Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

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