Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

As we have seen, one way that zoologists have tried to avoid classifying same-sex activity as “homosexuality” is by using terminology and behavioral categories that deny it is sexual activity at all. This approach also extends to the interpretations, explanations, and “functions” attributed to same-sex behavior, even when it involves the most overt and explicit of activities. Astounding as it sounds, a number of scientists have actually argued that when a female Bonobo wraps her legs around another female, rubbing her own clitoris against her partner’s while emitting screams of enjoyment, this is actually “greeting” behavior, or “appeasement” behavior, or “reassurance” behavior, or “reconciliation” behavior, or “tension-regulation” behavior, or “social bonding” behavior, or “food exchange” behavior—almost anything, it seems, besides pleasurable sexual behavior. ⁶⁹ Similar “interpretations” have been proposed for many other species (involving both males and females), allowing scientists to claim that these animals do not really engage in “genuine” (i.e., purely sexual) homosexual activity. But what heterosexual activity is ever “purely” sexual?

Two female Bonobos participating in “GG (genito-genital) rubbing”

Most biologists are not as candid as Valerius Geist, who, in Mountain Sheep and Man in the Northern Wilds, readily admits to his discomfort and homophobia in trying to “explain” homosexuality in Bighorn Rams as “aggressive” or “dominance” behavior:

I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-ram mount S-ram repeatedly … . True to form, and incapable of absorbing this realization at once, I called these actions of the rams aggressosexual behavior, for to state that the males had evolved a homosexual society was emotionally beyond me. To conceive of those magnificent beasts as “queers”—Oh God! I argued for two years that, in [wild mountain] sheep, aggressive and sexual behavior could not be separated … . I never published that drivel and am glad of it … . Eventually I called the spade a spade and admitted that rams lived in essentially a homosexual society.⁷⁰

This section will examine a number of nonsexual interpretations, including attempts to classify homosexuality as dominance or aggressive behavior, as a form of play, as a social interaction that relieves group tension, and as a greeting activity. In many cases, these “explanations” are not so much genuine attempts to understand the phenomenon as they are ways of denying its existence in the first place. Often these interpretations are simply incompatible with the facts, especially where “dominance” is involved. Furthermore, while in many instances animal homosexuality does have components of all these (nonsexual) activity types, this does not cancel its sexual aspects. As Paul L. Vasey observes, “Just because a behavior which is sexual in form serves some social role or function doesn’t mean it cannot be simultaneously sexual.”⁷¹ Indeed, both animal and human heterosexualities also share aspects of these nonsexual functions without losing their classification as “sexual” activities.

The Dominant Paradigm