Queer activists must make climate change a part of our movement

This year’s Pride in London parade was temporarily halted by a handful of activists, all representatives of the U.K.-based climate justice coalition Just Stop Oil. For just over fifteen minutes, they defiantly sat cross-legged in front of a sparkly, rainbow-painted Coca-Cola truck before being dragged away by police officers. According to Evening Standard, seven protestors were arrested “on suspicion of public nuisance.”

The disruption wasn’t unexpected. In the lead-up to Pride in London, Just Stop Oil released a statement calling on organizers to “condemn oil, gas and coal,” to “cease accepting sponsorship money from high-polluting industries” and to “stop allowing the inclusion of floats from these organizations in the parade.” If their demands weren’t met, they wrote, they would protest.

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Just Stop Oil’s statement was unflinching in its assertion that the climate crisis is a queer issue – and increasingly, there’s evidence to support these arguments.

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In 2020, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health published a wide-ranging, global review of existing literature on LGBTQ+ homelessness. The results were sobering. 

Across more than 50 studies, researchers found a series of key themes, ranging from poverty and racism to shelter inaccessibility and HIV. They found that LGBTQ+ people are more likely to be kicked out of childhood homes by abusive or unsupportive parents; due to workplace discrimination and the exorbitant costs of trans healthcare, they’re more likely – and this is especially true for trans women of color – to turn to survival sex work while living on the streets.

This homelessness can then make them more vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis. In a 2021 research paper, statistics showed that homeless populations are “the most exposed to weather conditions and the social and economic problems caused by extreme weather and climate change and variability.”

As a result, homeless people are more likely to rely on disaster relief efforts. Yet these efforts often leave LGBTQ+ people behind. In a 2021 U.S. study, “bias in federal disaster response programs, a lack of recognition of LGBTQ+ families, and the prevalence of faith-based organizations in disaster relief services” all compounded to create huge obstacles for LGBTQ+ people in need of aid or shelter. Crucially, natural disasters – caused in no small part by the worsening climate crisis – can be lethal; in 2022, they claimed a total of 474 lives.

It’s not just disaster relief, either. Studies have long shown that economically and racially marginalized people are disproportionately exposed to air pollution, but research published in 2017 found that this extends to LGBTQ+ people, too. Social scientists found that in the US, “mean cancer and respiratory risks from hazardous air pollutants for same-sex partners are 12.3% and 23.8% greater, respectively, than for heterosexual partners,” and that there’s more research needed to close the “knowledge gap” when it comes to examining LGBTQ+ health disparities through an environmental health lens.

There’s a global knowledge gap, too. Just Stop Oil’s statement outlines that “it is queer people, and particularly queer people of color in the global south, who are suffering first in this accelerating social breakdown.” Here, the climate crisis can’t be divorced from colonization. Not only do colonized countries face the brunt of pollution, they’re starved of wealth and resources by the same former empires responsible for the majority of the world’s emissions.

LGBTQ+ communities in these countries often still face persecution under anti-gay laws, imported by colonial missionaries. As the climate crisis worsens, they’re at greater risk of becoming refugees, endangered both by climate-related natural disasters and persecution on the grounds of their gender or sexuality. An intersectional approach is needed to understand the specific needs of LGBTQ+ refugees in countries most impacted by the climate crisis, yet the work to address these complexities is still in its infancy.

Increasingly, queer climate justice movements are fleshing out this nuance. There’s the Institute of Queer Ecology, an “ever-evolving” project which looks to queer knowledge to flesh out solutions and approaches to the climate crisis; there are trans, Indigenous leaders arguing there’s no climate justice without queer liberation; there are coalition movements drawing links between health disparities, police brutality and Indigenous land theft.

These struggles can’t be separated, nor should they be. The climate crisis impacts all of us. No planet, no future.

Just Stop Oil’s disruption drew from an existing lineage of queer protest, one rooted in solidarity and direct action. HIV activists from ACT UP weren’t just campaigning against institutional homophobia throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s; they were advocating for universal healthcare and racial justice. The Gay Liberation Front stood in solidarity with the Black Panthers while the right-wing press smeared them as terrorists; in the U.K., groups like Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants have fought tirelessly to end unjust deportations.

Pride has always been about protest, specifically in solidarity with those on the margins: people of color, sex workers, poor and homeless communities. So yes, the climate crisis is undeniably a queer issue – but even if it weren’t, it would still be exemplary of queer activists to take a stand, to advocate for the most marginalized and remind the world of Pride’s radical roots.