Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

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

The idea that homosexual relations in animals are necessarily gendered along heterosexual lines has its origins in Freud’s (and others’) view of (human) homosexuality as sexual inversion, the adoption by one partner in a same-sex interaction of the behaviors or roles “typical” of the opposite sex.⁷ In fact, some zoologists have used the very terms sexual inversion and inverse (or even reverse) sexuality to describe homosexual activity in animals. Desmond Morris developed this idea further with respect to animals in a series of papers in the 1950s, in which he introduced the terms pseudo-male and pseudo-female to describe animals who exhibit behavior patterns more commonly seen in the opposite sex; these terms are still used to this day in scientific publications that describe same-sex activity.⁸ Also still employed is the analytical framework represented by such terms, which argues that the occurrence of homosexuality in a species can be directly attributed to, and characterized by, opposite-sex or “gender-atypical” behavior. The argument goes something like this: certain animals in a population are prone to “pseudo-female” or “pseudo-male” behavior; that is, imitation of behavioral patterns found in the opposite sex. This mimicking of heterosexuality automatically triggers “homosexual” behavior in individuals who are essentially “deceived” into thinking they are dealing with a member of the opposite sex, hence they respond with sexual or courtship behaviors.

Often, an attempt is also made to correlate sexual “role inversion” with other behavioral or physical traits that are supposedly characteristic of the opposite sex (or of certain gender roles), such as higher levels of aggression in female Takhi and Mallard Ducks that mount other females. One scientist, in describing a male Snow Goose that supposedly adopted the “male role” in a homosexual pairing, even goes so far as to comment on the bird’s “much enlarged penis” in addition to his greater aggressiveness. As we shall see later in this chapter, this is reminiscent of descriptions of human “inversion” from the early sexological literature, which often focused on the appearance of a person’s genitals as somehow indicative of the “abnormality” or pathology of their homosexuality.⁹

Reciprocal Homosexuality and Heterosexual “Inverts”