Gay Animals: Read the NYT, But Buy Bruce Bagemihl's Book

If Jon Mooallem's editor asked him for a major article called "Can Men Be Tall?" would he have profiled a guy who's 5'10"?  That's what he's done by building his 7,700-word NYT mag cover story Can Animals Be Gay? around the Laysan albatross, known for their longterm female pair bonding. The title itself is terrible; meant to be a question about anthropomorphizing animals, it implies the fact of same-gender animal sex is still in doubt. With more than 450 species regularly engaging in same-gender sex, it's a certainty. For many of those species it is their primary social ordering, and they continue to have same-gender sex even when the opposite gender is available. That crucial fact is missing from Mooallem's misguided yet mandatory article.

One that reason the albatrosses were a bad choice exemplifying "lesbian animals" is that the females don't have sex with each other. They share a nest and take turns sitting on one egg, just as male - female pairs do. Lots of the scientific head-scratching ensues. Why would they do that? Ultimately it leads to this:

"Homosexual activity is often observed in animal populations with a shortage of one sex — in the wild but more frequently at zoos. Some biologists anthropomorphically call this “the prisoner effect.” That’s basically the situation at Kaena Point: there are fewer male albatrosses than females (although not every male albatross has a mate). Because it takes two albatrosses to incubate an egg, switching on and off at the nest, a female that can’t find a male (or maybe, Young says, who can’t find “a good-enough male”) has no chance of producing a chick and passing on her genes. Quickly mating with an otherwise-committed male, then pairing with another single female to incubate the egg, is a way to raise those odds."

Mooallem gives no equal time to the animals that have sex with their own gender when the opposite gender is plentiful. Instead, the article veers back into what humans would do with the ability to control homosexuality through genetics. The researcher who accidentally discovered he would re-orient fruitflies' sexuality got a lot of desperate calls from people wanting to be changed and one letter from a mother whose college-age daughter was contemplating suicide over her lesbian feelings. Couldn't the scientist consider a human treatment to re-orient her daughter's unwanted lesbian impulses and save her?

A further diversion away from gay animals takes readers to the fa’afafine men of Samoa and one theory that the "purpose" of homosexuality in nature -- the holy grail explanation for many of these scientists, both gay and straight -- is to create a legion of gay uncles who nurture relatives' procreative streaks and offspring because it's almost their own DNA.

Mooallem only quotes my hero Bruce Bagemihl twice.

“There is still an overall presumption of heterosexuality,” the biologist Bruce Bagemihl told me. “Individuals, populations or species are considered to be entirely heterosexual until proven otherwise.” While this may sound like a reasonable starting point, Bagemihl calls it a “heterosexist bias” and has shown it to be a significant roadblock to understanding the diversity of what animals actually do.

Bagemihl's encyclopedic book Biological Exuberance was published eleven years ago. He collates thousands of peer-review animal behavior studies and creates a couple hundred profiles of species, ranking their observed same-gender sexual activity as primary, moderate, or incidental, and concisely summarizing their behavior in clear, accessible prose. Named one of the year's best books by PW and the NYPL, it's an absolute masterpiece. I own two copies.

Comments

[D]

A google search for homsexuality, sheep and USDA gave me 160,000 hits. About 8 percent of rams prefer other rams. In good USDA fashion, we want to know why and much research has been done. Differences in the brains of gay and straight rams can be detected before birth. What does that tell you?

[George Gardiner]

Perhaps as important for the layperson is Joan Roughgarden's (Professor of Biological Sciences, Stanford Uni) EVOLUTION'S RAINBOW. It's subtitle is: Why Darwin was wrong about sexual selection).

Published by the Uni of California in 2004 & 2009, Roughgarden's work looks at "diversity, gender,and sexuality in nature and people". She looks at the range of sexual behaviors in animals, especially homosexuality among a huge range of creatures not usually evident.