I am on a plane and have an unshakeable itch to beautypost about Hot Rat Summer.
In the summer of 2024, something divine appeared in Seattle's Cal Anderson park.
I walked into the park ignorant.
First, I saw the posters.
I remember the message being everywhere, in every medium. Scribbled on utility poles, on the ground, strung onto fences.
Saint Rat was the pièce de résistance...
Look close. Pay attention.
When I look, I can't help but think about the care that went into her, to feel awe at the scale of time poured into giving life to this gray emptiness. I love the way the blue shifts in the light, from teal to sky. I love the different textures of glass, thick chunks pushing her tail into the third dimension.
All this appeared overnight, in Seattle's Cal Anderson Park, in the summer of 2024. Between 2024 and 2025, the city painted over Saint Rat at least four times, and every time, people stripped the paint.
Since 2025, the city has allowed the mosaic to remain, with two more mosaics being added: Community is Mother and Give us our Roses (while we are still here).
The goal of the artists was to create a symbol of trans resilience.
"Rats are never going to go anywhere. People can try to eradicate us, they can try to remove us from society but we are always there. So, we all love rats as a result." - KNKX Radio
And you could tell, not by the mural, but by walking around the park. Messages of trans joy, love, and persistence covered every surface. Saint Rat had a fragment of the trans flag in her lower righthand corner, her alcove stuffed with offerings of used T bottles and Marsha P candles. New artists kept contributing, despite many not knowing one another.
"The project speaks to different artists in different ways, but the power of community uplifting us, our visibility, the act of asserting ourselves in our neighborhood spaces, and feeling our own presence has been powerful for all of us. Trans people are all around us. And we have always been here." - FANE Mag, issue 4
Trans people will keep being here, and will keep being loved. Hot Rat Summer is eternal.
This is a big part of what makes it so powerful for me—being rather gender nonconforming, it reminds me that I am not alone. Yet there were many more ways to interpret it. 1 In reading messages like "every body is a rat body" and seeing rats in bikinis, I remember feeling a welcome sense of body neutrality. I also remember a friend's thought that it might be musing on how the "rat race" dehumanizes us.
But none of these meanings are what stood out most to me.
See, at the foot of each of these murals is an altar. When I'm in Seattle, I make a pilgrimage to them nearly every day,2 and, nearly every day, there are candles burning. Someone lights them. Someone brings new candles when they're needed, and someone takes the used ones away. Others bring flowers, necklaces, cocktails that spill into the pool Saint Rat watches over, dye spiraling from paper parasols.
It's art! It's the art of humanity, the art of care. It is care, leaving narcan and toothpaste and candy for anyone it might help out. It is not a tidy sort of art. But it's smiley faces in the snow, smudged hearts drawn in pencil on school desks. A mark. It's a sign that a person was there. That someone took time out of their day to experience something beautiful, and to pour their own energy, their own ritual, into it.
My favorite part, that which feels most imbued with sacrality, is the grimy path that lies underfoot—the step people walk on to pass the altars—and the water underneath it. I don't know why it makes such a huge impression on me. Perhaps the sacrality is in the accident of what it reveals? That people were here.
I notice the disgusting, littered muck of the fountain, right below the shimmering water. The cigarette butts, an apple core, the glittering broken glass standing in remembrance of lost candle holders, beer bottles, lip gloss. In signs of humans past, I see the flow of time spent.
It calls to mind a quote from Neil Gaiman's American Gods:
"That’s the American Way – they need to give people an excuse to come and worship. These days, people can't just go and see a mountain. Thus, Mister Gutzon Borglum's tremendous presidential faces. Once they were carved, permission was granted, and now the people drive out in their multitudes to see something in the flesh that they've already seen on a thousand postcards."
I agree. We're might not know it, but we're waiting for an excuse.
Though, perhaps the word "worship" sets off alarm bells in your head. More palatably, we seek to honor something, to sacralize, ritualize. We want to believe that something matters, something bigger than just ourselves. Without caring about something beyond "I," we decay, we collapse internally.
And in order to care about something other than ourselves, we need to connect to that object. In putting stickers in places I love, I feel connected with my city and I honor the loved ones who inspire my art. In my morning yoga, I connect with experience and make embodiment my holy object. In writing this, my relationship with Hot Rat Summer unfolds. And, you know, in praying before meals, or going to religious services, I engage with more traditional styles of devotion.
This is what I mean by worship: connection to something more important.
I find Hot Rat Summer so interesting because it's a new sort of permission. A new form, a guerilla temple, built to honor a community often wary of houses of worship. A sacred site that has grown into what it is because of the contributions of innumerable strangers. Its endurance shows that when you give people permission, they will come.
Or, at least, I choose to see it this way.
It doesn't have to be so beautiful—I'm sure many contributions to it are not made in reverence. It's just setting down some flowers, or lighting a candle, or sticking a sticker.But I like imbuing this with so much importance. In choosing to do so, I make its holiness real… in my mind, if nowhere else. Contributing to Hot Rat Summer makes me feel connected to something greater than myself: community and a communal plot of joy and care and solidarity. Even though all I see in the end are traces left by invisible hands, invisible feet.
Footnotes:
1) This reddit thread has some wonderful thoughts, if you are curious about more interpretations
2) …it's right by my gym. I must admit that I am not so fervent a devotee
You can find more information at https://www.hotratsummer.gay/ (this is where I got the photo of the Cal Anderson is a Holy Place sticker, alongside the second image with the fence rat and trash rat, and the hot rat summer is eternal image), or check out the @hotratsummereternal instagram page.
Hi! Here are some notes:
- If you have anything to add to this post, please reach out!! If you were actually directly involved with the creation of this piece, I'd love to know your thoughts, especially any disagreements. (I'm also generally open to critique, I always appreciate improving)
- I am very new to thinking about anything that, like, smells woo. Thus, there's a good chance that my future self will disagree with parts of this---I'll at least have more to say. So, ah... bear with me as I learn :)
- I wrote this because my friend was confused about this line item in stuff I like: "Hot rat summer (ᓚᘏᕐᐷ NOT the nerds)," and I didn't feel like any other sources touched on what I found interesting.
Here are some photos from the instagram:
And here are some photos I've taken:
