The body as home
Clare starts his novel with a disclaimer to readers, explaining himself as a Trans man. "Over the last decade in my continued process of reaching, I've chosen to slide across some gender line," he says, referencing the last essay of Exile and Pride, in which he ponders the notion of gender. "If I live long enough to see the world break free of the gender binary, will I find a home not as a butch dyke, a woman by default, but as some third, fourth, fifth gender?"

When the novel was first published, Clare was still identifying as a woman. Today, he notes that his Queer identity is entangled in the "dyke culture" of the '70s and '80s. For this reason, Clare has chosen not to rewrite his essays with his current pronouns and continues to refer to himself as a "dyke" and a "Lesbian" throughout the novel.

Experiencing gender dysphoria in a time when Trans and Nonbinary people had yet to receive mainstream validation left Clare with a now widely understood notion of displacement in the body. Existing at the intersection of queerness and disability, Clare struggled to understand if his sense of body dysphoria came from being a Lesbian, Trans, or disabled in a community where nobody else seemed to be. "I spent my childhood a tomboy not sure of my girlness, queer without a name for my queerness," Clare writes.

The overlap of Queer and disabled identities has been studied by theorists, such as Alison Kefer, who in her 2013 book Feminist Queer Crip suggested that "sexuality and disability have always been related to one another in medical thought and social action." Both identities are unique in that those otherized grow up in environments where those around them are often a part of the dominant society. A community outside of the home becomes vital for children experiencing differences from their families and neighbors. Yet these communities are often unavailable until the child reaches adulthood and can seek them out on their own.

For Clare, who grew up experiencing both heteronormativity and compulsive able-bodied-ness, a strong desire to "overcome" and assimilate culminated in what Clare refers to as "the super-crip." He paints the picture of the super-crip by bringing up "inspirational" stories often shared on social media about disabled people either accomplishing great feats or participating in the mundane, only to be celebrated in masked pity by those around them.

"These stories rely upon the perception that disability and achievement contradict each other and that any disabled person who overcomes this contradiction is heroic," he writes. "To believe that achievement contradicts disability is to pair helplessness with a disability, a pairing for which crips pay an awful price."

Finding Queer spaces
Clare tells his story, an amalgam of nostalgia and horror, as he recalls the backwoods of rural Oregon, where he grew up. Like many Pacific Northwesterners, the trees, the rain, and the unique scent of the dirt and grass fill his lungs. Yet, as Clare grew up, he realized he needed to get out of his rural hometown to escape a life of poverty and false heterosexuality. He also fled to escape constant reminders of his childhood, which was full of physical and sexual abuse.

When he finally left Port Orford, Oregon, Clare discovered himself in Queer spaces. He found immersion in liberal politics and activism, and established a community that understood and accepted him in ways his old one never would have.

However, the ache for his childhood home continued to ring. "I've failed mostly because I haven't been able to bridge the chasm between my homesickness for a place thousands of miles away in the middle of logging country and the urban-created politics that have me raging at environmental destruction," he writes.

The more Clare grew into his politics and identity as a Queer person, the more he realized he no longer fit into his hometown. Yet there were still parts of Port Orford that had shaped Clare. The yearning for trees, the pride of his lower-middle-class parents, the close-knit comradery of neighbors.

He reflects that his feeling of exile from Port Orford has everything to do with his discovery and acceptance of his sexuality (and ultimately gender identity). "My loss of home is about being queer," Clare writes. Clare describes a sense of emptiness familiar to many LGBTQ+ people not raised in accepting communities. An internal tearing begging us to choose what parts of ourselves to sever.

Rural vs. urban
Clare notes that even among Queer spaces, he feels out of place. "Queer identity, at least as I know it, is largely urban," he writes.

There's a reason Seattle is the only city in Washington to host an LGBTQ+ newspaper. To find acceptance and the LGBTQ+ community, those raised in rural areas must relocate, leaving everything they once found familiar gone. The result becomes a lifelong process of trying to discern whether "home" is the community you've fled to or the one where your severed roots still lie.

For people from tight-knit communities, adjusting to what many refer to as "the Seattle freeze" can be especially isolating.

Clare informs his readers that Queer spaces, artificial archipelagos filled with transplants from across the country, tend to become elitist. He recalls Stonewall 25, a celebration of a riot begun by working-class Trans women, now selling tickets for hundreds of dollars. He notes the corporatization of Pride, which now resembles Coachella, with a high importance placed on social media exploitation, outfits, and whiteness.

Even urban spaces, hailed by many as "safe spaces" for LGBTQ+ people to find community, are only willing to accept Queers in palatable doses, usually white, able-bodied, male, and well-off. With the gentrification of Queer spaces, such as Seattle's Capitol Hill, poor and working-class members of the LGBTQ+ community continue to feel isolated. Those without family support, the ones forced to flee rural areas in search of community, are the most likely to be left out of these spaces. The phenomenon of gentrifying Queer spaces leads to the disproportionality of LGBTQ+ homelessness, murder, and suicide.

The mass migration of LGBTQ+ people away from rural areas also leads to a crisis of mass youth abandonment, Clare points out. While the Queer or Trans kid in Seattle may not have welcoming parents, they do have access to resources, programs, mentors, and school systems that are willing to lend support. In rural areas, these children are left with nothing and nobody to advocate for them.

"Have we collectively turned our backs on the small towns in Oregon that one by one [are] passing local anti-gay ordinances?" Clare asks. While the media is now centering "Don't Say Gay" bills, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation continued to pass in small communities, where Queer children must wait and endure until they are old enough to flee, just as those before them did.

Passive activism
Clare's experiences of constant displacement give way to excellent observation. He can scrutinize fabricated ideals from all the communities he encounters. So as a kid from a rural logging community, he takes note of urban language around conversations of environmentalism and deforestation.

It's an image all too familiar in Seattle. A well-off young person demonizes the poor for their participation in industries such as logging, fishing, or farming, a stance often taken by affluent liberal kids but dissected by Clare as an issue of class.

"Complicit brutes, dumb brutes. I sit at my computer and imagine you, my reader. You have never seen a clearcut, or if you have, you were a tourist. Regardless of what you think about the timber industry, you believe loggers are butchers, maybe even murderers," Clare writes before humanizing the industry.

He reminds his readers that the fight to be had is not against the individual working in jobs that destroy the land but in the executives who employ them, exploiting the worker and the environment. Clare calls on his readers to do more than passive activism, retweeting staggering facts about climate change, or putting a bumper sticker on a Subaru.

He reminds his readers that community is the solution to the big problems and calls out to other urban Queers like himself, who may have fled mining, railway, or logging towns like his, to not forget about the people left behind. He warns against the elitism of gentrified urban areas, where people forget about rural Queer kids, expecting them to just get out. He warns against classist complicity that looks down on those fighting in the upward scramble to make a better life for those kids, those who were unable to leave.

As Eli Clare looks back on his life and all he had to sacrifice and cut out of himself as he searched for a home, he reflects on one central question: "Is queer identity worth the loss?"