces, made of the fringe used by Indigenous dancers, astound the viewer with their giant beauty and vibrancy and also invite us (or at least invite white viewers) to experience ourselves as small, to feel ourselves in the shadow of this Infinite Indigenous Queer Love. These pieces invite us to ask: what if infinite Indigenous queer love were our dominant horizon? How might the world be different, feel different?

Infinite Indigenous Queer Love is also linked in Gibson’s art to nonhuman nature. In a short film entitled To Feel Myself Beloved on the Earth, dancers and musicians perform movements that “convey a bodily tension between inner harmony and conflict.” One dancer, unclothed, moves slowly on a tree branch, their movements deliberate and intense—but it is unclear to the viewer if their movements are conveying ecstasy or anguish, or both. Another dancer, and then another, move slowly through a field of grass; we see them descend slowly into a river. These images of rhythmic movement in nature alternate with scenes of dancers and musicians in an urban building, playing drums and dancing rhythmically on a rooftop. Here, the sensual lushness and wildness of the earth allows the dancers to feel beloved, and so experience the fullness of their embodied, emotional experience. This experience in turn allows them to carry the rhythms of their inner life into the dominant world.¹¹

Gibson’s exhibit shows how the practice of art is one way to create spaces of enjoyment for infinite Indigenous queer love in a place—the United States—where Indigenous people have been violently dispossessed, and where indigenous queer and trans people are particularly vulnerable to violence. Yet the exhibit also showed how infinite love may be most clearly imagined through the experiences of those marginalized by dominant notions of love, which are connected in American culture to heterosexual marriage, bourgeois consumption, and whiteness. This American love, which many people think of as universal, is actually very narrow and portrays other loves (queer, Indigenous, trans, experienced by people of color) as shameful, disgusting, or simply second class. In this context, Indigenous queer love is better able to open our imagination to the infinite, to what it would mean to experience the practice of love as unsettling of straight love and whiteness and capitalism—opening onto beauty and equality and joy.

Jennifer and I were very moved by the exhibit, and silent as we left the museum. As we exited, we saw a group of four white people in their twenties or early thirties standing outside. As we passed by, one of the men made a dismissive joke about the exhibit, and the others guffawed quietly.¹² It took Jennifer and me, still in a reverie from the exhibit, a minute to register it. As we did, we looked at each other in a bit of shock. I wrote it down in a note in my phone and said that the man’s attitude was exactly what Gibson’s art was contesting: that guy couldn’t conceive that Indigenous queer experience could open onto infinite love and that it was really one of the only ways that we could ever imagine what infinite love could be. Jennifer said, “I hope you don’t start your book with that asshole.”

Well, I didn’t start with him, but I am referencing it here because it shows the everyday, likely unthinking ways in which the ideology of straight love is reinforced by those who take themselves to already know what love is and what it means. This is the violence of heteronormativity, masked as common sense or, here, as a joke. Yet I also discuss this moment because I think it helps to show another feature of straight love that I will explore in this book, especially in dialogue with James Baldwin and Audre Lorde: that straight love is not just linked to capitalism but also to whiteness. I do not mean whiteness as a skin color, but whiteness as a system of power, where many groups of people (queer, people of color, Indigenous people, poor people, trans people) have their lives systematically constrained while other people (white, cisgender, heterosexual, especially male people) have their lives systemically privileged. As I have learned from writers like Kim TallBear, Mark Rifkin, Roderick Ferguson, and Cathy Cohen,¹³ the ideology of straight love reinforces whiteness because it portrays non-white people’s sexualities as deviant, even if they are heterosexual.¹⁴ Indeed, the title of Gibson’s exhibit leaves the relationship between indigeneity and queerness productively unclear: is he talking about the experience of being Indigenous and queer, or is being Indigenous (at least for him) a way of always already being queer?

As perhaps is apparent in this discussion of straight love, I am not using the world “queer” to simply describe people who experience same-sex desire. Rather, I am using it to describe intimate feelings and experiences that are not comprehensible in the ideology of straight love, or that are pathologized or portrayed as disgusting or bad or embarrassing.¹⁵ The best exemplars of queerness that we have tend to be relationships between people who are not cisgender male/female couples, but I think that everyone has queer feelings within them. If we start paying more attention to queer love stories like that of Carson and Freeman, those stories might become domesticated into homonormativity (even as this book fights against it!). However, there is also the chance that paying more attention to queer love stories like this one might help everyone become more attuned to their queer feelings, and what those feelings might have to teach them about themselves, what they actually want in the world, and what politics they might want to engage in. “Queer” here thus refers to that which escapes or does not fit into the ideology of straight love, but it also denotes a realm of creativity and generativity outside of this ideology—a realm that includes Gibson’s art, as well as Carson and Freeman’s letters and relationship. I think queerness always involves intimate feelings, but intimate feelings (as I will be showing in this book) are not contained only in the self; they always also involve nonhuman nature, other people, and other material features of the world around us.

I develop a concept of queer love in this book through telling Carson and Freeman’s story, and by putting them into conversation with other writers like James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. My conception of queer love relies on Jose Muñoz’s work on queerness in his wonderful book Cruising Utopia. Muñoz, writing decades after Carson and Freeman, had more access to vocabularies and theories of queerness than they did, and his work (like Lorde’s and Baldwin’s) helps me bring out revelatory aspects of their love that we might not otherwise see as clearly.¹⁶ In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz looks to queer moments in the past to identify experiences of queer desire for a future that is other than the one we ended up with. Through returning to these past moments of queer desire for something else, Muñoz identifies queerness as a horizon of futurity that opens new possibilities for what we might strive for in the present.¹⁷

I find a queer love in Freeman and Carson’s letters that, on my reading, is a kind of desire, co-created with nonhuman nature, that reached toward a different environmental future than the one we ended up with. From Gibson’s Infinite Indigenous Queer Love exhibit and from Carson and Freeman, I learn that nonhuman nature can aid humans in accessing feelings (both beautiful and hard) that society portrays as meaningless, disgusting, or simply bad. Queer love and nonhuman nature exist in a relationship of mutual amplification: attentiveness to the meaning and pleasure of one amplifies the meaning and pleasure of the other. I return to Carson and Freeman’s queer love on behalf of inciting a desire in the present for a robust, generative climate politics that could lead us toward a better future. The power of queer love is, centrally, that it allows us to experience desire and pleasure outside the ideologies of capitalism and straight love; it empowers us to imagine a future of such pleasure, and fight for it.

This queer feeling of wonder at their love and nonhuman nature, I will suggest, lay at the heart of Carson’s turn to writing Silent Spring. She wanted to sustain a vibrant multispecies world in which queer love was possible. Silent Spring is not, on the reading I will develop, a book about keeping nature free from human meddling. Rather, it is a book about how nonhuman nature is crucial to human feelings, relationships, and pleasure, especially to the human capacity to find meaning outside of capitalism. Silent Spring is a book about sustaining nonhuman nature as part of meaningful human lives that move beyond the sterile world of capitalism.

When we read Silent Spring as written on behalf of queer love, a different climate politics comes into view: the politics of environmental desire. In this politics, the problem with degrading the environment on behalf of bourgeois happiness is that it actually gets in the way of real pleasure and meaning—a pleasure available not through consumption but through access to the queer pleasures we create with each other and nonhuman nature. The politics of environmental desire tells us not to fear losing our lives but to demand and create what we desire. Here, capitalist consumption is a promise of false happiness (never actually achieved) that stands in the way of pleasurable lives. The politics of environmental desire invites us to sustain a vibrant multispecies world in which we figure out what we want and demand it. Rather than a deference that is encouraged by the paralysis of fear without vision, the politics of environmental desire incites us to work on behalf of the lives we want.

One point of this book is that Carson and Freeman’s love shows nonhuman nature as enabling our awakening to our real selves, our real desires, the real pleasures and meaning of human life. We are conditioned to think of a “real” self as some essence that lies below our artificial conditioning. Yet I find in Carson and Freeman’s queer love a different way of thinking about our “real” self: as a capacity for spontaneity and habit breaking over time, a gradual and never-ending tuning in to what “feels right to me” (as opposed to what our society tells us should feel right to us). Nonhuman nature is integral to cultivation of this authentic intimate desire. When Carson and Freeman love each other while listening to veeries or looking at moss or tidepools, they experience a wonder and curiosity that they cannot fully understand: both in nature and in themselves.

We need to start reckoning with how intimate life and desire structure political life. We must give ourselves resources to imagine and experience intimate, meaningful desire for non-capitalist ways of living—desires that will help us find the strength and motivation to really fight for the climate policies we need. This is why, in Chapter 5, I argue that we need to start seeing heteronormativity as a climate issue—not only because heteronormative policies uphold unsustainable ways of living, but also, and more importantly, because the ideology of straight love habituates us out of wonder, the very capacity that we need to experience and pursue pleasures in non-capitalist ways of living.

Yet even in this world, the possibility of wonder and queer love in and with nonhuman nature, which opens up another horizon for good living, is still available. Carson writes about wonder as a capacity that we can cultivate not just with large-scale natural beauty but also, and maybe more importantly, with paying attention to small things, like a seed growing in a paper cup, or moss, or listening to the rain on the roof. Wonder is about cultivating attention to what is happening in the present moment, and to your feelings about it, so that you do not immediately rush to categorize them in the classifications and stories of your society. Wonder cultivates attention to the world and, at the same time, to the self as a feeling creature. It is accessible in queer love and horizontal relationality with nonhuman nature, and I am sure in other experiences, too.

I felt this capacity for wonder grow in me as I read Carson and Freeman’s writings and letters, and I took that experience with me into the world. I have always enjoyed being out in nature, but I had never paid much attention to birds, or thought about what life would be like without them, or without many other creatures and plants and trees that tend to go unnoticed in my daily life. I started listening to different bird calls and noticing strange fungi growing in my backyard, and weeds and flowers growing out of cracks in the sidewalk, and looking closely at the clouds as I bike to campus. Paying attention to my own feelings about these things—and sharing them with my love or friends or children—grew my attention to myself and helped me see more clearly what I felt and what I wanted. I would say that I have become more present in my surroundings and in myself, paying more attention to the small creatures and objects that create moments and feelings and experiences. In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett says that a capacity for “naiveté” helps vital materialists “linger in those moments during which they find themselves fascinated by objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality that they share with them.”¹⁹ I would say that reading about Carson and Freeman’s queer love helped me develop a capacity for co-presence with nonhuman nature, becoming attuned to how the creatures and plants and objects of the earth co-create my life: my feelings, my love, beauty, pleasure. I hope, of course, that reading this book will do the same thing for you, and even more.

All of this has made me more alert to possibilities for wonder in the world, especially when the world tells you explicitly that these places are not available for wonder. Over the summer of 2021, Jennifer and I traveled to Southport Island. We were eager to see the place that was such a significant part of Freeman and Carson’s love. I wanted to see the places they saw, walk the roads they walked, and experience the effects of these places on myself and my love.

While the island is extremely beautiful, we found that much of the beauty that Carson and Freeman experienced was no longer available to us. Rather than an island with open accessible space, most of Southport is fenced off to those who do not own property: almost every outlet to the ocean, or any path alongside it, had a large “Private” or “Keep Out” or “No Trespassing” sign. The road to Carson’s house had a “Private” sign on it, as did the road to Deep Cove, which lies between Carson and Freeman’s cottages. When Jennifer and I were almost to Dogfish Head (the outcropping of rock near Dorothy Freeman’s cottage), we encountered a large “Private Drive” sign next to the road, and I saw—from a distance—that there was now a large house on the Head. Walking one evening over a bridge onto a small island with a sign that said “Private,” and that only residents of that island were allowed to cross, Jennifer observed, “When everyone is rich, who needs public space?”

Having read Carson and Freeman’s letters, I had pictured Southport as an island open to everyone, with natural beauty and diversity that could nourish a wide variety of loves and experiences of meaningfulness. Yet it turned out to be mostly closed off to all but those who were wealthy enough to own pieces of its land and shoreline. This was partly due to changes on the island since Carson’s time. Large tracts of previously uninhabited land had been sold off and developed. The dominance of “Private” signs along the shoreline also had to do with a series of Maine court rulings in the late 1980s known as the “Bell cases.”²⁰ After a group of shoreline property owners from the town of Wells brought a suit asking the court to prevent members of the public from using the beach areas in front of their homes, the state court held that owners of shoreline land actually owned the beach up to the low-tide line. This paved the way for landowners to start marking off their bit of beach as private. Out of this came one absurdity that we witnessed in Southport: signs marking a small bit of land as private stood across the road from the house where its owners lived, and was situated directly next to the only public beach in Southport (Lighthouse Beach). Two Adirondack chairs (uninhabited during our visits) stood on this small piece of private land, with signs flanking it, telling those on the public beach to respect an imaginary line between openly accessible land and this owner’s territory.

Yet even with almost everything cordoned off, Jennifer and I found places open to our enjoyment. We appreciated the two public spaces on the island: Lighthouse Beach and the Hendricks Hill path. Even though the path to the lighthouse itself is marked off as private, Lighthouse Beach is quite beautiful. It is small, but when the tide goes out, there are many wonderful tidepools and interesting rock formations that we explored and laid down on for a while. Lighthouse Beach, and the island in general, did not feel at all queer. Jennifer and I would get stares and second glances when we held hands or kissed, but still Lighthouse Beach was a delight. The Hendricks Hill path was of another kind of magic. There, we found beautiful mosses and lichen and tiny trees and great swathes of blueberries—and also, to our great joy, veeries. After reading so much about Carson and Freeman’s love of the veeries, and sharing it with Jennifer, we were quite overcome when we heard their song. In a video I took, Jennifer looks at me with this expression that says, “I really think it is what we think it is.” This public path felt like ours to be enjoyed, as if the veeries had appeared magically to allow us to feel an intense meaning and love—part of what Carson called wonder. Our learning about Carson and Freeman’s queer love helped us wonder at nonhuman nature, and wondering at nonhuman nature grew our wonder at our queer love in that moment, as we experienced a beauty we could not quite explain or name, but only share with each other through looks.

While Carson and Freeman both owned land on the island, they also experienced many other places on the island as “theirs,” even when they were owned by other people. The wooded area between their houses, for example, was owned by a family (the Tenngrens), but Carson and Freeman experienced it as accessible and turned it into their own place that they called the “Lost Woods.” In the same way, Dogfish Head was privately owned, but they made it their place. This was also true of other places on the island that were important to them, like Pratt’s Island and the shoreline by Newagen Seaside Inn. They did not own these places, but they enjoyed them—as they were open to their free inhabitation, experience, and pleasure. This is not to say that everyone would have been able to enjoy them, but Carson and Freeman could, and did.

Jennifer and I found wonder in other places too on Southport, even the places with the “Private” and “Keep Out” warnings. We found them on the sides of roads, in raspberry bushes lining parking lots, and on privately owned land. These places were not marked public, but they were open to our enjoyment—even if their owners did not intend or want them to be. If reading so much about Carson’s time in Southport taught me anything, it is that nonhuman nature—even in the most unlikely places—has the capacity to open up and affirm forms of enjoyment, wonder, and love that society tells us are inappropriate, wrong, or disgusting. This kind of queer love remained a possibility on Southport even with all the “Private” signs, the stares at two women kissing, and the vast blocking off of beautiful shoreline.

I bring my own experience of wonder and queer love in here not because it is universal or generalizable, but as one example of how attention to Carson and Freeman’s queer love can cultivate attention to the world and ourselves in ways that help us discern our authentic feelings and wants. Reading Carson’s writings, and Carson and Freeman’s letters, has been part of my professional and political life, but it has also been an intimate experience that has helped me to be alive to the natural world and to myself in new ways. Reading Carson and Freeman, imagining their Southport and their queer love, coming to see Silent Spring as a book written on behalf of love—all of this has been part of developing my own voice, my own sense of what is important to me, and my sense of what my life should be about. All of that is part of why I am writing this book.

Within the collection of extant letters (published and unpublished), about three-quarters are letters Rachel sent to Dorothy. Martha Freeman offers an explanation for this in her preface to Always, Rachel. Martha notes that Rachel and Dorothy had a practice of destroying some letters that they did not want to end up in public. Dorothy told Martha that they “together burned packets of Dorothy’s letters in Rachel’s fireplace” during a visit in the early years of their relationship. This probably explains why there are no letters from Dorothy in the collection until December 1954 (almost a full year and a half into their relationship). Dorothy and Rachel also both burned letters that the other told them were meant for “the strong box” (that is, destruction), even though some letters labeled in that way survive. Martha explains that a “few comments in early letters indicate that Rachel and Dorothy were initially cautious about the romantic tone and terminology of their correspondence. I believe this caution prompted their destruction of some letters within the first two years of their friendship.”²¹ In addition to this burning of Dorothy’s early letters, Rachel—on Martha’s account—“made a greater effort than Dorothy simply to reduce the volume of collected letters.”²² Due to this imbalance in the letters, there are probably more quotes from Rachel’s letters than Dorothy’s in this book. Yet we can often glean what Dorothy wrote from Rachel’s letters; Rachel often repeated Dorothy’s questions, or things that Dorothy said that Rachel thought were particularly lovely or significant.

The letters are thus an imperfect record of Carson and Freeman’s relationship, but it is the record they chose to leave for us, and I find much to learn in it. I am especially grateful to Dorothy Freeman for choosing to let these letters become open to the public. It is no easy decision to allow the pages of your intimate life to be read by the public, even after your death. She likely could not have predicted what I would learn from them, but I believe that the overall lesson that I find in them—that queer love can change the world—would not be far from how she understood her experience.

And yet, these questions and their answers proved elusive for Freeman. In a stack of papers labeled “Notes for Book,” we find a series of lists. The notes form a suggestive miscellany that paints a portrait of Carson and Freeman’s relationship: “I never would have heard veeries if it hadn’t been for you,” “Another World,” “The masses of apple blossoms,” “calling birds with lips to hand,” “Hear sounds of running water.” In another set of notecards, labeled “How it Happened,” we find more lists, including things like: “Xmas Card—Courage,” “Tide-pool party,” “Microscope,” “Excursions at dawn,” “Discovery of Mutual Interests,” “Birds—Quest for veeries,” “Why Dedicate to Us—only 2 years,” “Sharing.” In a set of notes labeled “A Quiet Bower,” we find lists including: “Quote from original letter,” “Ten years after—a letter,” “Hyacinth Letter,” “Pedestal,” “How a writer works,” “Fragile, delicate, tasteful,” “winking across room,” “words—rote, cunning,” “Music,” “Look Mother,” “Escape,” “Publisher, telephones, interviews, Senate Hearings, TV,” “Chocolate Walnut Sundae,” “Rituals,” “Thinks best with Pencil.”

In addition to these lists, Freeman wrote up a few accounts of moments in their relationship—one entitled “Snake Eggs” (about Carson discovering snake eggs and putting them under the microscope, even as they were trying to pack up and leave Southport for the season) and another “Celebrities and Cats” (about Carson going to meet Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, to discuss Silent Spring). Yet there is no finished account of their relationship, no final narration of who Carson was to Freeman, no accounting for how exactly their friendship began, and no explanation of why it was so special.

While we cannot be sure why Freeman did not ultimately write a book on Carson, I think it is safe to say that she felt like she could not tell the whole story, she could not render legible the exact mechanisms of their relationship, and she could not really describe what it was or who Carson was to her. This failure to fully render the meaning of her relationship is, I think, in Jack Halberstam’s terms, a queer failure.²⁴ Heteronormativity tells us that the world is easily mapped and understood; we know what is a source of happiness and what is not, what is useful and what is not. Queerness has always unsettled this narrative, insisting that feelings that heteronormativity tells us are shameful are actually beautiful and integral to the self. Queerness instructs us in how to find pleasure in and explore feelings that we do not totally understand.

Freeman’s continued curiosity about her relationship with Carson, even as she could not fully understand it, is exemplary of this. Rather than storytelling (the practice that Hannah Arendt says is necessary for politics), Freeman practiced a kind of queer indexing: she could not tell the whole story, but she named the key terms in her experience. Even if she could not elucidate the meaning of these terms, she left them as guideposts for later readers to follow—both backwards into the meaning of her experience and forwards into a future still being written.

This book tells a story about the importance of queer love for Carson and Freeman, and for contemporary climate politics now. However, this is not the whole story of their relationship. Dorothy Freeman could not fully narrate it and neither, certainly, can I. Rather, I have followed the guideposts they left, drawing out the importance of terms to which other writers have neglected or insufficiently attended, to offer one narration of their relationship and its connection to Silent Spring that I think is particularly significant for us now. Yet this queer love story remains a queer index—highlighting key terms (wondrous revelation, loving use, environmental desire) to point us toward a different future that has contours still unknown.

My book aims to show that as long as we remain captured by heteronormativity as a society, we will have difficulty imagining pleasure in other ways of living, even if those other ways may actually be so much more meaningful and pleasurable. Learning about Carson and Freeman’s queer love may help all of us to be alert to the possibility of more meaningful pleasures in our own lives, already available to be enjoyed, but scripted as scary or pointless or shameful. Learning about Carson and Freeman’s queer love, and the world of nonhuman nature that makes it possible, allows us to experience and imagine desire for something better than what our society offers us.

While I am considering queer love primarily in terms of the climate crisis, the power of queer love in its various forms may be, as with Gibson’s art, infinite. In his art, infinite Indigenous queer love is a practice of becoming himself through creative practice with the earth and with others who share (at least some of) his experiences. Queer love is an affirming joy in the embodied emotional life of connected others, that allows them to carry their inner lives into a world that tells them they are shameful, ugly, uninteresting, threatening, unnatural. This intimate desire, as Carson so well knew, has political effects: our intimate desires shape what we demand in politics. The desires awakened by queer love point to an anti-capitalist politics, a politics that demands a vibrant multispecies world, where we can develop our true, becoming selves and true, becoming desires.

The power of queer love, as I will discuss in the following chapters, consists in practices of wondrous revelation, loving use, and environmental desire that disregard (or sometimes actively contest) ownership. It creates spaces of enjoyment where people may become more fully themselves and start to create the world they want. Carson and Freeman’s story is far from the only tale of queer love I could tell, but I think it is an important queer love story to tell now. Carson is not an environmental saint, but a flawed exemplar of queer love’s power to fight capitalism’s appropriation and devastation of the earth. Let us claim her as such and see what possibilities her queer love reveals in the present.

Notes

1. Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Mariner Books, 2009 [1997]), p. 61.

2. Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964, ed. Martha Freeman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 4. Hereafter cited in the book as AR.

3. Carson’s biographer, Linda Lear, says that early on in Carson and Freeman’s relationship, Freeman felt a need to be open with Stan about her feelings for Carson:

Dorothy shared parts of Rachel’s letter about being kindred spirits with Stan. Certainly she wanted him to understand as best he could the love and devotion that Rachel needed, and on some level, she wanted his blessing. From Rachel’s letters we learn that Stan’s response to his wife’s new relationship relieved her. Rachel reassured Dorothy that she understood her need to confide in Stan. “It means so very much to me to know that you have such an understanding, loving and wonderful husband,’ Rachel wrote. ‘And darling, I hope I made it clear in my little note that I was so glad you read him the letter—or parts of it. I want him to know what you mean to me” (Lear, Rachel Carson, p. 255).

4. On the impact of Silent Spring, see, for example, Douglas Brinkley, Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening (New York: Harper-Collins, 2022); Gary Kroll, “The ‘Silent Springs’ of Rachel Carson: Mass Media and the Origins of Modern Environmentalism,” Public Understanding of Science 10, no. 4 (2001): 403–420; Ralph Lutts, “Chemical Fallout: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Radioactive Fallout, and the Environmental Movement,” Environmental Review 9, no. 3 (1985): 210–225. Silent Spring was not, of course, the only spark for modern environmentalism. See Chad Montrie, The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); Laura Pulido and Devon Peña, “Environmentalism and Positionality: The Early Pesticide Campaign of the United Farm Workers’ Organizing Committee, 1965–1971,” Race, Gender, and Class 6, no. 1 (1998): 33–50.

5. On the problems with this outlook, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 7–28.

6. For example, see Lear, Rachel Carson; Mark Hamilton Lytle, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); John Paull, “The Rachel Carson Letters and the Making of Silent Spring,” Sage (July 2, 2013): https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244013494861; Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), ch. 6.

7. Kathleen V. Kudlinski, Rachel Carson: Pioneer of Ecology (New York: Puffin Books, 2014 [1988]).

8. Carson’s biographer, Linda Lear, does a wonderful job describing the centrality of Carson’s relationship with Dorothy Freeman. Yet Lear portrays Freeman as largely sidelined in Carson’s writing of Silent Spring. While it is true that Freeman could not enter into the scientific literature that Carson was absorbing, their relationship was still at the center of Carson’s desire to write the book. Like Lear, Lytle portrays Freeman as largely opposed to Carson pursuing the Silent Spring project (The Gentle Subversive). I suggest that even though Freeman was less enthusiastic about the project initially, their relationship nonetheless was the impetus for it, and their queer love ultimately led Freeman to change her view. William Souder gives a chapter of his book on Carson to “Dorothy” and their relationship but largely leaves her out of the rest of the book about Carson’s life and work: On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, Author of Silent Spring (New York: Crown, 2012).

9. Others have written on this topic extensively. For example, see Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (London: Zone Books, 2018); Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (New York: NYU Press, 2022).

10. See, for example, Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo, Dana D. Nelson, and Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

11. Gibson’s art resonates with Jodi Byrd’s argument for the Indigenous relationship to the land as always already queer, with land itself as “the source of fluidity, authority, and groundedness outside the means of (re)production” (p. 118). Byrd also asks, “what is left of the queer if the normative is no longer something to critique but to champion?” (p. 117). Jodi A. Byrd, “What’s Normative Got to Do with It?: Toward Indigenous Queer Relationality,” Social Text 38, no. 4 (2020): 105–123.

12. I chose not to repeat it here, so as not to give the comment more airtime.

13. As Kim TallBear argues, “the imposition of monogamy and marriage” is part of the structure of settler colonialism; “Indigenous communities throughout the Americas had same-sex practices, had multiple genders, not this gender binary stuff that the colonizers imposed on us,” cited in “Kim TallBear: The Polyamorist Who Wants to Destroy Sex—Interview by Montserrat Madariaga-Caro,” in Sex Ecologies, ed. Stefanie Hessler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), p. 111. See also Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997): 437–465.

14. As Cathy Cohen puts it, “many of the roots of heteronormativity are in white supremacist ideologies which sought (and continue) to use the state and its regulation of sexuality, to designate which individuals were ‘fit’ for full rights and privileges of citizenship.” Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers,” p. 453.

15. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes in Tendencies, “one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to” is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 8.

16. Thanks to one of my anonymous reviewers for this point.

17. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), p. 25.

18. This essay was republished later (after Carson’s death) with very slight edits as The Sense of Wonder. The original essay is available at: https://rachelcarsoncouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/whc_rc_sow_w…

19. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 17.

20. For more information on the Bell cases, see: https://seagrant.umaine.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/467/2019/05/1990-p…. For an argument for reversing the Bell decisions, see Orlando E. Delogu, Maine’s Beaches Are Public Property: The Bell Cases Must Be Reexamined. (Portland: Tower Publishing, 2017). Thanks to Martha Freeman for pointing me to these cases and to Delogu’s book.

21. Martha Freeman, “Preface,” in Always, Rachel, p. xvi.

22. Freeman, “Preface,” p. xvi.

23. All the citations of Dorothy Freeman in this section are from her unpublished notes in the Dorothy Freeman Papers in the Muskie Archives, Bates College. They are reprinted here with the permission of Martha Freeman.

24. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).