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

National Geographic

18-03-2025

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.'
National Geographic magazine.
A version of this story appears in the April 2025 issue ofmagazine.