A drawing from 1896 showing two male Scarab Beetles copulating with each other. This is one of the first scientific illustrations of animal homosexuality to be published.
Unfortunately, in a few cases scientists have subjected animals to more extreme experimental treatments, procedures, or “interventions.” During several studies of captive animals, same-sex partners in Rhesus Macaques, Bottlenose Dolphins, Cheetahs, Long-eared Hedgehogs, and Black-headed Gulls (among others) were forcibly separated, either because their activities were considered “unhealthy,” or in order to study their reaction and subsequent behavior on being reunited, or to try to coerce the animals to mate heterosexually. A female pair of Orange-fronted Parakeets was forcibly removed from their nest—which they had successfully defended against a heterosexual pair—in order to “allow” the opposite-sex pair to breed in their stead (based in part on the mistaken assumption that female pairs are unable to be parents). Female Stumptail Macaques had electrodes implanted in their uteri in order to monitor their orgasmic responses during homosexual encounters, while female Squirrel Monkeys were deafened to monitor the effect on vocalizations made during homosexual activities.
Although intended ostensibly to reveal important behavioral and developmental effects, the “treatments” applied to animals have in some cases been disturbingly similar to those administered to homosexual people in an attempt to “cure” them (separation or removal of partners, hormone therapy, castration, lobotomy, and electroshock, among others). Numerous primates, rodents, and hoofed mammals, for example, have been subjected to hormone injections to see how this might affect their homosexual behavior or intersexuality. Macaques were castrated as part of behavioral studies that included investigations of homosexual activity, as were White-tailed Deer to determine the “cause” of transgender in this species. Cats have even been lobotomized in order to study the effect on their (homo)sexuality. In some cases, biologists have gone so far as to kill individuals participating in same-sex activities (e.g., Common Garter Snakes, Hooded Warblers, Gentoo Penguins) in order to take samples of their internal reproductive organs.8 The reasons for this—usually to verify their sex or to determine the condition of their reproductive systems, including the presence of any “abnormalities”—reveal the incredulity as well as the often distorted preconceptions that many scientists harbor about homosexuality. As we will see in the next sections, these attitudes often carry over into the “interpretation” or “explanation” of homosexuality/transgender as well.
“A Lowering of Moral Standards Among Butterflies”: Homophobia in Zoology
… I have talked with several (anonymous at their request) primatologists who have told me that they have observed both male and female homosexual behavior during field studies. They seemed reluctant to publish their data, however, either because they feared homophobic reactions (“my colleagues might think that I am gay”) or because they lacked a framework for analysis (“I don’t know what it means”). If anthropologists and primatologists are to gain a complete understanding of primate sexuality, they must cease allowing the folk model (with its accompanying homophobia) to guide what they see and report.
—primatologist LINDA WOLFE, 19919
There is an astounding amount and variety of scientific information on animal homosexuality—yet most of it is inaccessible even to biologists, much less to the general public. What has managed to appear in print is often hidden away in obscure journals and unpublished dissertations, or buried even further under outdated value judgments and cryptic terminology. Most of this information, however, simply remains unpublished, the result of a general climate of ignorance, disinterest, and even fear and hostility surrounding discussion of homosexuality that exists to this day—not only in primatology (as Linda Wolfe describes), but throughout the field of zoology. Equally disconcerting, popular works on animals routinely omit any mention of homosexuality, even when the authors are clearly aware that such information is available in the original scientific material. As a result, most people don’t realize the full extent to which homosexuality permeates the natural world.
Scientists are human beings with human flaws, living in a particular culture at a particular time. Although the profession demands standards of “objectivity” and nonjudgmental attitudes, a survey of the history of science shows that this has not always been the case. For example, the sexism of much biological thinking has been exposed by a number of feminist biologists over the past two decades.10 They have shown that not only are scientists fallible human beings, but most are men—and their scientific theorizing has often been (and in many cases continues to be) detrimentally colored by their own and their culture’s (often negative) attitudes toward women. This observation can be taken a step further: scientists (who are often heterosexual) frequently project, consciously or unconsciously, society’s negative attitudes toward homosexuality onto their subject matter. As a result, both scientific and popular understanding of the subject have suffered.11
There are notable exceptions, of course. A number of scientists have presented relatively value-neutral descriptions of same-sex activity in various species without feeling a need to overlay their own commentary on the behavior, and several authors have recognized that homosexual activity is a “natural” or routine component of the behavioral repertoire in certain animals. Zoologist Anne Innis Dagg, for example, offered a groundbreaking survey of the phenomenon among mammals in 1984 that was light-years ahead of her contemporaries, while the more recent work of primatologist Paul L. Vasey is beginning to directly address some of the inadequacies and biases of previous studies.12 Aside from these few examples, though, the history of the scientific study of animal homosexuality has been—and continues to be—a nearly unending stream of preconceived ideas, negative “interpretations” or rationalizations, inadequate representations and omissions, and even overt distaste or revulsion toward homosexuality—in short, homophobia.13 Moreover, not until the 1990s did zoologists begin to address such biased attitudes: Paul Vasey and Linda Wolfe are, so far, the only scientists to acknowledge in print that there may be a problem in their profession (and Wolfe the only one to name this specifically as homophobia). The full extent, history, and ramifications of the problem, however, have not been previously discussed or documented.
The Perversion of Scientific Discourse
From a distance this might be mistaken for fighting, but perverted sexuality is the real keynote … . In fact, the birds seem sometimes hardly to understand themselves, or to know where their feelings are leading them … . My principal observation during the earlier part of the time … was a repetition of what I have before noted in regard to the sexual perversion, as one calls it—a term which serves to save one the trouble of thinking … .