Queer Comfort

Tucked behind the romantically overgrown, sloping grounds of a historic property on Staten Island is a noticeably modern landscape. A wisteria-drenched, arched metal trellis invites visitors to step into the community garden. Four raised garden beds sit within a protective frame of shrubbery, leafy vegetation, and hermaphroditic maidenhair ferns. There’s a cluster of fruiting strawberries, whose genes can express four different gender variations. In another bed sit pansies, which are considered androgynous but also allude to the historical queer pejorative. It’s tempting to reach out and rub a small patch of French lavender (an allusion to the color’s long-standing significance in LGBTQ+ activism) or bend down to inhale the bloom of hyacinths (symbols of gay love attributed to the myth of Apollo and his lover) and hermaphroditic green carnations (used by men like Oscar Wilde to signal their sexuality). Sweet-smelling black cohosh represents pre-colonial methods of gender-affirming care, used by Indigenous communities in North America to treat menopause systems and gynecological ailments. Delicate honeysuckle, valued for its healing anti-inflammatory properties, signifies love’s resilience. Benches nestled in each corner invite visitors to contemplate the delicious sensorium of the aromatic herbs and flowers sprouting in each raised metal container, the flittering dance of pollinating bees, and the cooling brine gusting from the nearby rocky waterfront. This is the Queer Ecologies Garden. Once an overlooked corner of the Alice Austen House’s grounds, it now represents the historic site’s experiment in community gardening as queer placemaking.

The Austen family called this place Clear Comfort. A modest 17th-century Dutch farmhouse nestled high up on a hill on the banks of Staten Island, the home and its surrounding sprawl of gardens remained Alice Austen’s residence for 80 years — 28 of them spent with her life partner Gertrude Tate. Austen and Tate were evicted and forced to sell Clear Comfort in 1945. It fell into a state of decay and disrepair until grassroots preservation saved the house from demolition. Purchased by the City in 1975, the landmarked property was restored, reopening as a public museum in 1985.

The Alice Austen House initially emphasized the building’s architectural heritage and Austen’s creative endeavors as one of New York City’s first female street photographers. Since 2017, Executive Director Victoria Munro has worked to center the queerness of Austen’s artistic life in its exhibits and programs. The new garden was conceived as a celebration of Austen’s personal love of gardening and as a new, safe space for the public to learn through hands-on care about the diverse, inherent queerness of botany and fungi through plantings that are historic cultural symbols of LGBTQ+ identity or which exhibit gender and sexually-fluid behaviors themselves. What better way to understand Alice Austen’s story and the proud, openly queer life she lived on Staten Island across the 19th and early 20th century than to learn directly from the land?

Austen founded the Staten Island Garden Club in 1914. In a time when women were held to strict codes of social dress and behavioral conduct and when engaging in same-sex relationships was still illegal in the state, Alice Austen transformed her family estate’s garden into a safe space for radically reimagining one’s gender and sexuality. She staged portraits of herself and her queer friends in gender non-conforming dress amid the garden’s blooms and hosted annual wisteria parties to celebrate the gender-fluid species that bloomed on the side of her house every spring. The garden became a place where her lesbian community could socialize among found family and express themselves away from policing eyes. Austen lived a queer ecological life long before there was the language for it.

What does it mean to have a community garden that refuses heteronormativity? What does botanical science have to do with the lived histories of LGBTQ+ people? In their foundational book, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, and Desire, scholars Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson write that queer ecological thinking confronts the “compulsory heterosexuality as it manifests in our perceptions of nature, ecology, and environmental politics.” Climate activist Ingrid Bååth also notes that queer ecology defies binaries, embraces fluidity, and interrogates assumptions about behaviors and ways of being we deem “natural” in biological science and human society. Designed in collaboration with nonbinary gardening consultant Marisa Prefer and historic preservation graduate students from the Pratt Institute Center for Planning and the Environment, the Queer Ecologies Garden demonstrates how the biodiversity of urban gardens parallels the gender and sexual diversity of the human world. The curated selection of species — many of which are already familiar to visitors and grow ubiquitously across the city — demonstrate a wide spectrum of reproductive strategies, sex identification, and gender presentation beyond the traditional binaries of “male” and “female.”

The site’s open layout, with generous paths of gravel around the raised beds, creates ample space to easily accommodate school groups. The elevated garden beds not only protect the plantings, but also invite interaction by bringing the greenery closer to the curious eyes and hands of visitors. Benches on the perimeter encourage contemplation, observation, and — true to Austen’s love of botanical backdrops — provide picturesque photo ops. The garden’s landscaping and its more secluded position on the property achieves a delicate balance between providing spatially intimate engagements with its queer vegetation and facilitating collective experiences of creative skill-sharing and ecological experimentation. “We can’t organize effectively,” Munro reminds me, “without space to think and reflect.”

“The garden is founded on the idea that queerness is inherent in nature and to be a safe space for that creative exploration,” Public Engagement and Programs Director Kristen Bartley tells me when I visit the garden in early May. The garden regularly hosts all-ages photography workshops, field trips, foraging and art-making events, and LGBTQ Photographic Storytelling programs rooted in that queer ecology framework. Local middle and high school Gender Sexuality Alliance (GSA) groups from Staten Island and Brooklyn are especially engaged with the garden, with students regularly coming for school visits and joining the multi-generational team of volunteers and Alice Austen House staff members who maintain the garden.

Lexy Trujillo-Hall first got involved with the museum as a local GSA student and has since become one of the Queer Ecologies Garden’s principal stewards and educational programming co-facilitator. Trujillo-Hall describes the Queer Ecologies Garden as a source of community whose transformative greenery has, over the past two years, undergone the same kind of fluid journeys of self-discovery and personal growth that they have. “Being a young queer person in this current moment is so fraught,” Trujillo-Hall reflects, “it’s nice to know that there’s always this space here where you can come and work on the land and just have this experience and share it with others, too.” They invite me to think of this community garden as a site of solidarity where, for a moment, anyone is welcome to be however they are: “You have a reference to your own identity that nature understands without having to explain.” Even if Staten Island GSA program participants might already be familiar with gardening or Alice Austen herself, Trujillo-Hall observes that, as students learn about the species growing inside the Queer Ecologies Garden, they “realize that these little things that surround them are representational of their identities, who they might be, or, in the future, who they might become. It makes students feel more comfortable when society as a whole is not always kind to them.”

The Staten Island St. Patrick’s Day Parade previously blocked LGBTQ+ groups from marching; a ban that was only lifted last year. In the city’s most conservative borough, the Queer Ecologies Garden remains a small, yet mighty force for inclusivity, safety, and empowerment. When I ask Munro how she and the Alice Austen House team navigate local homophobia and national efforts to suppress opportunities to learn about LGBTQ+ history, she points out that the Queer Ecologies Garden regularly serves as a welcoming educational catalyst: “It’s a point of connection. That anti-queer erasure and violence is born out of a lack of knowledge, which creates fear of the other. . . . Doing this gardening work in an open, public space for every person to enjoy creates that potential for a conversation about what the garden is, why we do it, but it can happen in a manner that’s very approachable for a lot of folks that would never even want to have that conversation.”

The Queer Ecologies Garden has already begun to surpass the boundaries of its original containment, a testament to its defiant sensibility. When I toured the grounds with Bartley, she pointed out the migration of pansies onto the property’s lawn and an errant trail of hyacinths from one section of the garden to another. There are the hearty perennials, like lavender, strawberries, salvia, garlic, and Austen’s beloved wisteria, which bounce back every year. A sturdy crop of garlic whose survival through New York City’s winter means they’ll be harvested for summer. Bartley takes me to a shady corner right behind the Alice Austen cottage where a stacked row of logs reveals a cluster of fruiting shiitake mushrooms used to teach students about the non-normative, multi-sexual morphology of fungi and their capacities for queer world-making through their hidden mycelium networks.

When I first encountered the garden, I was frustrated by the lack of signage in the beds, the absence of clear demarcation amid the cluttered quilt of growing blooms. It felt a little too easy to pass by the unmarked, different looking back garden when an entire sweeping stretch of park around the historic house is there to explore. Yet, after hearing Bartley and Munro outline the plans of the garden’s planting programs, I began to understand why the Queer Ecologies Garden didn’t feature traditional labels. Over time, unplanned crops like marigold and goldenrod have sprouted up in the garden bed, most likely transported over by birds or the stray cats that occasionally roam the grounds. Bartley doesn’t rush to remove these in order to maintain a pristine image of the garden’s composition. She welcomes them to the site and invites them to stay a while.

Since the New York Restoration Project replenishes the Queer Ecologies Garden with a fresh array of annuals every spring, the Alice Austen House staff plan their requests based on what’s thrived in the garden before and future programming needs. Bartley notes that, for this year, she’s asked for colorful vegetables that can be harvested for the museum’s anthotype workshops, more edible crops for staff’s experiments in food production, and for a few previously successful species like fragrant ginger. Munro envisions the garden’s sensorial growth out onto the rest of the property. The addition of new native grass plantings, Munro hopes, will eventually enable staff to reclaim the land for a new set of visitor walking paths, zones for pollinators, and a natural amphitheater to facilitate live performances in the meadow. At the moment, however, “just being open to the public is an act of resistance.”

Photos inside the museum feature Austen and her friends posing around the estate’s extravagantly blooming gardens and on its beachfront overlook, and I am reminded of other beloved, subversive sites of outdoor queer history: joyous partygoers on Jacob Riis Beach, the protective ruins of the old Christopher Street Piers, a 1969 demonstration by gay protesters in Flushing Meadows Corona Park to combat local harassment of cruisers. These ephemeral landscapes are some of New York City’s greatest living witnesses to local queer history. Rarely preserved, constantly threatened by city planners, real estate developers, and climate change, these ecological communities persist by mutating with and growing in defiance of the built environment. New York City’s environmental and queer histories have always been entangled, quests for refuge playing out across neglected urban peripheries in abandoned lots, public parks, and on waterfront margins. Each species cultivated at the Queer Ecologies Garden grows and thrives on its own nonlinear schedule of queer time, interconnecting Alice Austen’s openly lesbian life at Clear Comfort with a network of queer movements for social justice, historic practices of communal healing, and modern-day struggles for visibility and safety in the face of continued political marginalization. Queer people, the Queer Ecologies Garden reminds us, have always cared for each other by taking care of the land.