The bats swept above us as we entered the water. In late spring, the San Juan charged like a desert bighorn ram in the rut. It was strewn with cottonwood seeds: The puffy globs drifted on the khaki surface like a monsoon over a desert escarpment. Dragonflies dipped and blue grosbeaks got in their final bzzts before nightfall. “The old age river”(Są́ Bitooh), as the Diné call it, was alive. But like so many of our rivers today, it was disabled.
My partner and I were on a four-day trip through southern Utah, floating the 27 miles from Sand Island through a deep canyon dome of Martian geology to Mexican Hat, Utah. I stayed with the river that night, talking to the waterway and giving them my gratitude for our safe passage. I listened to their rhythmic voice, absorbing their stories and woes.
Rivers are often at their strongest lifeforce in spring, but it is important to not be tricked. The San Juan may look healthy, but many disabilities have invisible undercurrents: When you float the lower canyon below Mexican Hat, you can feel the river’s terminal sickness as the flow halts, approaching the stagnant Lake Powell. A large tributary of the Colorado, the San Juan is plagued by overconsumption, scorched by climate change and threatened by contamination from mining. Pollution, too — I mistook a blown-out tire for a beaver’s tail on a remote bank on River Mile 11.
As a person disabled by the ongoing pandemic, I often feel a bond with rivers. Despite looking “normal” on the outside, we are made crips by climate change and capitalism. Sunaura Taylor, author of Disabled Ecologies, describes modern environmental health as a “mass ecological disablement of the more than human world, a disablement that is utterly entangled with the disablement of human beings.” In his latest book, Is a River Alive?, Robert MacFarlane writes that “our fate flows with that of rivers, and always has.”
In recognition of that, there’s been a renewed push to grant rivers personhood — a designation that gives them the right to be represented in court by human guardians. The Klamath was granted this status in 2019 by the Yurok Tribe, while in 2021, communities near Colorado’s Boulder Creek and the Uncompahgre River passed resolutions recognizing their rights to flow naturally and maintain biodiversity. Indigenous peoples have long regarded rivers as interconnected entities, and now many groups are leading the charge to grant rivers legal personhood, including the Colorado River Indian Tribes who are considering personhood status for the Colorado River. Yet other efforts in the West, like the drive for the Great Salt Lake’s personhood, have failed — for now.
The section of the San Juan we floated went through Utah. In 2024, the Utah Legislature passed a law that prohibits giving personhood to natural entities, even though corporations are granted those same rights via, most recently, the Citizens United court ruling. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are threatened by the rights-to-nature movement, trembling at the idea of their corporate donors going up against beloved mountains and rivers in the courtroom.
One afternoon on the trip, in the shade of a riverside cottonwood tree, I shivered at the thought of greedy corporations being people. To combat such a nightmarish concept, I closed my eyes and imagined what the San Juan River might look like as a person, drawing from Studio Ghibli’s river spirits.
At first, I saw buzzed hair and a crown of woven yellow prince’s plume flowers. Top surgery scars gave way to arms made of silty rapids and rattlesnake bends. They held a cane made from netleaf hackberry wood. Their fingers were tattooed with hundreds of gnats. If rivers are persons, then surely they are queer and trans persons. And as most have been harmed by corporate greed and debilitated by climate change, they must be queer disabled people, too.
For one, rivers are canonically not straight. They meander, twist and wiggle as the San Juan does through its plunging Goosenecks. Because of this nonconformity, mankind and capitalism have often tried to channelize rivers, a process literally called “river straightening” that forces them into canals in order to tame them. It leads to habitat loss, erosion and even heightened flood risk. Put simply, it’s “conversion therapy” for waterways. Keep rivers wiggly!
As a person disabled by the ongoing pandemic, I often feel a bond with rivers.
Some riparian terms that show the health of rivers are also used to describe sexual and gender identities. Fluidity can refer to how either — or both — can change over time, how they are never permanent. That fluidity can be erotic and connective: Writer Ewelina Jarosz uses the term “hydrosexuality” to describe water as “a non-binary substance connecting all bodies of water on the planetary scale.” Hydrosexuality blends love, care and attraction with environmental justice. Additionally, many terms about queer people are inspired by water. According to the Queer Arab Glossary, “qāyiso-l-mā” is a derogatory Moroccan term for effeminate men that means “one who has been touched by water.” It suggests that queer men are “swaying as if they are liquid.”
The San Juan kept flowing, despite its struggles, carrying us along with it downstream. Our lives were also reaching a confluence. Aaron had proposed to me with a ring he made of grass and a single desert globemallow flower a few weeks before our trip. On the last night on the river, I proposed to him, too: another globemallow bloom that I’d found swaying on our riverbank campsite. He said also yes (phew!) and we skinny-dipped in cool waters sown with Russian olive flowers that had fallen in the river from bankside trees.
There, the San Juan rippled and wiggled in celebration with us as we splashed and swayed. We were two men touched by water who were committing to each other for the rest of our lives. “In sickness and in health” was a vow we had been preparing for since we fell in love five years ago; I was ill when we started dating. Our relationship had also been forged by the rivers of the Southwest, so it was only natural for our first engagement party to include the living river, our friend the San Juan.
Though they weren’t yet recognized as a legal person, we asked: If a river was given personhood, could it marry you? Come spring, I want the San Juan to slide on their bolo tie and officiate our wedding. After all, aren’t the promises of care that we weave into our vows the same as the ones that we make to protect our rivers?
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This article appeared in the August 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “My friends, San Juan.”
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