Sometimes I feel like the only Climate Gay in the Village. Sure there are LGBTQ folks concerned with accessorizing their carbon footprints and buying trendy eco-friendly products, but when it comes to climate change, it seems most of us live on another planet

No doubt we have been preoccupied with fighting for our recognition in a world that treated us like toxic waste. Not that long ago whenever a major weather catastrophe hit, Christian ministers lined up on TV to declare that homosexuals magically stirred up the waters. That or they proclaimed we incurred the wrath of a God who seemed far more concerned with butt action at a New Orleans bath house over the weekend than to what we have been spewing out of our chimneys into the atmosphere for the past 100 years.

Yes, we have been distracted with a protracted fight for our basic rights and protections. Today many LGBTQ people throughout the developing world face severe, consistent, cruel discrimination, and a dismal lack of basic rights. This is also very true for trans* people in North America and Europe. Sure we can say that for some of us in the LGBTQ Rainbow Collective that “It Gets Better,” but we all know there is work to do.

So who has time or energy for climate change?? We are busy fighting for our rights or with caterers over the perfect gay wedding.

We are in a funny time in history, a time when LGBTQ people in the developed world have more rights and protections than ever before. We also live in a time in which we have altered the chemistry of the planet to such an extreme extent that if we don’t act immediately to stop the insanity, we are looking at a dire, perhaps impossible future. Great, I can get gay married just in time for the end of the world. The worse part is that me and my “gay lifestyle will likely get blamed for it! (As opposed to our fossil fuel lifestyle and overpopulation of the planet.)

For me there is something decidedly queer about Climate Change, yet when I attend Citizen Climate Lobby meetings and Climate Rallies, I feel I am swimming in a sea of white, gender-normative, heterosexuals. Nice people, but we need over voices from other rooms.

I am a climate queer actively looking to develop Queer Responses to Climate Change? What about you? What might those responses look like?