Chapter 4
Explaining (Away) Animal Homosexuality
In August 1995 a historic event took place: a special symposium on sexual orientation in animals was held at the 24th International Ethological Conference (ethologists are zoologists who study animal behavior). This was an unprecedented occurrence: the first time that animal homosexuality was formally recognized by a zoological organization as a legitimate subject of inquiry unto itself. As hundreds of zoologists and other scientists gathered from more than 40 countries around the world to discuss the latest findings and hypotheses, this conference held the promise of inaugurating a new era in the study of animal homosexuality—one characterized by an absence of the judgmental attitudes chronicled in the previous chapter.
Unfortunately, what actually transpired at the conference is symbolic of the pitfalls that have plagued discussions of animal homosexuality throughout the scientific study of this topic. The symposium’s stated mission was to explore “behavioral correlates of sexual plasticity”; its organizer’s opening remarks even invoked Paul L.Vasey’s recent work on primate homosexuality—to the visual accompaniment of giant photographs of human gay couples projected on the screen.1 Yet only a handful of papers at the symposium even mentioned homosexuality, let alone dealt with it in any depth. Most were concerned with the hormonal and neurological correlates of male and female differences in behavior and anatomy—reflecting the still widespread view that homosexuality is simply an example of gender “inversion” or “gender-atypical” behavior (e.g., males exhibiting “female” behavior patterns and vice versa). Ironically, among the conference attendees were a veritable who’s who of zoologists who have observed homosexual behavior firsthand in wild animals—a treasure trove of information on the topic that went virtually untapped by the symposium’s organizers and all but unnoticed by the conference-goers.2 On the final day of the conference, after it became apparent that animal homosexuality would receive no more than a cursory discussion in any of the formal presentations, one zoologist tacked a hand-scrawled note on the public message-board: “I am looking for examples of homosexual affairs in insects, please contact …”—a cogent reminder of both the desire for, and lack of, information on this subject at the very locus where it should be most available.
What happened at this conference is not unusual. The scientific discourse surrounding animal homosexuality has been preoccupied with finding an explanation for the phenomenon, often at the expense of providing comprehensive descriptive information about, or acknowledgment of, the actual extent and diversity of same-sex activity throughout the animal kingdom. Rather than being seen as part of a spectrum of natural variation in sexual and gender expression, homosexuality and transgender are viewed as exceptions or anomalies that somehow stand outside the natural order and must therefore be “explained” or “rationalized.” In most respects, by trying to answer the question “Why do some animals engage in homosexual behavior?” scientists have simply found an opportunity to continue many of the same homophobic attitudes documented in the preceding chapter (while ignoring the biases inherent in such a question in the first place). Significant numbers of zoologists are willing to concede that same-sex courtship, copulation, and pair-bonding are indeed “sexual” or “homosexual” activities. However, they commonly propose alternative explanations for these behaviors premised on the notion that this activity is still in some way “anomalous” or “aberrant.” Ultimately, most such attempts to find an “explanation” have failed outright or are fundamentally misguided. In this chapter we’ll explore four such “explanations” that crop up repeatedly in the scientific and popular discourse surrounding animal homosexuality—the idea that homosexuality is an imitation of heterosexuality, a “substitute” activity when the opposite sex is unavailable, a “mistake,” or a pathological condition. These explanations need to be addressed not only because they are widespread within the scientific establishment, but also because they form part of the popular mythology surrounding animal homosexuality. Each of these ideas or analyses is in fact incorrect—or at the very least, only partially relevant.
Significantly, each of these explanations has also been proposed at various times as the “cause” or “reason” for human homosexuality, and equally as often shown to be false. In fact, the language and logic of many of these explanations for animals are directly out of the psychopathological analyses of human homosexuality from the 1940s and 1950s (which, in turn, are a continuation and elaboration of earlier prejudicial attitudes about “abnormal” behaviors). So similar are they to the luridly homophobic accounts of these eras that many such descriptions would be entirely interchangeable were it not for use of the word animals in one and people in the other. The nearly seamless continuity between attitudes toward human and animal homosexuality is exemplified by the following pair of “observations,” each of which reduces homosexuality to a form of role-playing imitative of heterosexuality:
… one woman lying on top of another and simulating in movements the act of intercourse … gratifies her masculine component … . Some authorities regard [the partners of these] women … as pseudohomosexuals. The number of sex-starved women who yield to homosexuality … is much greater than one might suppose.
—F. S. CAPRIO, female homosexuality, 1954
female [s] … occasionally carry out elaborate homosexual pseudocopulatory manoeuvres. Usually one female assumes the male role and mounts another female … and the two animals then perform a remarkably realistic pseudocopulation.
—from a scientific description of Northern Fur Seals, 19593
Sadly, such perspectives on animal homosexuality are still prevalent today among both scientists and nonscientists alike. In many cases, people are still reapplying to animals the same outmoded views of homosexuality that were used to condemn and pathologize the behavior in humans throughout most of this century. Such “explanations” have since been shown to be untenable (if not downright laughable) for people, and they should similarly have been abandoned long ago by scientists studying animals.
“Which One Plays the Female Role?”—Homosexuality as Pseudoheterosexuality
One of the most prevalent and pernicious misconceptions about animal homosexuality is that it is simply an imitation of heterosexuality and heterosexual gender roles.4 In numerous species, animals that participate in homosexual interactions are assigned—sometimes arbitrarily—to one of two roles: “male” or “female.” Masculine or feminine, malelike or femalelike, male-acting or female-acting, male mimicry or female mimicry, pseudo-male or pseudo-female are just some of the other terms widely used to refer to the participants in homosexual interactions.5 In other words, homosexuality is seen merely as a replica of heterosexuality—male—female patterns transposed onto same-sex partners. In perhaps the most extreme example of this viewpoint, one scientist actually treated the homosexual couples in his captive population of Orange-fronted and Aztec Parakeets as stand-ins for heterosexual pairs. Because of the rather embarrassing fact that there were more same-sex than opposite-sex pairs in his flock, he used several homosexual couples as male-female surrogates in his experiments on “heterosexual” pair-bonding behavior. For this to work, however, “it was necessary … to assume that in homosexual pairs one bird assumes the role of the male, the other of the female, and that behavioral events between such birds are those typical of heterosexually paired birds.” This assumption entirely disregarded the fact that female pairs in this species differ in important respects from heterosexual pairs (for example by exhibiting mutual, as opposed to one-way, courtship feeding) and probably also hindered the discovery of other such differences.6