Beautiful Sludge as Queer Ecology

I discovered Newtown Creek in April 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City. Visiting the creek became a daily ritual for me as I explored my new neighborhood. The creek is a superfund site that harbors a surprising wilderness. It is a space of both toxicity and beauty, a landscape responding to ecological devastation with style, a queer ecology.

Stepping onto the Grand Street Bridge for the first time, I could only see two inches into the creek’s body. A rainbow sheen flitted across the creek’s surface, and small pieces of plastic floated by. Spring unfurled. Cracks in the sidewalk, like scars from the city’s slow death from Covid-19, began to fill and overflow with weeds. Hundreds of thousands of dandelions poked out from the underbrush.

Then summer came, and the dandelions lining the creek’s toxic body bloomed, wilted, and burst into fireworks of seeds. I became a dandelion gardener of the creek, picking seeds from dandelion blooms and spreading them into more cracks in the sidewalk.

I came to know the creek in new ways—sometimes returning to the Grand Street Bridge, or trespassing through the countless industrial sites ringing the creek banks. The creek also came to know me in new ways as we stewarded one another and germinated into new, nonbinary bodies.

Beautiful Sludge

Between 1860 and 1978, ExxonMobil, BP, Texaco/Chevron, Keyspan, and Phelps Dodge collectively spilled between seventeen and thirty million gallons of oil into the Newtown Creek watershed. Now, when it rains near Newtown Creek, this oil—remnants of the Greenpoint Oil Spill—trickles upwards and creates rainbow sheens that glint atop puddles, or leaks out through bulkheads, or slithers towards the sewer system. It is an oil spill in slow motion.

New York City’s sewer system discharges raw sewage into the creek nearly every time it rains. During the pandemic, this raw sewage was teeming with SARS-CoV2 viruses. The mixture of sewage, pathogens, and oil spilled created a twenty-foot-thick layer of sludge atop Newtown Creek.

Yet dandelions still sprouted.  

Newtown Creek is a truly toxic place; it is one of my favorite waterways in the world. While oil, plastic, and sewage coat the city’s surfaces, the creek persists as a wilderness.

Industries pollute places like Newtown Creek to affirm an American identity based on the (White) heterosexual, nuclear family. The pollution of the creek, in other words, has produced and continues to sustain heteronormative structures and systems. The polluting industries that ring the creek’s banks were among the United States’ first oil refineries, fueling US imperialism, expansion, and persecution of marginalized communities.

At the same time, the destruction of ecosystems is tied to the persecution of queer lifeways. Urban wildernesses have long served as refuges for queer communities because they offer shelter from heterosexual gazes and are more difficult to police. Jacob Riis Beach, for example, located only twelve miles away from Newtown Creek, has harbored queer activity for nearly a hundred years. Recent plans to redevelop the beach are putting its status as a haven for queer New Yorkers in jeopardy.

Scholars refer to the entanglement between ecology and heteronormative social structures as hetero(eco)normativity. Through this framework, the proliferation of creekside wildernesses emerge as a queer mode of resistance.

The Newtown Creek is an archive of the chemicals and pathogens in New Yorkers’ bodies. It is a dump for refuse, a storage ground for petrochemicals, and a river of sewage. Being there is seeing the toxins within us reconfigured into an aquatic ecosystem.  

Gardening the Dandelion Wilds

New Yorkers create toxins that infiltrate Newtown Creek. In response, it gardens itself, using me as an agent of its dandelion wildernesses.

My pandemic-era dandelion gardening became a generative way for both Newtown Creek and me to confront mass death. By seeding dandelion wildernesses, I imagined that the city could be overtaken by dandelions. This would memorialize and inhabit life stolen by the pandemic.

I was inspired by artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, who used a garden to refuse the death of his queer chosen family to AIDS. When Jarman was diagnosed with AIDS, he collected his queer family’s belongings and moved to the English coast. There, he dispersed those belongings among a garden meant to expand endlessly beyond the bounds of the property and overtake all of England. This “melancholoy ecology” creates ecological possibility in a toxic time/place.

Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands argues that gardens cultivate “an ethical practice of remembering as part of a queer ecological response to loss.” The garden becomes a “metaphor for queer possibility” in the midst of death and oppression.

Death from AIDS is a kind of murder. Inaction to develop treatments killed (and continues to kill) people in ways that entrench hierarchies. Those most vulnerable to policing, racism, and ostracization, as well as unsheltered people, are most likely to die during pandemics. This happened both during the AIDS crisis and during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Gardening and transmuting death into living queer flesh unsettles the very systems that are responsible for this asymmetric violence. Gardening itself cannot bring human life back into being. But it can encourage the proliferation of wilderness that inhabits the porous, queer(ed) body.

Nonbinary Creekwater

Newtown Creek is a queer ecology. It embraces queerness not as a category of identity, but as a practice of porosity and transformation. As I gardened the creek, my own relationship to queerness changed and adapted in response. In the spring of 2021, I came out as nonbinary.

To be nonbinary is to refuse identification with the premise of the gender binary. It gestures toward modes of existence outside of the ideals of “womanhood” or “manhood.”

In practice, the nonbinary category creates its opposite: a binary-gendered category. “Nonbinary” thus arises out of a tradition of “divergence” within queer identity. “Divergence,” as described by theorist Kadji Amin, means definition in opposition. As queer people have organized to be accepted into heteronormative society, queer communities have sought to make their identities legible to this society. The “divergence model” first arose as homosexuals wanted to at once differentiate themselves from heterosexuals and legitimize their existence.

In doing so, however, they paradoxically created and solidified the “opposite” category: heterosexuality. Thus, this initial idea of divergence, ironically, legitimized ideas harmful to queer people—like the idea that only “queer” people experience homosexual desire (when in reality, “straight” people do as well).

The divergence model was further perpetuated by trans communities, who sought to differentiate themselves from both cisgender people and homo/heterosexual people. Again, the “trans” identifier anchored the “cis” category. This binary between trans and cis mirrors the homo/hetero binary, with serious consequences, including “extraordinary acts of transmisogynist violence” by men who are attracted to trans women “to protect their heterosexual masculine status.” And while it is true that most cisgender people do not seek to transition, everyone experiences so-called “gender trouble.” The categories of “man” and “woman” are, after all, social constructs that are impossible to perform perfectly. 

I do not want being nonbinary to create a “binary gendered” category. This would be antithetical to “nonbinary” in the first place. If nonbinary claims social, legal, and identitarian “legitimacy” by reaffirming an idea that being a “man” or “woman” in a perfect and ideal way is possible, then it is doing an equal amount of theoretical work to construct the binary it attempts to escape. Alternatively, Amin calls for creating and exploring “a robust trans politics and discourse without gender identity.”

The divergence model also fails to recognize new and resistant queer embodiments—like Newtown Creek. As new embodiments (like nonbinary) arise, divergence enfolds queer bodies into heteronormative legibility, categorizing dandelion wildernesses as “wastelands.” In this way, the divergence model functionally acts to further marginalize queer identities and ecologies, attempting to regulate them instead of allowing queer identity to reassemble harmful systems into reparative ones.

The creek, having been dredged, channelized, polluted, made toxic, and declared a “dead zone” exceeds existence as either an industrial waterway or an “untouched wilderness.” It is, therefore, a nonbinary ecology.

Nonbinary ecology is plastic; it is flexible, mutable, transformational. The dandelions that surround Newtown create nonbinary wildernesses from toxic sludge.

Deathly Wilderness

The Newtown Creek’s nonbinary embodiment emerges as a “necropastoral” landscape. This term is coined by Joyelle McSweeney, a poet of the Anthropocene. For McSweeney, the necropastoral emerges where the body meets itself as “part of an inhuman multiple body…made up of component catastrophes: genocides, depredations, the enslavement and debilitation of human populaces alongside the non-human.”

SARS-COV-2—made possible by neoliberal capitalism and the destruction of ecosystems that brings humans in contact with new viruses—becomes necropastoral at the site of the human body.

According to McSweeney, the necropastoral alights in the “outrageous horrors of Anthropocenic ‘life’ made visible as Death.” Perhaps for this reason, the Newtown Creek felt like the most accurate depiction of New York City during the Covid-19 lockdown. Its sludge emerges as a sickened body, its waters an already toxic archive of industrialization, petrochemical waste, and disease.

But queer ecologies adapt to and transform these toxic worlds.

A group of biologists studying plants in extreme environments made a routine trip to the Alberta Tar Sands in 2017. They found dandelions growing in the tar sands and tailings piles. Further investigation revealed the dandelions share a remarkable, symbiotic relationship with a fungus named TSTh-20-1. The fungus metabolizes petrochemicals bound in soil and converts them into carbon dioxide and water, which their dandelion partners readily take up.

Refusing Death

 The various human and more-than-human rewilding projects along and within the creek create a unique wilderness in Brooklyn. As you approach the creek from any side, the sidewalk slopes towards the creek’s body. Residential neighborhoods melt away as warehouses, abandoned lots, and petrochemical infrastructure spring up around you. Weeds take over. They run through cracks in the sidewalk, eroding them with each passing day.

If it is raining, you will begin to smell sewage as you near the creek’s body. You might have to hop over a fence or find a street that dead-ends at the creek to see it. Right beside the creek, rusting bulkheads burst with weeds. A varnish of plastic, oil, sewage, and feathers floats by below. Flowerboxes planted by the Newtown Creek Alliance sit at the high tide line. Drops of oil glisten on all the leaves that touch the water.

This is a dead landscape that refuses to die. It is a sacrifice made by petrocapitalism, actively rewilding on its own, in tandem with nonbinary gardeners of the dandelion wildernesses. It is sublime, serene, horrifying, and deeply beautiful.

A robust trans politics that transcends gender begins here for me. I embrace the Newtown Creek’s inhabitation of my body and become something new—something defined not in opposition to a category, but by my willingness to participate in the transmutation of flesh into flesh.

In 2024, I went back to Newtown Creek during a research trip to the city. It was a windy day. While I waded through patches of dandelions, their seeds dispersed in gusts and were carried throughout the watershed. I plucked a dandelion stem ripe with seeds and gently let them go: still a nonbinary gardener of the creek’s watershed.

I visited some of my favorite creekside refuges, including the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, which holds an artificial wetland (the first wetland along the creek’s banks in 150 years!). The wetland was full of life, and dandelions were everywhere. I watched a person on their work break pluck one of those dandelions and blow its seeds over the wetland. The sight brought tears to my eyes. Newtown Creek was inter-embodying more nonbinary gardeners right before my eyes.

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Feature Image: A wildflower garden at Newtown Creek. Photo by Matthew Willis, 2017.

Quinn Luthy (they/them) is a queer ecologist currently living in Seattle, Washington, on the unceded ancestral and contemporary homelands of the Coast Salish people. Quinn holds degrees from the University of Utah, and The New School, and studies bodies of water as novel queer embodiments. Website. Contact.