Our cheeks blush amidst prairie grasses

In the cannon of photography when queerness is invited to the table to be discussed, it often is observed through the voyeuristic lens of a queer male photographing a fellow queer male in the nude. Though rejoicing in the body and sexual experience that comprises a slice of queer life proves valuable, an over glorification of these images minimizes the complexity of the queer identity. Growing up in the Midwest, queer love was reduced to a purely physical and sexual presence – something deemed disturbing by the hegemonic gaze, I transgress this to propose an expanded view of queerness in the landscape as an embodiment of my experience.

Bell Hooks puts it best when stating that “[being] Queer' [is] not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

What does queer love look like? How can we position queer love as a natural component within our more than human world? How do I tell my partner I love and long for him across hundreds of miles of distance? Through the photographic investigation of the Indiana Dunes, the site of my engagement, and the Iowan prairie, the place me and my partner now reside, I challenge oversimplified views of queer love by expanding naturalist heteronormative narratives of the landscape. Furthering this conversation, my partner and I perform still-lifes in our interior domestic space in search for a view of queerness that implores the romantic, complex, effeminate, and saccharine. Queerness is not detached from the landscape but is innate to our world and its inhabitants, from the cellular to the sunset.