Exile and Pride

Clare meditates on the idea of loss of home. Homesick is not the right word, so he considers the words “queer,” “exile,” and “class.” He begins with the word “queer.” As a youth, he never felt like he belonged due to his cerebral palsy, his discomfort with gender, and his identity. Clare uses the word “dyke” to refer to his lesbian identity, reclaiming an anti-gay slur that he feels best describes his lesbian experience. When he left Port Orford to attend college on a scholarship, he realized he was a lesbian and always had been. Throughout his adult life, he has sought out different LGBTQIA+ communities. However, when he thinks about the idea of home, it is not the LGBTQIA+ community that comes to mind; it is Port Orford. 

However, there are no queer people in Port Orford—or at least Clare has never found them, as the threat of anti-gay violence looms large. Clare acknowledges that if he moved back to Port Orford and lived quietly and privately as a lesbian, no one would shoot him or throw rocks through his windows, but they would judge him privately. He would live his own version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” While some urban activists would look at this arrangement with disdain, Clare argues that middle class, liberal heterosexual people similarly erase the LGBTQIA+ community. He gives the example of his aunt Margaret and her lover, Barb. When Clare’s grandfather died, Margaret attended the funeral with Barb, though Clare is sure Margaret never introduced Barb to any of the family as her lover or partner. Still, Barb sat with Clare’s immediate family and openly comforted Margaret at the funeral. The “rednecks” of Clare’s family tacitly accepted Margaret and Barb’s relationship, even if they did not acknowledge it. 

Clare then explores the term “redneck,” giving its denotation of “a member of the white rural laboring class,” its connotation of a person with a “provincial, conservative, often bigoted sociopolitical attitude,” and its usage by queer progressives to mean a person who is “racist, violent, uneducated and stupid (as if they are the same thing), woman-hating, gay-bashing, Christian fundamentalist, etc.” (33). Clare explains that the racism that Barb, as a Black lesbian, experienced from “rednecks” was “muffled” (though in the 2009 edition, Clare acknowledges that the racism Barb experienced was likely worse than he was able to understand at the time) (33). 

Clare would not walk hand-in-hand with a woman in Port Orford, nor would he trust that a lesbian who did not grow up there would be safe from anti-gay violence. Moreover, if Clare was subjected to anti-gay violence in Port Orford, it would shatter the illusion of safety, as the perpetrator would be someone he knows. If he experiences harassment in Ann Arbor, he still has the anonymity of the larger community to make him feel safer and more secure; bigots do not know who he is or where he lives, which is a luxury not available in Port Orford.

Clare considers the term “exile” and wonders if it applies to his departure from Port Orford, which is undoubtedly related to his queerness. Exile, Clare argues, “implies not only loss, but also a sense of allegiance and connection […] an attitude of mourning instead of good riddance” (35). To contextualize the complexity of his feelings of exile, Clare shares the truth of his physical and sexual abuse by his father and other adults in the Port Orford community. For years, Clare could not return to Port Orford and be physically safe.

Class also plays a role in Clare’s exile. In Port Orford, jobs are scarce. Fishermen have started ferrying drugs. Loggers cut brush. The only steady jobs are teaching or working minimum wage tourism roles. If Clare moved back to Port Orford, he would struggle to earn enough to make ends meet even if he got a job that he could do with his low fine motor skills. He left to avoid poverty. However, he grew up middle class by community standards; his father was a high school teacher, and his mother had a doctorate. They had food on the table, a somewhat large house, and books to read. Still, they wore hand-me-downs and balanced paying dental bills and buying new shoes, which would mark them as outsiders in a truly middle-class community. 

Clare left at 17 to attend college in a city. His best friend, who was poorer, stayed behind and married her boyfriend. Clare disparaged her decision before years away and maturity helped him realize it was financially necessary for her. Clare also later realized how the loss of his connection to the landscape, the loss of the neighborly working-class community, and the loss of the easy pace of life and small-town trust have shaped him. Clare’s parents had also left their homes behind to make new lives, his father leaving North Dakota and his mother impoverished Detroit, both to attend college. They ended up in Port Orford, still insecure in their financial position. Their children are possibly middle class; Clare’s brother is a high school teacher, his sister a low-level administrator, and Clare a bookkeeper. Nevertheless, Clare’s parents missed aspects of their prior lives, like Clare misses parts of his life in Port Orford.

Clare questions if queer identity is worth the losses. Clare argues that queer identity, particularly for him, is rooted in urban spaces. Urban spaces also helped him understand that he is not truly middle class. He at first attributed his differences to the divide between rural and urban life. He thought of himself as “a country bumpkin” (40), assuming that was why he did not know certain things. However, as he discovered middle-class writers able to afford things he could not, he felt confused about his class standing, sometimes referring to himself as mixed-class instead of middle-class. 

The difference between rural and urban experiences is integral to Clare’s politics. He recounts the celebration of the 25th anniversary of Stonewall in New York City, which featured numerous wildly expensive parties for well-off, urban members of the LGBTQIA+ community while failing to include lower-income and more rural LGBTQIA+ people. Clare then dives into the idea of rural organizing on behalf of the LGBTQIA+ community. Clare wants to center rural and working-class voices in positions of leadership and work to address economic injustice that disproportionately affects those in rural communities. He also discusses how bridges must be built in the rural communities, sharing the example of the trust he built with a sheriff in rural New York while working with other gay women to protest a US army weapons depot. That trust allowed the sheriff to gain understanding of the queer community and work more proactively to combat anti-gay bias. 

Clare acknowledges that leaving to form a “dyke” community did not change his class standing but says that it was necessary for him to survive and recover from the trauma of his childhood abuse. He thinks back to a trip he took to rural Oregon with a friend and encountering the rural “dyke” community—a community he acknowledges he cannot join because he knows he could not find economic opportunities to survive. He then explicitly states that his exile is linked to queerness, exile, and class. He ends by reiterating his desire to center rural, working-class voices in the fight against rural anti-gay bias.

Clare juxtaposes the fight for the survival of the northern spotted owl against the survival of the loggers that make their living off industrial logging. He characterizes the loggers as brutes, while the northern spotted owl epitomizes the problems and environmental destruction caused by logging. This in turn inspires pro-logging activists to create bumper stickers with phrases like “save a logger, kill a spotted owl” (52).

Clare recalls reading voraciously as the controversy surrounding the northern spotted owl developed, tracking how different environmentally oriented publications variously depicted loggers as “dumb brutes,” “complicit brutes,” and “indoctrinated forest workers” (53). These characterizations each represent a stereotype about loggers and forest industry, which Clare works to unpack through three stories, focusing on the ideas of complicity and stupidity.

In 1977, Clare and his father were working on building their house. They got their lumber from Tucker’s Mill, a one-family sawmill, as many of the other sawmills had permanently closed since the Siskiyous was nearly logged out. One day, there wasn’t the right lumber. Clare knew the sizes of the wooden beams they needed, but Tucker explained he wasn’t able to find logs big or long enough to make the beams. Weeks later, the beams arrived. Clare, looking back, realizes the beams must have come from an old growth tree and recognizes his complicity in the destruction of the forest he loves.

In 1991, Clare returned to Port Orford for the first time in four years. Sitting with his sister and their neighbor, he heard about the neighbor’s stepfather, Jim. Jim was a timber cruiser (a logger who goes to forests marked for clearcutting and estimates the profitability and feasibility of the operation) turned environmentalist but was in British Columbia doing cruising work for an old growth forest. While he fought to save the Siskiyous and the Elk River, he was willing to doom old growth forests in Canada to clearcutting because he needed the money to live and support himself as an environmentalist during the rainy season. He’s not a “dumb brute,” nor is he any more complicit, Clare argues, than Clare himself was when he was building a house out of large support beams.

Clare then recounts the story of his mother’s composition class at a community college in Coos Bay. She often saw former loggers in her classes, some of whom wrote beautiful pieces about their love of nature and some of whom wrote narratives comparing felling trees to rape, seemingly proud of both acts. Clare suggests that this demonstrates the human depth and complexity of the loggers. They are not all good or all bad. They are also damaged by the work they do that harms the forests, as they often lose limbs, suffer nerve damage, and experience other negative health impacts. They are complicit in the destruction of the forests because of their work, but so are the people who use timber products. Clare wonders what would happen if environmentalists shifted their criticism away from the loggers themselves and toward logging executives, the leaders of the large corporations that profit most from the timber industry.

Clare admits that he now believes clearcutting is a crime, but he has empathy for loggers and those who live in communities that would suffer if logging was taken away. He wants those who advocate for the end of logging to take accountability for how the logging communities would suffer economically, and he wants his audience to consider their complicity in supporting logging, as everyone utilizes paper and wood products in their everyday lives. Consumption creates a need for and logical rationalization for clearcutting, as does the capitalist and free trade market. He calls out Weyerhaeuser, a lumber corporation that has made billions cutting down old growth forests and sending the timber to Japan. Clare also calls out the US Forest Service for its role in allowing the timber companies to destroy the forests, even building roads for companies to use to increase the efficiency of their destruction. Clare identifies capitalism and those who benefit the most by it as those chiefly “complicit” in environmental destruction. Capitalism is a system that places profit above all else, including the planet, and Clare wants that system dismantled and replaced. 

Clare acknowledges that blame is easier than systemic overhaul. It’s easier to blame loggers for the destruction of the forests than the executives who own the companies, as the image of the working-class logger is more visually associated with environmental destruction than a boardroom full of businesspeople discussing how to maximize profits. Targeting loggers for blame means jeopardizing the jobs and communities of timber workers, like Port Orford. Clare examines the different dying timber communities and the options for work outside the logging industry; some city and state governments want to place maximum security prisons near towns with failing economies, while others try to build Wal-Marts to offer low-paying service jobs. Neither addresses the root of the problem, much like placing the northern spotted owl on the endangered species list will not solve the problem of clearcutting. Clare wants activists to target the heads of the corporations like Weyerhaeuser. He also acknowledges the role that Eurocentric Christian ideals have played in creating the consumptive economy that treats the natural world like a commodity, especially in the context of the United States’ theft and destruction of Indigenous Americans’ land and resources. He wants a revolution to really change the system.

In 1999, the year Exile and Pride is published, Clare reflects on the five years since he began writing the essay collection, describing both the changes and stagnancies in the environmental movement, especially as it pertains to the timber industry. Court hearings and legislative bills have led to some changes, but destruction still remains a problem. For example, President Bill Clinton passed a bill forcing timber companies to review the watersheds and ecosystems of areas they plan to log in, but the compromise allowed a third of remaining old growth forests to be cut, making timber corporations richer while causing some loggers to lose their jobs. Meanwhile, environmental groups remained unwilling to look at the intersections between environmental harm and other types of destruction (though in a footnote from 2009, Clare admits that this characterization is too simplistic and exclusionary of environmental activists of color and their intersectional work). 

Clare then recounts something that has changed. In the 1980s, the Weyerhaeuser mill in Coos Bay closed down, leaving its land and buildings vacant. It is now a casino owned and managed by the Coquelle, a tribe that was dissolved by the US government in 1954 after over a century of genocide and whose spoken language, Miluk, died with the last fluent speaker in 1961. After the fall of the mill, the tribe reclaimed the land and created a casino that benefits and enriches the tribe while offering jobs to former mill employees who might otherwise have no economic prospects. Though it is not the revolution Clare yearns for, it is still a move away from the destruction of clearcutting.