Extract

Cities across the Global North are scrambling to become “greener” by planting thousands of trees in a bid to remain attractive and “livable” as temperatures rise. Paris is no exception, and, in fact, has even come to be seen as a “model” city in its use of green infrastructure to tackle heat and air pollution.[1] In response to this urgency, we must find ways to slow down and interrogate our relationship with trees. What is being planted now is an arboreal heritage for the future, with cultural and even sexual implications. Our present arboreal heritage in Paris, as I will show, encodes straightness into the fabric of the city. Can the present offer a queerer legacy to its descendants—one that celebrates a wider set of stories about what it means to live among trees? By connecting the past and present of municipal tree planting in Paris with an alternative reading of trees through queer kinship in the work of the artist Benny Nemer, I will argue that it can—and must.

Trees have been recast in the urban planning imaginary as technologies to clean the air that the economic systems of advanced capitalist societies have polluted, to cool the streets they have heated, and shelter us from the sun that our current practices have turned into an enemy. Driven by this technical vision, the City of Paris launched its Plan arbre (Tree Plan) in 2020, with an aim to plant 170,000 new trees within the city limits by 2026, increasing the volume of trees in an urban setting by around 50 percent (others are in Paris’s sylvan and decidedly nonurban woodlands, to which we will return). The Plan arbre is being enacted against the backdrop of an already rich arboreal heritage—patrimoine arboré, or “arboreal heritage,” as it is described in the plan—positioning Paris to claim the title of most wooded capital in Europe.[2]

The last great era of tree planting, from which this patrimoine is inherited, was also driven by the technical concerns of the nineteenth-century reorganization of the city’s housing and circulatory infrastructures led by Baron Haussmann, and then by Jean-Charles Alphond. Over the course of more than a century, 100,000 arbres d’alignement (alignment trees) were planted in strict linear arrangements along the new boulevards that Haussmannization cut violently through the dense, organically developed fabric of the medieval city. The linearity of the boulevards was part of a conscious “straightening out” of the city. The boulevards were conceived not only to rationalize the city’s circulatory infrastructures, easing movement around the city, but also to discipline the “degenerate” life of its twisted backstreets, where insalubrious living conditions fomented revolutionary fervor. Trees were part of this strategy. Alignment trees were employed as barriers, clearly separating channels of pedestrian and carriage movement along the boulevards before the introduction of pavements.

But more than this, as Antoine Picon explains, “nature within networks of Haussmann and his engineers had the purpose of not only regenerating people’s bodies but also improving their morals.”[3] Trees were tools not only of hygiene and modernization but also for shaping the social character of the city. The uniformity in both spatial arrangement and choice of species within alignment trees was crucial to this—visually representing order but also helping to choreograph straight movement along the boulevards. This linearity was an inheritance from the design of the gardens of the Tuileries and Cours-la-Reine that were the stages for the ritual of the promenade mondaine, the “worldly walk” that, in the eighteenth century, had no circulatory or health purpose other than of making oneself visible in bourgeois society. Laurent Turcot’s history of walking in Paris describes how these gardens—walled off from the “unfrequentable” pre-Haussmannian streets that were the “social space of all dangers”—were opportunities to implement a rectilinearity of social space appropriate to the people of “good tone” who were allowed through the gates that kept out the feared unwashed masses.[4] This rectilinearity, then, was a scenography for the performance of rightness of character and an essential condition for the promenade publique. According to Turcot, “the planted trees are integrated into an ensemble of lines forming promenades that the honest man can take.”[5] To show oneself as such an “honest man” required the correct enactment of a strictly codified set of bodily gestures: from the rhythm of movement, to the straightness of one’s path along allées of trees whose spacing allowed for surveillance and the assurance that no illicit encounters would take place beneath them. It was this outwardly directed performance of civility, with straight rows of trees as crucial props, that was to be imposed on the broader population of the city by the new boulevards, whose planting style was a direct descendant of the gardens.

Following the model of the gardens, then, a network of trees, with boulevards as its edges, and parks and gardens as its nodes, was the setting for the newly democratized practice of the promenade. Whereas the late seventeenth century’s promenade mondaine was a performance intended to be viewed by others, it was throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the practice of walking alone was invented among the nobility and bourgeois intellectuals, and later taken up by broad swaths of society, as Rebecca Solnit recounts in Wanderlust.[6] Its role was no longer to simply put the body on display but also to exercise it—improving health to improve the mind, and by extension society. Walking allowed for an escape from the (politically and miasmically) infectious crowds of the twisted old streets, to take the purified air that supposedly circulated along the new, straight boulevards. For Picon,[7] the role of trees in the reconfiguration of Paris around the “organic and circulatory imagination,” in which walking is understood as part of public health, enters into a lineage of infrastructural endeavors that reconfigure the material conditions of urban life around new social imaginaries. The boulevards materialized a modern ideal of clean, individualized urbanites moving in neat lines along wide, straight roads that, like the allées of the gardens, facilitated surveillance and policing. This was in contrast to a past (as imagined by the authorities driving the changes) full of dirty revolutionary rabble in winding alleyways that enable the barricades of the defiant masses who can disappear around shadowy corners. Contemporary green infrastructure takes back up this hygienist impulse, looking to cleanse cities of noisy, dirty ways of using public space and to instill new, healthy modes of life in city dwellers. But while reducing noise and air pollution should certainly be celebrated, we must also look below the surface of the new social imaginary being instilled by the material configurations of green infrastructure. What kinds of movement, what ways of being, and which bodies are imagined as licit within the new, green, healthy city? Who, now, are the monsters imagined to be lurking in the dark corners of the city?

Queer arboreal heritage

To answer this, we might first consider how this hygienist heritage is also a sexual legacy. This again connects the gardens of public promenade, such as the Tuileries, with the avenues. The correct performance of the promenade mondaine, with its emphasis on matchmaking between (male) suitors and (female) debutantes, involved moving in rigid straight lines, and exposing the encounters of potential partners to social surveillance. Linear avenues of trees were ideal backdrops for heterosexual bodies to reach one another in the public world of eighteenth-century Paris. Unlike for homosexuals, making one’s (hetero)sexuality visible was not only unthreatening but positively required as part of the social spectacle. This is not to say that homosexual desire did not enter into the Tuileries, but rather that, when it did, it had to work against visibility. Bourgeois men seeking men sought codes through which to become visible to some but not to others, with a backstage of lodging rooms and taverns to which to retreat for the enactment of physical contact, always with the risk of being discovered and, as a result, arrested and imprisoned. Later, homosexual desire found its place in other kinds of spatial configurations: by cruising the narrow stalls of public urinals (a new invention of the nineteenth century) or the dense, unaligned arboreal arrangements of the newly public Bois de Boulogne.

Régis Revenin’s history of male homosexuality and prostitution in Paris describes the “less watched, less lit” environments of the vast woods adjoining the city as the “real places of sexual intimacy” for men seeking the touch of other men in the eighteenth century, in contrast to the risky environment of gardens and their linear alleyways.[8] As Sara Ahmed tells us, there is a more-than-metaphorical relationship between straight lines and straight sexualities. Straightness is whatever is in line with the paths trodden by dominant ways of being. The spatial disposition of the line, with clear views and lack of overgrowth, is quite simply not conducive to public sex. Moreover, as Ahmed notes, straight lines become the infrastructures for straight orientations simply because they are trodden as such. Straightness is enacted by extending “correctly” into spaces that are organized around straight sexuality—spaces that “move us closer to bodies” that are “constructed as reachable love objects.”[9] There are bodily and sexual politics, therefore, wrapped up in the geometries of planting that characterize climate-oriented urban greening. But the contemporary infrastructural vision of trees as devices in a fight against climate change–driven urban heating, represented by the Plan arbre, fails to address the ways that greening is also a cultural, rather than a purely technical, process.

Where the cultural dimension to arboreal heritage is recognized, it excludes these sexual politics. The city of Paris provides a list of “remarkable trees and arboreal ensembles… that distinguish themselves by their singularity, their morphology, their identity, or their social role.”[10] The Elm of Saint-Gervais, for example, standing before the church of the same name, has a history as a meeting place for the enactment of justice since the Middle Ages. Though the current tree was only planted in the 1930s, it gains landmark status because of the gatherings that took place on the ground it grows in, where debts were settled and judgments passed. It seems a tree can become heritage by virtue of what took place in the shade of its predecessor’s leaves. If this is the case, the patrimoine arboré that Parisians live within is also a sexual heritage, one with a history of both enacting straightness and harboring homosexuality. Can the imaginaries of contemporary tree planting expand to englobe this sexual heritage? Cruising, for gay men, is heritage. It is embedded in our cultural representations and shared memory. Yet it is also a necessity for those who cannot afford—whether economically, socially, or both—to live openly as gay men and participate in commodified spaces of gay life. Can Paris’s new trees also inherit the histories of both conformist and deviant sexualities their predecessors bore witness to so that a new arboreal heritage might be imagined for queer life in the woods?

The work of the artist Benny Nemer suggests that they can. Responding to Ahmed’s critique of straight linearity, Nemer’s practice stages “queer affect” between people and plants, working with flower arranging, floral gift-giving, and walking among trees as choreographies to be imbued with the oblique lines of desire that Ahmed understands as enactments of queerness. His work Trees Are Fags[11] is an audio walk staging “a guided encounter with a tree.” It is part of a thread in Nemer’s work that considers cruising as subject matter, as aesthetics, and as method. Nemer sees in cruising a sensibility that has the potential to expand human capacities for attention toward the nonhuman. Meant to be followed among trees in city parks, it invites the listener slowly to identify a single “arboreal lover” through a series of vocal cues derived from methodologies of cruising, programmed so that each user has a different experience of the piece.

Follow the absence of a path, move in the direction of something that is out of view, find a shadow that conceals and use it to reveal something, approach a point where the vegetation is so dense it creates a blockage, walk past a tree but look back at it, approach it at a slant.[12]

Trees Are Fags also works as a queer arboreal history. “Trees,” Nemer reminds us, “have provided an architecture for gay sex since time immemorial.” He continues, “they have cast shadows, created walls and shelters, formed chambers among their labyrinthine branches, for lovers to climb into, to reveal, to conceal.”[13] In describing this architecture, Nemer wishes to “sing the praises” of urban trees, the trees of city parks—such as Hampstead Heath, Colton Hill, the Märchenbrunnen, Uenokoen, Sosnovka Park, and the Bois de Vincennes—where men congregate to have sex: “trees way more sexually experienced than [we] will ever be,” trees that have seen it all. This queer history of urban trees, woven through Nemer’s narration, calls on us to remember the sodomite ancestors who have been seeking one another among the trees since the days when their witchy kin—sexual libertines, healers—were burned at the stake, and long before that. Like the ecofeminist Starhawk, who (as cited in Hélène Frichot’s eponymous essay in the Avery Review)[14] “cries out that ‘the smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils,’” I too can smell the heady combination of sex and persecution, feel their effect in the adrenaline that pumps through my chest—driven by both excitement and fear—when entering that one patch of the Bois de Vincennes whose ground has become imbued with the traces of cruising. For us—the faggots whose bodies, like the trees, were treated as bundles of sticks to stoke the flames of the witch hunts—this is heritage, far more so than the Elm of Justice of Saint-Gervais, whose landmark status was asserted at a time when our ancestors were granted no justice at all. Acknowledging this architecture as heritage means also acknowledging the skin, the sweat, the shit, and the semen that have been absorbed by soil and bark—the ways the bodies of gay men have literally become part of these ecologies.