Trees and the staging of straightness

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 Fags¹¹ 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.

Instead, as “deviant” ecologist Cy Lecerf Maulpoix argues, these traces are framed as pollutants, jeopardizing the “health” and “well-being” of families and joggers whose bodies follow the “correct” alignments. While homosexuality has a long history beneath the trees of Paris, its manifestation in cruising and public sex remains at odds with the imaginary of a healthy life in the green city. It is one of those monsters imagined to lurk in the dark corners of the city. Rather than challenge that reactionary imaginary, authorities would rather straighten out the corners. In the lead-up to the 2024 Olympics, for example, the City of Paris announced that it would rip out and cut back hedges in the Tuileries Gardens that formed two labyrinths that were popular spaces for cruising. The labyrinths were added in a 1990s re-landscaping of the Tuileries, their thick green hedges creating a new set of narrow passages and shadowy corners that provided exactly the walls, shelters, and architectures for the gay sex of which Nemer speaks. The argument for destroying these conditions, according to the director of the Louvre, is “to improve the comfort of visitors and protect the historic patrimoine of the gardens.”¹⁵ Protecting heritage, it seems, means violently defending a straight version of history for consumption by tourists, regardless of the impact on the physical artifact itself or the nonhuman ecology it supports. Now, instead of a labyrinth, there are open lawns surrounded by low, straight hedges, with any remaining narrow, hidden passages fenced off. Like the city itself under Haussmannization, the garden has quite literally been straightened out spatially, in order to straighten it socially. Frichot’s words can be almost perfectly transplanted: “when witch hunts take hold, what results is the destruction of environment-worlds, the eradication of locales of meaning and situated practices, and an inability to undertake both land care and care for social relations, meaning that diverse knowledge practices are likely obliterated.”¹⁶ The environment-world that allowed cruisers a place at the historic heart of the city of Paris has been erased, pushing them into the darker, less accessible woodlands where they are more vulnerable, isolated, and exposed to physical danger. Failing, then, to account for a queer sexual heritage in Paris’s patrimoine arboré is damaging for both ecologies and human cultures, showing how violence against ecologies and against marginalized bodies continues to be linked. The labyrinths were not a heritage from the Tuileries’ past, but they could have been one for its future, carved out as a space where both queer and nonhuman bodies can find shelter in the center of the city.

Trees out of reach

Whereas for Haussmann, trees were elements in a system of organization of society, they are now imagined as networked machines for maintaining cities as habitable. The City of Paris describes trees as our “best allies to fight against climate breakdown.” According to a web page titled “Tout savoir sur l’arbre à Paris,”¹⁷ trees not only absorb CO₂ to improve air quality, enhance rainwater management, and support biodiversity, but also act as natural barriers against visual and sonic pollution, helping to reduce stress. Trees, it seems, are there to save us from ourselves—from all the ways capital has found to make cities uninhabitable.

How, then, does this mechanization of urban nature play out in the shapes of contemporary tree planting and its relationship to queer life? Partially in the spatial distribution of new planting in Paris, and partially in the ways it attempts to keep trees out of reach of those who might inhabit them in the “wrong” ways. Almost 50 percent of the 114,000 trees planted so far are on the embankments of the Péripherique ring road that tightly hugs the inner city, separating it from the sprawling suburbs. Though these embankments butt up against housing and public spaces, they are fenced off, inaccessible to human bodies (other than those performing their maintenance), to be touched only by the eyes from within vehicles skirting the city via the ring road. Like the embankments themselves, which are part of the infrastructural substrate of mobility, these trees form part of the network of inaccessible systems that underpin the motorway, solutions for managing air and noise pollution in order to better integrate it into the lived fabric of the city. In these buffer spaces, trees can be planted densely without fear of inviting the kind of uses drawn to the non-straight spaces of the woodlands. Furthermore, as Céline Baumann describes, trees themselves act “queerly” when they refuse to be “compliant” with the public order, flamboyantly shedding rotting fruits, flowers, and leaves.¹⁸ The City of Paris, it seems, has capitalized on the opportunity provided by the embankments to meet its tree-planting goals without disrupting the social geometries of Paris’s streets and squares. The City of Paris has planted a dense cluster of trees on the infamous colline au crack (“Crack Hill”) as part of a policy to green the surroundings of the Périphérique.¹⁹ This patch of embankment has long been home to a mix of encampments and drug users seeking distance from the exposure of the streets within the motorway interchange at the Porte de la Chapelle—one of the focal points of this year’s Olympics. But along with this, high fences have been installed to prevent access to this new microforest. Here, trees and fences work together as a form of defensive architecture, making clear that this ecology is not open to human use. Just as semen left by cruisers is viewed as a pollutant in a “straight” vision of ecology, so too are the drugs and paraphernalia used by those who might seek shelter among these trees from the violence of public exposure.

Queering the urban forest

So, while new “urban forests” are the flagship of Paris’s tree-planting and greening campaign, their implementation encapsulates tensions between a normative dream of the green city and the nightmares (for some at least) conjured by the idea of the woods: public sex, drug use, informal encampment—everything that finds shelter in shadows and overgrowth. As Shannon Mattern writes, “in Western cultures, the forest has traditionally symbolized the unconscious, the Kantian sublime, the chaotic—a primordial place, the opposite of civilization. And while individual trees might embody ideals of knowledge and enlightenment, such as the Elm of Saint Gervais, their dense aggregation can provoke disorientation and confusion.”²⁰ The much-circulated, dreamlike artists’ impression of an urban forest proposed for the parvis of Paris’s City Hall depicted butterflies flitting through sunbeams as young families with strollers meandered through a sylvan glade. This dream hit up against a reality. The City Hall project was initially canceled because of an underground car park beneath the parvis, which made the soil too shallow for the dark, tangled fungal world of root systems that is so rarely visualized in the desire-inducing renderings of the green city. Now it is back in a diminished form—as banks of trees not intended for human access. Beyond this shadowy subterranean world, then, we might also speculate that it was the fear of “primordial,” “chaotic” life that ultimately dissuaded Paris from creating a new kind of civic space where public life truly plays out among the trees.

Urban forests, however, as the urban geographer Hugo Rochard has pointed out, are a new and even unprecedented milieu for Paris.²¹ As such, their definitions are subject to debate and, I would argue, attempts to imagine their cultural implications are lacking. Are they to be conceived as technical infrastructures for maintaining the public in the face of rising temperatures, or the opportunity for radically new kinds of public ambiance? Another way of asking this might be: What is to be the cultural heritage of today’s tree planting? Just as the alignment trees continue to help straighten movement around the city, today’s vegetal configurations will stage, for 100 years, the way people move and encounter each other. Will the green city continue to be dominated by straight lines of movement, its ecologies stretched along infrastructural corridors and boulevards, or can we imagine a kind of planting that allows the knotty ground of the woods to disrupt this logic of efficiency?

Trees Are Fags, again, offers an alternative to the segregation from and exploitation of trees that characterize Paris’s Plan arbre. As it navigates both overgrowth and sexual possibilities, cruising crosses the boundaries in new green spaces between the sunlit realm of public conviviality and the shadowy ambiance of the creaturely forest. Rather than following the straight paved path, cruising weaves among trunks, getting its feet dirty, being led by instinct. In doing so, it thickens the range of human-tree relationships, rendered instrumental by the infrastructural mindset. As he guides the listener toward an appreciation of the histories that connect the bodies of trees and of gay men, Nemer’s cues tune the senses into the individualities that constitute the monolithic “urban forest”—ill or strong, muscular or slim, with smooth or life-worn skin, resting or bursting with sexual energy and heavy with pregnant seed pods. The trees of the Plan arbre seem, conversely, to be anonymous. Only the past has given us remarkable trees, the present absorbing them en masse, 170,000 strong, into a layer of infrastructure for the “ecological transition.” But this transition means little if it does not also include a shift in the relationship between human and vegetal bodies—in other words, if we do not “re-enchant” our relationship with nature, as Silvia Federici pleads for in her critique of the witch hunts and the enclosure of the commons.²² The Plan arbre has an opportunity to learn from this potential: to re-enchant, to experiment with new configurations that multiply the environment-worlds available to us in the city, rather than reinforcing a relationship of domination over nature—to plant trees meant to be touched, felt, and known like those in the parks celebrated by Nemer.

Overcoming this domination also requires a slower, more consensual relationship to the non-human. City-makers, as Hélène Frichot points out, must ask: “How can we insert spaces of slowness, resistance, and refusal into architectural practice and thought by reclaiming other ecologies of practice?”²³ By positing cruising as such an ecology of practice, Trees Are Fags offers one answer. “It might seem absurd to ask a tree for permission to touch it,” Nemer says toward the end of the audioguide, especially when, as the contemporary planning imaginary would have it, trees are there to work for us. “But,” his soothing voice continues, “given how deeply an unnatural separation between us and trees has been cleaved in this chapter of the Anthropocene; given the entitlement with which humans touch, grasp, and claim whatever we want; given how the language between us is broken; perhaps a gesture of respect, a gesture of repair, a request for consent, might be in order.” So we are invited to do just this—to feel the draw of one particular tree, one arboreal lover, to move toward touching it, but first to ask its permission: “How might we do this, in what language? One thing is certain, it begins by slowing down… So slow down. Now find a way, with words, with breath, a gesture, with carefully directed energy, with the transmission of a thought, find a way to ask. Then wait. Wait for as long as it takes.”²⁴

The slowness of consent, of course, is at odds with the climate emergency. Perhaps we have left it too late to explore consensual relationships with trees as we ask them to help us survive in cities. Perhaps, equally, the unconsidered urgency with which trees are being deployed is locking urban societies into new dynamics of domination with nature. But we cannot simply fill cities with trees, transforming them spatially and atmospherically, without also transforming the ways certain modes of public life are criminalized and marginalized. I have spoken here about cruising, but the same goes for many other activities that flee into the woods, away from surveillance. As Hugo Rochard argued in his account of the development of Paris’s urban forests, the accountancy-based rationality of nature-based solutions is often at odds with the images people hold of trees, and reduces the complexity of our relationships with them. New stories, or new ways of telling old ones, are needed for us to imagine what living in the green city means from each other’s perspectives, how the ecological transition feels for different bodies, what kinds of new invitations or limitations it entails. Those who, right now, are defining a new set of relationships to urban trees, both spatially and culturally, must be ready to hear these stories, but also to follow cues that act as scores for other (for them) ways of living those relationships.