The splatters on my windshield were electric yellow. Against the blue of the desert sky, they looked like daytime fireworks that had frozen at their climax. Each collision cut deeper into my soul, causing me to drop well below the speed limit on the sidewinding road leading out of California’s Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. At a slower pace, my butterfly body count plunged; one female even managed to hitchhike on my car like a bejeweled hood ornament.
I now understand why writer Sara Dykman followed the monarch butterfly migration over 10,000 miles by bicycle: She could pedal at speeds similar to the fiery insects and thereby avoid turning them into clarified butter. At Anza-Borrego, I wasn’t traveling among monarchs, but rather their smaller cousins Vanessa cardui — the “painted ladies,” who always reminded me of drag queens and the rows of colorful houses in San Francisco.
Catalyzed by a wet winter in 2019, nearly a billion ladies started their 9,000-mile migration near the Mexico border, later riding the curve of California into the Pacific Northwest. But they were taking their sweet time; a “superbloom” in the desert justified a little procrastination. At their speediest, the butterflies travel at 25 miles per hour. Ecologist Arthur Shapiro once described experiencing their migration as “like being in a hail of bullets.” Their miles-wide front spanned the desert to the coast, attaining an elevation of 22,000 feet. In six generations, the painted ladies travel as far as Alaska and back. Eggs hatch into caterpillars; caterpillars shed tight skins and construct cocoons, where they sprout wings and transform into butterflies. By the time they return to Mexico in the late fall, they land where their great-, great-, great-, great-, great-, great-grandparents first appeared as mere eggs. In Africa, the same species crosses the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea before making a U-turn at the Arctic Circle.
“When I see a monarch pictured in a magazine or television screen I’m swept back into the strange but comforting intimacy of their winking paradise.”
After returning to Los Angeles, I lived in a fever dream, thinking of proboscises covered with blazing star nectar as the butterflies mated in kinky spirals. According to a review in the Journal of Insect Science, at least 25 species of butterflies exhibit same-sex sexual interactions, and nearly a third of male monarchs partake in homosexual courtships, curling and conjoining their abdomens together. Others exhibit gynandromorphism, with a male wing on one side and a female on the other: a stunning kaleidoscope of colors and patterns, blending genders.
Randy Conner, who was part of the countercultural Radical Faerie movement, wrote a guide to LGBTQ+ myths and lore in which he probed connections between butterflies and queerness. He noted the Greek poet Sappho, herself a gay icon, depicted the god Eros with butterfly wings. Spanish poet Federico García Lorca once imagined Walt Whitman as a “lovely old man” with a “beard full of butterflies.” Writer Brooks Peters describes the “butterfly effect” in literature and notes, writing “as if by some bizarre literary alchemy,” any book with the word butterfly in its title in the 20th century has some hidden gay theme.
I sank into Rigoberto González’s memoir Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa shortly after witnessing the ladies in the desert. Born in the Mexican state of Michoacán, where monarchs winter before their long migration, González connects the orange wanderers with both place and family. “We’d walk around wearing butterflies like appliqués on our clothing,” he wrote of his childhood in the town of Zacapu. “When I see a monarch pictured in a magazine or television screen I’m swept back into the strange but comforting intimacy of their winking paradise.”
The monarch also became a symbol of González’s migrations between México and California’s Coachella Valley, where he picked grapes as a child and had early sexual experiences with closeted farm workers. His connection to the monarchs only grew stronger as he matured, embracing the homophobic Spanish slur he’d been called his whole life. “In México the homosexual has many names … and my favorite mariposa, butterfly, (is) an allusion to the feminine fluttering of eyelashes.”
As the butterflies flew northwest from Borrego, I realized their path would take them across my home in LA. I waited anxiously for them that week, buying bouquets of irresistible asters from the farmer’s market. The day they arrived, I placed the flowers on my windowsill next to a colorful sign that read “Welcome, ladies!”
I drank in the phenomenon from a knoll in Griffith Park, lying next to aromatic sagebrush, watching the river of winged bugs flow above me for hours — translucent orange, white and black wing scales in the late afternoon sun. Most were expected to cross over into the Mojave Desert and cruise the deep trench of Owens Valley like bowling balls down slick lanes, seeking refuge and host plants to lay the next generation.
The dazzling group of migrants overhead reminded me of González and the extraordinary migrations other queer people make. LGBTQ+ asylum seekers traverse impossible landscapes for the possibility of better human rights. There are transgender people fleeing states because of bigoted anti-LGBTQ+ laws, and the constant flow of queer people from rural towns to cities rich with queer culture and life — like my own flight to LA from Colorado nearly a decade ago. Still, there is the urge to return home to my roots like a painted lady, and indeed, queer people are now migrating in reverse, too: from Colorado’s Tenacious Unicorn Ranch to California’s Solar Punk Farm, we’ve been establishing a new queer, rural West.
I drank in the phenomenon, watching the river of winged bugs for hours — translucent orange, white and black wing scales in the late afternoon sun.
Through generations of family and chosen family, queer people have swept over entire landscapes, the fierce legacy of our ancestors within us. We leave home in search of something better, seeking refuge and battling the elements in hope the next generation won’t have to. We might not touch down in the Arctic Circle ourselves, but we each go as far as our speckled wings will take us.
Confetti Westerns is a column that explores the queer natural and cultural histories of the American Southwest. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the September 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The butterfly effect.”
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