Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

In the 1890s, Oscar Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, characterized homosexuality as “the Love that dare not speak its name,” referring to the silence and stigma surrounding disclosure of homosexual interests and discussion of same-sex activities. ⁶¹ An analogue to this silencing and stigmatization exists in the pages of zoology journals, monographs, and textbooks, and in the wider scientific discourse. Discussion of homosexual activity in animals has frequently been stifled or eliminated, and a number of examples can only be considered active suppression of information on the subject. When several comprehensive reference works devoted to every conceivable aspect of an animal’s biology and behavior are published, including chapters by scientists who originally observed homosexuality in the species, and yet consistently no mention is made of that homosexual behavior, one has to wonder about the “objectivity” of these scientific endeavors.

At one extreme, there are cases of apparently deliberate removal of information. In 1979, a report on Killer Whale behavior was issued by the Moclips Cetological Society, a nonprofit scientific organization devoted to whale study. Sexual activity between males—classified explicitly as “homosexuality” in the report—was discussed at some length, concluding with the statement, “Homosexual behavior has been observed in many animals including cetaceans, canids, and primates, and, in some cases, it has significance for social order.” A year later, when this report was published as a government document for the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, all mention of homosexuality was eliminated even though the remainder of the report was intact.⁶² At the other extreme are cases where homosexuality is discussed but is buried in unpublished dissertations, obscure technical reports, foreign-language journals, or in articles whose titles give no clue as to their content. For example, the earliest reports of same-sex courtship and mounting in wild Musk-oxen appeared in an unpublished master’s thesis at the University of Alaska and a (published) report for the Canadian Wildlife Service. Consequently, a study on homosexual activity in captive Musk-oxen conducted more than 20 years after the initial discovery fails to mention any occurrence of this behavior in the wild. Similarly, the first reports of Walrus homosexual activity, complete with photographs, were published in an article with the rather opaque title of “Walrus Ethology I: The Social Role of Tusks and Applications of Multidimensional Scaling,” while all records of homosexual behavior in Harbor Seals are contained in unpublished reports and conference proceedings that are only available at a handful of libraries in the world. This perhaps explains why virtually every subsequent discussion of homosexuality in animals omits any mention of these two species.⁶³

Between these extremes are numerous examples where homosexuality is “overlooked” or fails to gain mention. Describing itself as “the culmination of years of intensive research and writing by more than 70 authors”—all experts on the species—the massive book White-tailed Deer: Ecology and Management (1984) presents in minute detail every imaginable aspect of this animal’s biology and behavior, no matter how obscure or rare. There’s even room in the book’s nearly 900 pages for lengthy discussion of “abnormal” and pathological phenomena (a category in which homosexual activity is often placed). Although the chapter on behavior was coauthored by the scientist who originally described homosexual mounting in White-tailed Deer, there is no mention anywhere in the book of this particular behavior. Nor is there discussion of the transgendered deer found in Texas, even though a whole chapter is devoted to this regional population. A decade later, the same scenario was repeated when another volume of the same scope and on the same species was put out by the same publishers. Similarly, a standard scientific source book, The Gray Whale, Eschrichtius robustus (1984), omits any reference to homosexuality in this species even though it includes a chapter by the first biologist to record same-sex activity in Gray Whales.⁶⁴ Several comprehensive reference volumes on woodpeckers fail to mention homosexual copulations in Black-rumped Flamebacks, even though no other (hetero)sexual behavior has ever been observed in this species. This omission cannot be due to the putative rarity or “insignificance” of such behavior, since one book does mention another behavior that has only ever been observed once in wild woodpeckers—bathing.⁶⁵ Other in-depth surveys of individual species follow suit, eliminating any mention of homosexuality even when they make direct use of other information from the very sources that describe same-sex activity.⁶⁶