Nor is this merely a question of relevance to scientists, or simply a matter of esoteric academic interpretation. The assertions made by zoologists about the “functions” of homosexual behavior are often picked up and repeated, unsubstantiated, in popular works on animals, becoming part of our “common knowledge” of these creatures. In a detailed survey of primate homosexuality published in 1995, zoologist and anthropologist Paul L. Vasey finally and definitively put the dominance interpretation of homosexuality in its proper perspective, stating that “while dominance is probably an important component of some primate homosexual behavior, it can only partially account for these complex interactions.”99 We can only hope that his colleagues—and ultimately, those who convey the wonders of animal behavior to all of us—will take these words to heart once and for all.
The Desexing of Homosexual Behavior
… two males (Dinding and Durian) regularly mouthed the penis of the other on a reciprocal basis. This behavior, however, may be nutritively rather than sexually motivated.
—T. L. MAPLE, Orang-utan Behavior100
In nearly a quarter of all animals in which homosexuality has been observed and analyzed, the behavior has been classified as some other form of nonsexual activity besides (or in addition to) dominance. Reluctant to ascribe sexual motivations to activities that occur between animals of the same gender, scientists in many cases have been forced to come up with alternative “functions.” These include some rather far-fetched suggestions, such as the idea (quoted above) that fellatio between male Orang-utans is a “nutritive” behavior, or that episodes of cavorting and genital stimulation between male West Indian Manatees are “contests of stamina.”101 At various times, homosexuality has also been classified as a form of aggression (not necessarily related to dominance), appeasement or placation, play, tension reduction, greeting or social bonding, reassurance or reconciliation, coalition or alliance formation, and “barter” for food or other “favors.” It is striking that virtually all of these functions are in fact reasonable and possible components of sexuality—as any reflection on the nature of sexual interactions in humans will reveal—and indeed in some species homosexual interactions do bear characteristics of some or all of these activities. However, in the vast majority of cases these functions are ascribed to a behavior instead of, rather than along with, a sexual component—and only when the behavior occurs between two males or two females. According to Paul L. Vasey, “While homosexual behavior may serve some social roles, these are often interpreted by zoologists as the primary reason for such interactions and usually seen as negating any sexual component to this behavior. By contrast, heterosexual interactions are invariably seen as being primarily sexual with some possible secondary social functions.”102
Thus, a widespread double standard exists when it comes to classifying behavior as “sexual.” Desexing is selectively applied to homosexual but not heterosexual activities, according to a number of different strategies. The first and most obvious is when scientists explicitly classify the same behavior as sexual when it takes place between members of the opposite sex and nonsexual when it involves members of the same sex. This is readily apparent in the following statement: “Mounting [in Bison] can be referred to as ‘mock copulation.’ It seems appropriate to classify this action as sexual behavior only when it is directed towards females. The gesture, however, was also directed to males which suggests that it also has a social function.” Likewise, because a behavior often associated with courtship in Asiatic Mouflons and other Mountain Sheep (the foreleg kick) was observed more frequently between individuals of the same sex than of the opposite sex, one zoologist concluded that this activity must therefore be aggression rather than courtship. Primatologists reassigned what they had initially classified as sexual behavior in Stumptail Macaques to the category of aggressive or dominance behavior when it took place in homosexual pairs, while marine biologists reclassified courtship and mating activity in Dugongs as nonsexual play behavior once they learned both participants were actually male. Ornithologists studying the courtship display of Laysan Albatrosses also questioned whether this behavior was “truly” related to pair-bonding or mating after they discovered that some courting birds were of the same sex. Finally, because (male) Dwarf Mongooses and Bonnet Macaques are as likely to mount same-sex as opposite-sex partners, scientists decided this behavior must be nonsexual.103 This is not to say that behaviors cannot have different meanings or “functions” in same-sex versus opposite-sex contexts, only that the erasure by zoologists of sexual interpretations from same-sex contexts has been categorical and nearly ubiquitous.
Not only do zoologists apply nonsexual interpretations to behaviors when they know that the participants are of the same sex, they also do the reverse, assuming that a superficially nonsexual behavior—especially if it involves aggression—must involve animals of the same sex. A particularly interesting example of these assumptions concerns the flip-flop in interpretation of sexual chases in Redshanks, part of the courtship repertoire of this sandpiper. Because of their somewhat aggressive nature, these chases were originally interpreted as a nonsexual, territorial interaction and assumed to involve two males—in spite of the fact that some scientists reported seeing chases between birds of the opposite sex. Subsequently, more detailed study involving banded birds (enabling individual identification) revealed that most chases did in fact involve a male and a female and occurred early in the breeding season—at which point the behavior was reclassified as a form of courtship. However, it was also discovered that in a few instances two males were actually chasing each other—and of course scientists then tried to claim that, only in these cases, the chasing was once again nonsexual (in spite of the fact that the two males often copulated with each other as well).104
Sometimes the arbitrary categorization of behaviors reaches absurd levels. In a few instances components of one and the same activity are given separate classifications, or the undeniably sexual character of a homosexual interaction is taken to mean only that the activity is “usually” heterosexual. For example, in one report on female Crested Black Macaques, a behavior labeled the “mutual lateral display” is classified as a “sociosexual” activity, i.e., not fully or exclusively sexual. It is described as a “distance-reducing display” or a form of “greeting” that “precedes grooming or terminates aggression between two animals.” Yet the fact that females masturbate each other’s clitoris during this “display”—about as definitively sexual as a behavior can get—is inexplicably omitted from the description of this activity. Instead, this detail is included separately in the “sexual behavior” section of the report under the heading “masturbation”—a contradictory recognition that, apparently, part of this behavior is not truly sexual yet part of it is! In the same species, males often become sexually aroused while grooming one another, developing erections and sometimes even masturbating themselves to ejaculation. Amazingly, this is interpreted by another investigator not as evidence of the sexual nature of grooming between males, but rather that grooming is probably an activity “typically” performed by females to males prior to copulation. Apparently such overt sexuality could only be a case of misplaced heterosexuality, not “genuine” homosexuality.105