My love affair with rats came imperceptibly, without ready origins. Certainly, it didn’t start with a youthful embrace of pet rats—my friend Will had a few, and their furry bodies scampering around his bedroom only unsettled me. A decade ago, in my first fall at Northwestern University, my friend Ramona slipped a plastic rat into my cardigan pocket, a generic party decoration transformed, in time, into a talisman of sorts. Four years later, as I started my life in Chicago, I came to realize the strange truth: I found myself identifying with the city’s most unlovable of beings, a faint tether of identification growing into the sturdy tendrils of rats’ tails, entwined in the knot of a King Rat.
There is one proper origin story, I suppose: while living at the Stone Soup Cooperative in Uptown, where I spent a fleeting, necessary eight months upon crashing out of undergrad, I sat on the ramshackle home’s paint-chipped porch, smoking a joint and shooting the shit with my new housemate Bryce. In that moment, a garden-variety rat scampered onto the front steps, considered—horror upon horrors!—running into our collective home, before vanishing once more into the night. I offered something that didn’t even make sense, yelling to our nocturnal visitor, “I am the rats!”
This sentiment, silly and unconsidered in the moment, grew into a real sense of self-identification in short order. Living communally with other queer and trans people, I began to understand myself as both of those things as well; yet, perhaps just as importantly, I could start to articulate myself in multitudes, which I understood metaphorically in the image of my being a cooperative of rats, sliding through fleeting harmony and chaos in equal measure. I felt like the cooking rat, the long-term planning rat, the be-here-now rat, the reading rat, the gender-confused rat, and countless other rats all living in arrhythmic synchronicity, doing their best to chart a coherent path through the city. I cemented my ratty ardor with a tattoo of the iconic Chicago rat a summer later, since joined by two more, a growing mischief (the term for a collective of rats) mirroring my own sense of devious, gnarled city living.
The rats were my own, a way of articulating the complex realities of embodiment as a trans woman living in a trash-strewn, hostile urban environment. Then, just as unexpectedly, I came to understand that these rats were far more than my own.
Group identification is a tricky thing. There are a million ways to be queer, to be trans, to be a trans woman: each of these labels, capturing some facet of how I’ve fashioned myself over the last six or so years, is only a fragment of a much larger picture, the serrated tip of a piece of broken glass that can, in mosaic form, piece together a fuller image of my being. Yet a label is simply that, a word that we affix to ourselves or something put upon us by others, that is perhaps a starting point for connection, yet never the end of the story. Realizing I was a trans woman who needed cross-sex hormones to become embodied was only a starting point; narrating myself as a collective of rats, then discovering other trans women who had found their own kinship to the quintessential urban creature, helped me get much closer to my true, feral nature.
One of the first people who I saw reflect my appreciation of rats was Never Angeline Nørth, a Pacific Northwest-based writer and artist whose deceptively simple “rat ok” design was gifted to me on a tote bag by my friend Sasha. When we first talked three years ago, Never described a larger posse of what she called “trash animals,” like possums and raccoons that others had bonded with—as opposed to cuter creatures, animals that helped people articulate a sense of chaos. Yet she always wanted more people to appreciate rats, and through her own rat-oriented art, including several zines that explore the sense of familial displacement she experienced through her transition, she began to meet others like me, those who saw rats as their closest kin in the ecosystem of disdained wildlife.
Courtesy Never Angeline Nørth
“I always kind of thought that rats got the short end of the stick, and I feel like not enough people talk about them,” Nørth said. “Now I see more people talk about rats, but that might also be because I talk rats all the time and I feel like the rat people are drawn to me, but I don’t know.”
The way a rat moves through the city—surreptitious and calculated, eager to find the small spaces where others may not know they’re even there—resonated with me early in my transition. At a time in which trans people are being targeted with policies that seek to make us disappear, the ability to hide oneself, to make do while avoiding the powers-that-be that want us gone, had an immense and intuitive appeal. To live on the fringes of the capitalist city, eating other people’s trash and otherwise seeking the company of the other wildlife that inhabit urban spaces, was about as much as I could hope to find for myself under such dire circumstances.
Equally important: the rat is fundamentally a creature of the city, a being that’s just as much an inhabitant of our metropolis as humans. In his book Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants, author Robert Sullivan wrote: “Rats live in man’s parallel universe, surviving on the effluvia of human society; they eat our garbage. I think of rats as our mirror species, reversed but similar, thriving or suffering in the very cities where we do the same.” This feeling of an intertwined fate with our city’s rats, small creatures just trying to eke out their own existence under hostile circumstances, is one that’s only possible because of the city itself, as these creatures refashion their surroundings by burrowing tunnels under sidewalks, secreting food from restaurant dumpsters, in their own improvisational act of survival.
This relationship to the rat—a studied but ultimately distant appreciation, a gratitude for their presence within the city, but not necessarily in my own home—is perhaps easier to cultivate when I’ve never dealt with rats sneaking their way inside. The presence of a rat inside one’s living space is perhaps the most dramatic vision of how a landlord’s neglect exposes the poor to the rat’s terror. It’s an image so striking that such a scene is the very first in Richard Wright’s classic Native Son, as a foot-long rat sneaks into a south-side tenement; even in the face of its eventual death by skillet, “the rat emitted a long thin song of defiance, its black beady eyes glittering, its tiny forefeet pawing the air restlessly.” Forced to fend for themselves under duress, rats are often first to target those who have already been most abandoned by society, the human’s inhospitable living conditions creating an opening that rodents and other pests will pursue with intuitive zeal.
As someone whose day job involves fighting for radical transformations to the way we treat housing, I know the importance of feeling safe and comfortable in one’s own home. Even when living in horrid, often illegal conditions, renters nonetheless try to make the best of their surroundings, in ways that have often meant taking stock of rats and their efforts to get inside. The rat itself became the focal point of a 1963 rent strike in Harlem, a symbol for the tenants’ growing consciousness that strike leader Jesse Gray would capitalize on. Collecting as many dead rodents as possible, Gray and the tenants he organized would bring them affixed to poles as they picketed their landlord, flipping it from the creature that terrorized them into a marker of their growing militancy.
“The tenants are like rats now,” Gray said. “Rats feel their power, and they come out in broad daylight and just sit there. Once the tenants feel their power, they stop running. They’re not afraid anymore.”
If I am myself a mischief of rats, charting an unsteady journey into my surroundings, I know that I am not alone. Nørth’s work, especially her “It’s Okay, Ratdaughter” zines, which capture the rat in many forms and shapes, depict her coming to terms with the ways in which years of pre-transition life created expectations that no longer make sense as she accepts the need to make a great change. “So to be perfectly straightforward, I can’t have someone in my life who doesn’t want to know me the way I am,” one page reads, a sentiment that every trans person must navigate, in some form or fashion, with those that knew them before; a social transformation in which all too many relationships have been shattered, severed by a lack of curiosity about what we might become. Even as I’ve not experienced the loss of birth family that countless others have faced, the doubt expressed in Nørth’s drawings is nonetheless deep-felt, as we push out of our hiding spaces and into the light of day, hoping that other people’s fears will not define our futures.
In this moment, it appears that a love of the rats is not merely confined to trans women. According to at least one TikTok trend, we’ve just passed through a “Rat Girl Summer,” with the hashtag being used 30 million times since its inception by writer Moira Johnson in early June. What Johnson found in the rat is admirable: as she suggests in her first video launching the trend, “We’re scurrying around the streets, we’re nibbling on our little snacks, and generally finding ourselves in places we have no business being in.”
As the trend gained momentum, it animated a vital outlook in its devotees, rejecting an overemphasis on appearance and instead encouraging people to embrace an outgoing lifestyle, refusing to overthink the things that make life pleasurable, like the rat that defiantly hauls a slice of pizza down subway steps. To see the rat picked up on such a wide scale excites me; though I’ve had my own long, winding relationship to the rat, this adoption is affirmation that I’m not alone in seeking a different connection to the city, a desire to move through the streets on instinct and passion, without fear.
The rats will always articulate the unspoken parts of ourselves that others disregard. In this, I am reminded of an essay published in Dazed in April, in which James Grieg argued, “As a gay man, the rat is not my enemy, but my comrade in abjection,” a fitting symbol of what others choose to misrepresent in us. I think about musician Ada Rook, who has long centered the rat in her visual imagery and songs, both in solo work and as part of the duo Black Dresses. Rook’s unrelenting, blown-out sounds often defy intelligibility, a sonic tactic that’s made her work popular to those who are often willfully misunderstood, no matter how well they articulate themselves.
Rook has an as-yet-unreleased song called “Rat Kid Lifestyle,” uploaded to YouTube as a live performance from earlier this summer. Everything about it feels right: Rook tells the crowd to create a tight circle “like a fidget spinner” in the cramped, sweaty room inside Bar Orwell, a low-rent, DIY-oriented dive bar in Toronto, a perfect rat locale. The song is as high intensity and inchoate as so many others that she’s made, and the name “Rat Kid Lifestyle” suggests that it’s just how it’s gonna be. Played at a benefit show to support a friend from being deported from Canada, it also shows that the rats know how to look out for themselves and everyone they care about—if not us, then who?
As the world crumbles around us and our cities fall into disrepair, it’s that basic animal instinct, to look out for those around us and seek collective survival, that the rats might teach us all.
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