My people — Queering relationships

Four guys in a picture. Four smiling young men. The fifth is the one with the good camera and photographer skills, taking the picture. 

One is Russian of Ukrainian ethnicity; one is French with a German surname; one is part Italian, part American, part English, part German. They’re different heights, different builds; they have different jawlines, different facial hair. But they all have something in common, they all exude a similarity that comes across vividly through the photo. It’s a commonality that goes beyond the similar backpacks, the outdoor gear, the helmets on their heads or hanging at their sides. It’s a kinship that exudes from their smiles — a liveliness, a wildness, a quiet yet triumphant confidence in their faces? 

They’re climbers — we’re climbers. 

And they’re my people. 

These are my people — the thought kept presenting itself spontaneously to my mind, kept bubbling up from my heart to the surface of my consciousness, throughout the long weekend in Moab for my French buddy’s birthday. 

Apart from me, not one of them is, technically speaking, queer. They’re four cis-het white males. And yet, our relationship with each other is definitely queer. 

“You queer relationships”, my closest nonbinary friend said to me as we chatted a few days ago. “It’s apparent even in your relationships with your climbing buddies, the way you all do masculinity together”. 

It was one of my local non-climber friends who noticed the silent yet clear similarity exuding from the photo of me with my climbing buddies. His comment about that similarity and my nonbinary friend’s comment about how I queer relationships have been, for me, two of the most validating and affirming and spot-on comments I have received recently. They really touched me deeply and made me feel seen, really understood. 

Yes, I queer relationships and within the climbing community I have found fertile grounds to build and maintain queer relationships (with “non-queer” men) that fit my nature and that meet most (albeit not all) of my relational needs. And that’s because there’s an intrinsic queerness or an intrinsic, albeit probably mostly unconscious, tendency to queer relationships, to rewrite relational rules, within the climbing community, with outdoor climbing partners. Whether these cis-het men realize it or want to acknowledge it explicitly or not, there is deep love between them. (My climbing buddies actually talk explicitly about how they care about each other — that’s love.) 

Despite the fact that my climbing buddies are not queer men, while I am, they are my people and I am one of them: and I think they will always be “more my people” and I will always be “more one of them” than I will ever feel with the persons in the gay men’s chorus or within a group of queer folks or among queer men. That’s because I am a climber. And yes, I’m also queer, but somehow I can be more myself as a climber and queer person with my climbing buddies than I can be with the persons in the gay men’s chorus or within a group of queer folks or among queer men. I think that’s because outdoor climbing partners share a passion, a drive, a lifestyle, which is precisely what leads us to go on adventures and climb outdoors together; and from this follows a spontaneous, intrinsic, deep queer intimacy and/or queer love between us — regardless of our genders or sexual orientations or “significant others”. And this is something that I cannot find, I cannot get, with the persons in the gay men’s chorus or just any group of queer folks.