This year’s Provincetown Carnival is headlined by the drag performer and environmental campaigner Pattie Gonia. In 2018, she posted a video of herself hiking in sky-high heels. Since then, she has racked up almost a million followers on Instagram, co-founded the Outdoorist Oath, a nonprofit focused on creating an outdoor community for BIPOC and queer people, and was on Time Magazine’s 2023 list of Next Generation Leaders.
When Pattie is not strutting through canyons and forests in full face, she is Wyn Wiley, a 33-year-old professional photographer and nature-lover from Lincoln, Neb. Pattie is currently traveling the U.S. on her summer tour, “Save Her!”
As a writer on the climate and masculinity beats and host of the podcast Non-Toxic, I’d been following Pattie for a while, so I jumped at the opportunity to speak with her. Speaking from the side of the road on her way to perform for park rangers at Yosemite National Park, Pattie gave me the rundown on her journey into drag and environmental activism — and her mission to make nature queer again.
Q: Let’s start at the beginning. In a 2021 interview you did with Yale Climate Connections, you said Pattie Gonia started in 2018 as a joke. The name is a pun on the famous outdoor brand Patagonia. Who were you before Pattie, and where did she come from?
It was half a joke but also half because of curiosity. Pattie has given me a chance to get to know my queer self and to continually come out of the closet. So, who was I before Pattie? I was out, but I was a way more closeted version of myself. I was also way more toxically masculine — born and raised in Nebraska, I was taught masculinity and how to be straight passing as a protection mechanism.
I had a lot of people in my life at the time who loved me but with conditions. I’ve learned that love with conditions isn’t love. It’s actually a special, weird form of hate.
Q: How did Pattie change things for you?
Pattie came about when I took a pair of high heels into the back country and started wearing them on backpacking trips with friends.
As a child, nature was a safe space, where I felt free and like I belonged. But through middle and high school, and through toxic masculinity and homophobia, nature became a place that was very much not for me.
I learned that only real men, men that were hunting or fishing, could be outside. I also learned that the outdoors were a thing to be conquered, to be colonized, to be used. And that nature was a resource and not a relative. Pattie came into my life at a time when I was really feeling that toxicity.
I knew I wanted an opportunity to change and to become who I was. What I wasn’t seeing was that through me wearing heels in the outdoors and doing drag outside, I was actually getting in touch with my inner child who loved nature.
There’s a narrative in the world and in the queer community to run to big cities for acceptance. But I have met hundreds, thousands of people who call rural spaces and outdoor spaces home. And I think it’s really important to make community in those spaces.
Q: Let’s talk about the theme for this year’s Carnival: Summer Camp. Growing up, you were a Boy Scout, and you also attended a YMCA summer camp. Talk about your experiences as a camper and what kind of experience you’re hoping to create in your Provincetown show.
I feel like there are two kinds of people in this world: people who went to summer camp and people who didn’t.
Q: I am a person who went to summer camp. And it’s a part of my identity, whether I like it or not.
Same, girl. Here we are. We are in this together.
I went to two very different summer camps growing up. I went to a Boy Scout summer camp, which was the most toxic place I have ever been. And then I went to a YMCA summer camp. That was one of the first safe spaces I was ever in. I didn’t know that until much later in life, when I realized that a lot of the counselors were queer.
I had a lot of mixed experiences, but summer camp at its best to me is a playground to discover who you are and to lean into who you are. That’s what I hope I can bring to Provincetown.
Q: Can you reveal anything of what you’ve got planned for the show?
We’ll have drag kings, queens, and queer performers doing numbers ranging from summer camp to the great outdoors to activism to remembering drag’s political roots.
Q: Do you think of your performances as a form of climate activism?
I struggle when people think of me as a climate voice or a climate expert. What I’m trying to do is to make space for people, especially new people, to join the climate movement. And I want those new people to be people of color, queer people, women, younger people, Gen Z.
Drag has a beautiful and urgent opportunity to fight for what matters. And people fight in different ways. I want to make space for that. Every performer fights when they take the stage, because drag has now become so political. But I want more drag performers, especially people who have large platforms, to stand up and make their voices heard and use their drag for a purpose. There are a lot of people out there stunting in $10,000 looks for nothing and for no one. I want them to remember why drag was created.
Q: RuPaul famously has a big ranch in Wyoming that he leases for natural gas fracking. What do you think about that?
I’m not going to make a comment on that. I’m going to keep my side of the street as clean as I can.
Q: Let’s talk about your relationship to Provincetown, which is sandwiched between the harbor and the National Seashore. We’ve got whales, migratory birds, great white sharks — also rising sea levels. And at the same time, it’s been a refuge for queer people since the late 19th century. What’s your relationship to Provincetown as a drag performer and also as a nature lover?
Provincetown is every childhood wish of mine come true. Here there’s the potential for queer people to be there for each other, to create community, to be in a beautiful, natural place.
And I hope that those queer people can get even more connected to the nature by being out here. But as a ginger, I’m mostly going outside and enjoying nature before 8 a.m. or after 7 p.m. That’s when you can catch me on a beach, in the dunes, or out by Blackwater Pond.
Q: Since Trump took office in January, the situation in the country for climate and for queer people has taken a turn for the worse. Environmental regulations are being gutted. Trans kids are losing access to health care, drag queens are constantly under attack. How are you moving forward now that every aspect of your job has become a lot more political?
Now is the exact time when artists and queer people get to work. Now is the exact time when we need our community spaces. I think there are a lot of people out there in the queer community and the environmental movement who feel very affected by what’s going on, me included. And that’s why coming together and getting to work is even more important. We have and always will save ourselves.
I implore everyone to work their asses off — mourn the losses that are occurring — and also, fucking party. Because the minute they take our joy is the minute everything changes.
Queen of Carnival
The event: Pattie Gonia presents “It’s Camp!” at Provincetown Carnival
The time: Wednesday, Aug. 20, 8:30-10 p.m.
The place: Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St.
The cost: $45 to $155 at events.humanitix.com
