Activist Pattie Gonia is on a mission to make the outdoors a more welcoming place

The outdoors can sometimes feel hostile for the queer community. That’s a conclusion Wyn Wiley reached as a kid at a summer camp run by the Boy Scouts. “I was indoctrinated into this militaristic, masculine outdoor system of ‘You have to be strong to survive,’” Wiley recalls.

Today that kid raised under a stifling vision of the outdoors leads a movement built on a very different story—and does so in heels. After going viral in 2018 for hiking in six-inch-heeled boots, the world’s premier “backpacking queen” was born: Pattie Gonia, an activist in drag who’s turning ravines into runways and striving to make LGBTQ people feel more at home in the outdoors. “I think the narrative, writ large, for the queer community is to run to big cities for acceptance,” says Pattie (who uses she/her pronouns in drag). “And I feel like I ran the other way into the woods.” 

Pattie calls from her home in Bend, Oregon, while out on a hike around a favorite pond. She’s known to perform in lavish costumes, some made from upcycled camping tents. Though her approach to climate change awareness is certainly novel, she’s not a novelty act. “Drag queens have always been at the forefront of community organizing and protesting,” Pattie says, a point reinforced by Parks and Recreation star Nick Offerman, who invited her to perform at last year’s Netflix Is a Joke festival, in Los Angeles, as part of a night of comedy devoted to inspiring action against climate change. Pattie’s set included (among other things) an extended riff on the movie Finding Nemo and the male clownfish’s ability to change its sex. “The health of our ecosystem isn’t a particularly sexy topic,” Offerman says, “nor is it easily made the subject of a comedy set, which makes Pattie’s expertise unique and impressive.” 

Wyn Wiley was raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, and often felt uncomfortable among the alpha males who ran summer camps. But today, Pattie, remains nostalgic for the state’s natural wonders. “There’s nothing like a Midwest thunderstorm,” says Pattie. “There’s a lot of beauty we can see when we look up.” Getting kids to commune with nature is one of the reasons she joined the board of Brave Trails, a nonprofit that offers a summer camp and backpacking trips for queer youth. “One of the biggest lessons the outdoors has taught me is to be where your feet are,” says Pattie. “Very rarely are we where our feet are nowadays. We’re in a thousand different places in our day.” 

Brave Trails recently purchased its “forever home” in Santa Clarita, California, and according to Jake Young, the organization’s director of communications and culture, that deal wouldn’t have been possible without the visibility and corporate sponsorships that Pattie brought in, including significant commitments from the North Face and Tazo. Pattie’s strength is creating a support system—whether it’s for the campers at Brave Trails or for her 700,000 Instagram followers—and that, says Young, is essential work. “Being an LGBTQ+ person in a time [when] there’s so many anti-trans bills and so much negative media and propaganda coming out,” Young says, “it’s so beautiful to not just create resources for these youth, but to give them access to other people like them.”  

Pattie’s activism has taken her to the White House and to Yosemite National Park, where for several years she has been helping organize pride celebrations for park employees. While Pattie often gets press attention for her outrageous looks, including for an enormous pair of wings she wore to an Audubon Society event, her environmental work is effective because it’s personal. In 2023 she released a music video with celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Indigenous trans musician Quinn Christopherson shot in Kenai Fjords National Park, in Alaska, to bring awareness to the steadily retreating Exit Glacier. The place has deep meaning for the person behind the drag persona: It’s where Wiley scattered his father’s ashes after his death from cancer several years ago.  

Wiley reveals he had a “complicated” relationship with his father, but memorializing him while on a kayaking trip in his dad’s home state provided some closure. Perhaps in the same way, Pattie’s advocacy work with Brave Trails can heal old wounds. On the day we talk, Pattie remains focused on the path ahead. “Trying to take pain and turn it into something different,” she says. “I think that’s what queer people always try to do.”