Out of the Woods

"What I find really compelling about this book, actually, is his rejection of the notion of safe haven. Which I think is really necessary in this field. We have a tendency to write cosy things about nature-as-cure, nature-as-healing. Luke Turner flips this around. He fully interrogates the idea and looks at it through multiple historical lenses, and his own, which I think is really exciting. He’s incredibly frank about sexuality and sexual assault and how when we go searching for beauty we can so easily be thrown back to our worst moments. In his writing, the forest and the city bleed together. There isn’t a nature/culture divide in his work. He rejects this idea of the forest as rural idyll, and gives us these stories of the forest as a place of work. He talks about how ancient woodlands are managed landscapes over time. He talks a lot of crime, of sexuality, of dead bodies in the forests. I come to this book with a particular interest because when Luke was working on Epping Forest, I was writing my PhD about Hampstead Heath. I had been studying dead bodies found on Hampstead Heath and sexuality on Hampstead Heath, and Luke does this so much better than I ever could. It’s very raw and visceral. “He talks a lot of crime, of sexuality, of dead bodies in the forests” That’s really exciting, because if I have to read another book that’s just ‘I went forest bathing, and everything was okay’ . . . While I know that we can find great moments of healing in the natural world, it’s a dangerous course of thought that allows us to think that it’s there in service of us, rather than an entangled and complicated web that doesn’t have us at its centre. Luke does a really good job of this. I wrote down a quote: The forest for him is “a space that asks no questions and demands nothing in return.” Not a place where we can go and ask our questions and get them answered, necessarily. He rejects that, which is quite shockingly rare right now in nature writing. Yes. It’s a vast forest that has been managed, and central to a human community over time. There’s a lot of coppiced woodland, where people have used the timber, and the trees have grown in this shape due to our input. It’s very much this place where human culture and the natural world are shown to be actually quite entangled things. The thing I enjoy most about Luke’s writing is just he has it out for Millennial nature porn. As someone who really loves social media, someone who is very much torn between those two worlds, he’s just an incredibly necessary voice at the moment, not in a fusty old man way, because he’s a young guy, but rather to force us to disrupt this idea that we can just go out into forest, and it will optimise our way of living, then we can go back to our jobs and be good capitalist subjects. I think Luke really is very good at unpacking the problems with that kind of thinking."

"Yes, it’s interesting that the three books I’ve chosen for the B, the T, and the I on this list are more recent titles, because I think we have been less aware of the bi community, the trans community and in particular the intersex community until very recently. What’s interesting about bisexuality is that, I think, we have become comfortable with the concept of bisexual women—particularly among a certain sort of arty, bohemian set—but I don’t think we hear enough about bisexual men. I don’t think we really hear about them at all, to be really honest. There are loads of sexual studies where participants are shown sets of ‘erotic’ images, and your genital arousal, pupil dilation and reported states of arousal are all measured. Even the findings of these experiments, largely, seem to say that bisexual men don’t exist. Meanwhile, you find that women tend to be aroused across the board by anything, whatever the genders and orientations of the people they are watching. Even if women might not publicly declare the arousal, their physiology says otherwise. I find that very interesting—that female sexuality is more broad, more vast than we, as a society and culture, like to admit. The findings of these studies often say that the men were either turned on by men, or turned on by women. So there is this weird idea that there aren’t bisexual men. Luke’s book was really important for meeting that need for a role model or some kind of representation. I guess he’s a tiny bit younger than me: he talks about how in the 1990s, sex education in schools was woeful for heterosexuals, let alone gays and lesbians, and especially those in the middle. How he comes across those different sexualities is very extreme and very different. He’s primarily having settled and domestic relationships with women, but the male sexuality he stumbles across is in gay male cruising grounds in Epping Forest when he is exploring, as you say, his natural environment among the trees. This very in-your-face male sexuality, which is definitely part of the gay male scene. And you know what? Good for them, if everything is consensual and safe. But of course there’s a whole other side to gay male sexuality and relationships. I know some very, very committed gay men who have been married to a civil partner for decades. But it’s interesting that Luke’s experience of that queer sexuality is possibly quite scary—anonymous sex is available if you want it, but gosh, is that what he’s looking for? He very poetically weaves in this conflict about his bisexuality, and wanting to own both parts of that identity, with this story about his relationship with nature. There is something sexy about nature and the outdoors, something organic, real and earthy. You could be right. I think that’s part of the complexity of being gay: your sexual orientation shapes the course of your life, shapes what friendships you’re going to make, shapes what bothers you. It shapes what parties you go to, what bookshops you go to… So much of your identity is shaped by sex. I don’t think it’s the same for straight people. The friendships you make are just people you hung out with at school and ended up having common interests with. For so long, I wrote about sex, I spoke a lot about sex, because I thought my life had been so defined by it. I thought it would be difficult to have a relationship with a woman that I had lost that sexual passion with, because surely that would be a compromise, almost like being with a man. Which of course it’s not… because now I’ve got an amazing partner. We are engaged to be married! But there is a complexity around gay sexuality because our culture and identity has been so shaped by sex that it’s almost hard to escape it, and the feeling that sex must be vital to the health of our relationships. I think that has partly fuelled the serial monogamy you see in lesbian relationships—because they can settle quite quickly into something that feels like a kind of domestic friendship. Gay men too. But it’s sort of a stereotype that lesbians suffer from what’s known as ‘lesbian bed death’, a phrase coined by an American sexologist called Dr Pepper Schwartz. This was back in the 1970s; she found lesbian couples reported themselves to be having the least sex in longer term monogamous partnerships."