Queering the Animal Kingdom

Bighorn sheep came out of the closet long before we did.

Animal behavior is not a direct guide to human behavior, for several very good and obvious reasons; but it still gives us some valuable insights into the biology and psychology of sex.  Excerpt from an article in Slate magazine:

In an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan on Sunday, former Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron called homosexuality “unnatural,” and a behavior that is “ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization.” We’ve heard that many species of nonhuman animals engage in gay sex, which calls into question the first part of Cameron’s statement. But what about the practice of shunning gays—can animals be homophobic too?

Not as far as we know. Homosexual behavior has been documented in hundreds of animal species, but the same does not hold for gay-bashing. For starters, few animals are exclusively gay. Two female Japanese macaques might have playful sex with each other on Tuesday, then mate with males on Wednesday. Pairs of male elephants sometimes form years-long companionships that include sexual activity, while their heterosexual couplings tend to be one-night stands. For these and many other species, sexual preferences seem to be fluid rather than binary: Gay sex doesn’t make them gay, and straight sex doesn’t make them straight. In these cases, the concept of homophobia simply doesn’t apply. . . .

Researchers believe that gay sex is even rewarded in certain species. For bonobos, sexual activity serves as an instrument of social harmony: It reinforces bonds and keeps the peace. For instance, when a female bonobo migrates into a new group, she often ingratiates herself to the clan’s other ladies by having a lot of sex with them. Far from being shunned, this homosexual behavior is welcomed. And former Stanford researcher Joan Roughgarden has argued that among male bighorn sheep bisexuality may be the norm; those that don’t participate end up as outcasts.

And from Seed magazine's 2006 article about Roughgarden's research:

Male big horn sheep live in what are often called “homosexual societies.” They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males “effeminate.”

Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in “penis fencing,” which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.

As this list of activities suggests, having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there’s a vertebrate out there that does it. Nevertheless, most biologists continue to regard homosexuality as a sexual outlier. According to evolutionary theory, being gay is little more than a maladaptive behavior.

Joan Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford University, wants to change that perception. After cataloging the wealth of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom two years ago in her controversial book Evolution’s Rainbow — and weathering critiques that, she says, stemmed largely from her being transgendered — Roughgarden has set about replacing Darwinian sexual selection with a new explanation of sex. For too long, she says, biology has neglected evidence that mating isn’t only about multiplying. Sometimes, as in the case of all those gay sheep, dolphins and primates, animals have sex just for fun or to cement their social bonds. Homosexuality, Roughgarden says, is an essential part of biology, and can no longer be dismissed. By using the queer to untangle the straight, Roughgarden’s theories have the potential to usher in a scientific sexual revolution. . . .

Of course, most humans don’t see sex as a way of maintaining the social contract. Our lust doesn’t seem logical, especially when that logic involves the abstruse calculations of game theory. Furthermore, it’s strange for most people to think of themselves as naturally bisexual. Being gay or straight seems to be an intrinsic and implacable part of our identity. Roughgarden disagrees. “In our culture, we assume that there is a straight-gay binary, and that you are either one or the other. But if you look at vertebrates, that just isn’t the case. You will almost never find animals or primates that are exclusively gay. Other human cultures show the same thing.” Since Roughgarden believes that the hetero/homo distinction is a purely cultural creation, and not a fact of biology, she thinks it is only a matter of time before we return to the standard primate model. “I’m convinced that in 50 years, the gay-straight dichotomy will dissolve. I think it just takes too much social energy to preserve. All this campy, flamboyant behavior: It’s just such hard work.”

What I say: Your Head Trucker finds all this research mildly interesting, and an excellent rebuttal to the fundamentalists. Still, there doesn't have to be a reason for gayness, you know. It is what it is, and what it is is human - "that is all ye know, and all ye need to know."

You must remember this,

A kiss is still a kiss,

A sigh is just a sigh--

The fundamental things apply

As time goes by . . . .

Keeping Up with the Bonobos

And the albatresbians.  The New York Times Magazine features a thoughtful, well-written piece on "Can Animals Be Gay?" that you should read.  Excerpt:

Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional. . . .

These ideas generally aim to explain only particular behaviors in a particular species. So far, the only real conclusion this relatively small body of literature seems to point to, collectively, is a kind of deflating, meta-conclusion: a single explanation of homosexual behavior in animals may not be possible, because thinking of “homosexual behavior in animals” as a single scientific subject might not make much sense. “Biologists want to build these unified theories to explain everything they see,” Vasey told me. So do journalists, he added — all people, really. “But none of this lends itself to a linear story. My take on it is that homosexual behavior is not a uniform phenomenon. Having one unifying body of theory that explains why it’s happening in all these different species might be a chimera.”

The point of heterosexual sex, Vasey said, no matter what kind of animal is doing it, is primarily reproduction. But that shouldn’t trick us into thinking that homosexual behavior has some equivalent, organizing purpose — that the two are tidy opposites. “All this homosexual behavior isn’t tied together by that sort of primary function,” Vasey said. Even what the same-sex animals are doing varies tremendously from species to species. But we’re quick to conceive of that great range of activities in the way it most handily tracks to our anthropomorphic point of view: put crassly, all those different animals just seem to be doing gay sex stuff with one another. As the biologist Marlene Zuk explains, we are hard-wired to read all animal behavior as “some version of the way people do things” and animals as “blurred, imperfect copies of humans.”

What I Say:  Your Head Trucker is mildly amused by the convoluted attempts of scientists and philosophers to fit homosex into some rigid, all-encompassing Grand Theory of Life; which to me seems just as silly and irrelevant as the fundamentalists trying to fit all the messy, multiform variety of the cosmos into the straitjacket of Biblical literalism.

Both attempts are very short-sighted and missing the point:  namely, that there is a divine and jovial mystery at the heart of things whose depths no one can plumb. 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

--Hamlet, Act I.

As I see it, one might as well try to explain why Australia is where it is and not, say, in the Gulf of Mexico.  Or why the sky is blue, or why stars twinkle but planets don't, or why we say the sun rises in the east when we could if we wanted to just as easily say it rises in the west.  Or why in certain cases the precise compound curve of a lip, a shoulder, a hip, or a buttock makes another person weak at the knees.

Very clever fellows have, indeed, long since come up with explanations for some of these things; but I submit that these delightful events would still be occurring and giving daily joy had no explanation ever been devised.  Explanation is not the same as justification; and some things need no justification at all.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty:  that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.

--Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Who Says It's Not Natural?

Vielpunkt and Z, gay Humboldt penguins at the Bremerhaven Zoo in Germany.

Ran across this feature in Esquire about gay life in the animal world, including rams, swans, bonobos, macaques, dolphins, whales, and koalas. Pretty cool, check it out.

And if you want more documented examples, see the Wikipedia article on homosexual behavior in animals.