Natural
In Back and Forth to the Land1, Scott Morgensen describes a queer community called the “radical faeries” that regularly leave their urban lives to retreat to the countryside to experience their natural queerness. This community originated in Los Angeles in 1979 and spread to San Francisco and the rest of the nation soon after. He writes, “Radical faerie culture frames urban sexual minority cultures as inauthentic within modern fictions of rural authenticity… My reading suggests that the distinctive culture that radical faeries present arises precisely in order to incite and address more general desires for rural authenticity among urban sexual minorities.” He continues, “Inspired by gay liberation, neopagan, and back-to-the-land movements, the faerie founders argued that locating gay community in rural space would help gay men realize a common and spiritual nature.” Here, in the wild, queers can escape into their own fantasyland, where they can let their hair down, so to speak, and be their natural “homo” selves. In this case, a more natural style of landscape design is queer because of our natural queerness.
1. Morgensen, Scott. “Back and Forth to the Land: Negotiating Rural and Urban Sexuality Among the Radical Faeries.” Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World, Blackwell Publishing, pp. 143–163.