“I’ve always had a very strong connection to the sea,” says author Sabrina Imbler, who grew up in California by the Pacific Ocean. “I remember always being like: ‘If I could live anywhere, this is where I would be: I would be a fish in this place.’ I think about queerness in a similar way– as a space of possibility and radical imagination.” It is with this in mind that Imbler’s essay collection, My Life in Sea Creatures, published at the end of last year, explores 10 sea or aquatic creatures and how, among other things, they relate to their identity as a queer, mixed-race person.
There is, for example, Imbler’s essay on cuttlefish, which are known for their capability to change appearance to resemble the opposite sex. “I found it very liberating to try to understand the many ways in which a cuttlefish can transform,” adds Imbler, speaking over Zoom from where they now live in New York. In another chapter, Imbler explores the yeti crab, which lives in deep-sea hydrothermal vents – spaces, they say, “that we humans would consider very hostile or inhospitable to life”. This got Imbler “thinking about the ways in which I feel like queer people often take refuge in spaces that straight people don’t want”.
Imbler is not the only queer writer turning to the fluidity of oceans and their inhabitants as a means of exploring LGBTQ+ identity. Lars Horn, in their latest book, Voice of the Fish, uses mythology, water and fish to explore their trans experience, while drag artist Amrou Al-Kadhi’s 2019 memoir Life as a Unicorn includes a section on how tropical fish helped them understand their sexuality and gender identity. Imbler puts these connections between the ocean and queer identities down to the sea being “full of different bodies [and] different ways of being in the body”.
When the London-based author Julia Armfield began writing her debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea, out in paperback next month, the ocean setting was a no-brainer. So much of the lesbian media she had been consuming “really did involve the sea quite a lot”, she says: Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet begins in the coastal town of Whitstable, for example, while the films Ammonite and Portrait of a Lady on Fire are both set by the sea. “What is it with these lesbians, and why are they all so wet?” Armfield asked in an essay on the subject published by Lit Hub last year.
With themes of grief, love and loss, Our Wives Under the Sea explores the relationship between Leah and her marine biologist wife, Miri, after Leah returns from a deep-sea expedition gone wrong. In writing it, Armfield took inspiration from Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group, which, she says, includes a “crucial act of coming out, which is also to do with going over the ocean and coming back again”. While Our Wives is “not a coming out novel”, it is about “finding layers of yourself and becoming and re-becoming”, Armfield says. “All of that fits so well into queer storytelling, which is why queer storytellers return to it over and over again.”
This trend of queer writing about oceans and water is set to continue, with Maria Ingrande Mora’s The Immeasurable Depth of You due out in March and Tanya Byrne’s The Mermaid of Black Rock in September.
Out next month is New York-based author Jade Song’s Chlorine. It follows the life of competitive swimmer Ren Yu, who loves mermaids (“the kinds that call sailors to their doom … not the clean, sanitised version in the Little Mermaid,” the author specifies). As Ru continues her swimming career, “she dreams of being in the water permanently seeking a life and a self and a body as the mermaid that she’s always wanted to be”, Song explains.
“It’s a novel for anybody who’s ever dreamed of transcending their bodies and their selves into a truer state of being – truer to ourselves, not true to whatever standard society has set in us,” adds Song. “Which is, I think, what we all long for, and I think is inherently queer, because it might not be what we’ve been told how we should be.”
Song was not “necessarily conscious” of their decision to explore LGBTQ+ themes in this way – but on reflection, it makes sense to them. “I do think, looking back, being queer feels like moving through water while everyone else is on land, because you have to learn how to swim, you have to learn how to move your body, learn to adapt your lungs,” they say. “But at the same time, that’s what’s really beautiful about it, because being queer is so wonderful. You learn how to be.”
The book also resonates with the pride Song has in their identity. “I am an Asian queer femme in America, and in a way that makes me a monster,” they say. “A sexy monster, just like a mermaid, but a monster nonetheless. But I think being monstrous is far more fun than being a normal, boring human.” Armfield, too, talks of how she used monsters to embrace queerness in her short story collection Salt Slow. “I think that reclaiming the monstrous as a queer person has always been something I’ve been really interested in,” she adds.
For Imbler’s part, writing their book was, they say, a “transformative experience” and one which “taught me a lot about embracing fluidity”.
“The person who pitched the book is a different version of myself than I am now,” they add. “It has really helped me to understand myself as a person but also, as an organism on Earth, to look to other organisms and to try to find inspiration in them.” This, they say, is what they want to share with others. “I hope that anyone who is hoping to understand their queerness feels open to looking to the natural world.”
