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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (June 6, 2003)
52*“ * ' luna fi. 2003 BOOKS Balancing apathy and dogmatism Environmental author finds perennial paradise between control and wild abandon by C ptstal ' s dur <3 Lfsbmn Cm Dfincf Ttif BIGGEST 2003 Our PeiDf Dftncf in P optimd ! SATURDAY, JUNE 14 2003 9:00PM-1:30AM AT THE DOUBLETREE DOWNTOWN 310 SW LINCOLN H u g e D ahce f L O O & fULL b flp <3 COMPLIMENTARY APPETIZERS n o n - S n o K in o D ahce A rea SPECIAL R O O M RATES O N LY $ 7 9 Pfl&wno J ust $2 Evimno o o $£> O vkhkhit TKKiTS ® TOUCHSTOHf C O ffff • 7631 Hi GUSM1 BUY YOUR TICKETS IN ADVANCE - $12 O R AT THE D O O R - $15 —PRESENTED BY CME PRODUCTIONS— EVERY BOOK OF GAY EROTICA ALW AYS M STOCK! <@> Strapped for Cash. History of the male hustler. Straight guys drop trou for money! $20. <@> Bel Ami: New Generation. Photos of barely legal, highly aroused Euro-boys. $39.95. <@> Rawhide Kid. Turns out the 60s comic book hero was a pooftah! New comix. $3 ea. DOWNTOWN @ 927 SW OAK • 226-8141 CAMPING FOR GAY & LESBIAN MEMBERS ONLY. Located one hour north of Seattle on a National Scenic Byway in the beautiful Cascade Mountains. * Limited membership $15 per night Regular memberehip $150 per year (unkmtod camping) T PHOTO BY P A R T Y WITH PRIDE! T im o t h y K r a u s e aking a middle-of-the-road approach to environmental issues has made David Oates a hit of a radical. In his new brx)k, Paradise Wild: Reimag- ¡rung American Nature, Oates follows an occa sionally biographical trail through a personal wilderness. He successfully keeps the forest-for- the-trees environmental activists on one side and the effluent river of commerce on the other. But the path of practical consumption is a lone ly one in an all-or-nothing society that has crime to believe its own myth of Paradise List. “It definitely is my lifelong commitment to ask questions about how does it feel to he in nature? Do we belong there? How do we belong there?" says Oates, 53, a gay English professor at Clark College in Vancouver, Wash., who lives with his partner in Southeast Portland. Drawing together his once- compartmentalized spheres of reli gion, sexuality, environmentalism and scholarship, Oates examines the intersection of nature and cul ture by focusing on how “the mis applied myth of Eden has mired Americans in a hopeless ‘Paradise Lost’ mentality that belies the true ever-present wildness in our lives.” I'm convinced that our public debate (and private struggle) over die enwronment are locked into an un- resolvable cycle of use versus preservation because they are founded on the cultural myth of Paradise Lost, reinforced by an unexamined nostalgia. A remembered perfection: an inevitable decay — this thought pattern has already broken the world into two opposites : natureJwddemess/Eden and hunvm/avdized/fallen. Oates’ book responds to other environmen tal writers and thinkers who held a “not very productive and not very realistic set of beliefs, mythologies, projected desires that didn’t corre spond to the reality that I knew, and that wasn’t getting us anywhere as environmentalists.” The goal, he says, is to do a better job of realistically planting the human animal within nature. The reasoning is simple. People will contin ue to consume and dispose, drink and piss. But no longer should they romantically grieve the loss of nature, nor should they repeatedly cry wolf when, in fact, nature continues, ever onward, changes notwithstanding. Utility is now linked with destruction, as if to use something you had to despoil it. Preservation is linked with purity, as if to preserve something you had to hermetically seal it. To follow that model is to create a world split equally between toxic waste dumps and museums. And there is not a whole lot of life in either place. “We have to think productively about how to do those things and not just put up some sort of childish obstacle and say, ‘No, I shall be pure of these uses of nature,’ ” comments Oates. “At some point you need to turn a cor ner and say: ‘OK, here we are in the world. We’re living on it. It chews us, and we chew it. Our real choice is how to do it. Which trees to take and which ones to leave.’ ” For extreme environmentalists, giving any ground, even one tree, can be giving too much. Oates sees a sustainable compromise as more of a comprehensive plan rather than hacking off Author and professor David Oates really throws himself into his work. H is new book is Paradise Wild: Rehnagining Am erican N ature. or giving in. He suggests, for exam ple, that just as much energy be put into practi cal and sustainable tree harvesting as is invested in protecting trees that shouldn’t be touched. Nature is not the opposite of culture. It is at least as full of change as of stasis, as full of danger as of solace. We need to embrace both. “I’m more interested in the how than just saying ‘no.’ How are we going to go about this?" questions Oates. “I really do think it’s going to take an army of environmentalists with chain saws to drive [forestry giants like] Weyerhaeuser from the hills. I want them on the run; I think they’re the devil. I think it’s corporate greed creating clear-cuts.” But, he continues, “We’re not going to get them out of the forest until we have a workable alternative.... What happens when these kids with chain saws go across the hills is they say: ‘We have a better way to do this. We know how to love the forest, and we recognize that loving the forest and using the forest are not opposites.’ ” There is middle ground between control-all engmeerism and don’t-touch romanticism. Throughout Paradise Wild, Oates introduces stories from his private life to illustrate not only his mountain-climbing journey to this realization but also humanity’s intimate con nection to an innate, pervasive wildness. This is particularly evident in his renouncing funda mentalist religion in order to reconcile queer sexuality— a type of wilderness in itself. There's a sly but unmistakable connection between queemess and wilderness, buggers and tree-buggers.... Nature itself is always capable of bursting our bubble, breaking through, insisting there's m ore.... Gay people do the same thing.. insisting that real people and real sexuality are strange, multi-form, exciting, unprogrammed and capable of infinite surprise. Just like nature.... Those who go outside in any sense are likely to discover the queemess of the world. And so went Oates, who grew up in sub urban Los Angeles and attended an evangelical college in Santa Barbara. Passionate about his faith, he thought at the time his sexuality was a problem to solve. “ I felt like my soul was at risk the whole time, that no amount o f belief or practice was enough to cleanse me of something that couldn’t be eradicated. I prayed for about 10 years for Jesus to change me into a straight man. It cost me a lot of tears and a lot of sleepless nights and some severe distortions in my personality trying to hold together a facade of a correct straight person and at the same time intensely aware that it wasn’t true.” A turning point came when he opened up * to a classmate who was surprisingly compas sionate. “That little tiny chink of human kind ness was such a big deal,” the author recalls, having expected immediate rejection and hos tility. Then as soon as he left that environ ment, everything began to change. Fundamentalism in the environmental movement, like in religion, he claims, “is a powerful force against the work of thinking and feeling more clearly.” But if religion gave Oates an understanding of the environmentalist movement, it was sex that drove him to the mountains to see with immediacy what it meant to be a man within nature, while observing how sexuality and the environment validate each other. Sex is wild. Literally. A little wilderness right m your pajamas! Sex keeps on escaping the cage, running wild in the streets, eating the suburban poodles, messing up die smoothly running and too-scripted system o f G irl, Boy, Marriage, Death. And the numb consumerism that some times goes with it. To oppose these orthodoxies is buggery. Queemess. I say: Lets claim the badge gladly. Let’s be queer for the woods. JH D a v id O ates will conduct a "Wild Writers Seminar" later this summer. For details visit www.davidoates.info.
