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Deer Hunting

June 4, 2023May 25, 2023

It’s deer hunting season north of here. So I hear.

My first copy editing job was for a fishing and hunting quarterly. When I took the job I was sad that unlike campus or advocacy work, I wouldn’t be around queer people all day.

I met a number of hunters. Listened to their tall tales. I listened to learn what they wanted in a magazine, to what they wanted in Bass Pro Shops, and to what they wanted in a hunt. I learned how to shoot a shotgun, how to walk fencelines to flush quail, how to behave in a deerstand and in camp, and almost how to stay warm. I learned to discern between different patterns of camo and the mating calls of turkeys.

I learned that some hunters approach hunting season as an art, others as science, others as escape, or as a mission, or as work, or as a spiritual practice, or as connection to conservation, or as an homage to heritage or as a thrilling hobby. They all had their reasons. They had tricks, too, most of them put time and money and thinking into tricks, strategies, superstitions, plans and obsessions.

I knew deer hunters who bathed ritualistically, to erase themselves by removing their man-scent. They carefully dressed in their special wardrobe and spritzed themselves with the scent of apples or with actual or synthetic doe urine. They moved cautiously, thinking like a doe, walking where she would walk, mimicing mating calls or the scrape of her hooves or the antlers of lesser bucks who didn’t deserve her.

Their entire focus was seducing a buck, the bigger the better, wanting nothing more for hours and hours and days and day on end to pass as a doe, to pull that big buck close close closer. Close enough to possess him.

That’s when I learned that we’re all pretty queer, just about different things.

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