In “Place,” Eli Clare describes his nature-filled childhood in rural Oregon as he reconciles with the contradiction between the way he was raised and his urban, metronormative, reality as a queer adult. Clare’s writing takes a deeply personal tone as he describes his connection to the land he was raised on, which was both immersed nature and at odds with the natural environment through the town’s logging industry. Clare serves as an environmentalist in this section, identifying the ways in which his perspective on what was “good” for the environment shifted as he got older. He separates his “old self,” a child who believed the environmental propaganda taught to him in his hometown, and his “new” self, an activist who questions that propaganda. By interweaving ideological arguments about class, race, and sexuality with vignettes from his childhood, Clare encourages readers to have empathy toward his childhood self and the propaganda-based environmental beliefs common in his hometown.
The relationship between Clare’s sense of nature and his sense of self is complex, which is partially caused by the feeling that he cannot return “home” to the place he was raised. This tension between childhood and adulthood has many causes for Claire, but his queerness and conflict between rurality and queer identity is an undercurrent to this section. Although he misses the connected nature of his childhood environment, he can also identify with the stereotypically urban, visible queerness in his future. Queerness was one of many reasons Clare left the environment of rural Oregon, allowing him to discover new perspectives contrary to the propaganda he was raised within.
I think it’s interesting how he decides to separate his “old self” and “new self” since in “losing home” he touches upon the nostalgia of living in a small town. It made him ponder over the idea of leaving for the longest time. It’s one of the reasons why he wishes for LGBTQ support groups to come to the countryside in hopes of spreading awareness, so that other closeted individuals feel knowledgeable enough to make that decision. However, it is only after being an adult has, he matured and understood this dilemma of sacrifice.
I find that Saeed Jones’s “Boy at Edge of Woods” also focuses on the idea of queerness distancing family (how it makes people feel othered). In specific, the mention of a “burning house” could be in relation to a broken or explosive home environment (where the child’s life is crumbling down around them and they feel as if they cannot take refuge in the place that should bring them comfort). The title of the piece also hints towards nature being important (with how it represents safety, secrecy, and a barrier between the person of focus and the outside world).