Can animals be gay? Pengus, flamgos and whal thk so | Environment | The Guardian

Contents:

• CAN ANIMALS BE GAY?
• CAN ANIMALS BE GAY?
• CAN ANIMALS REALLY BE GAY?
• 11 ANIMAL SPECI THAT PROVE BEG GAY IS NATURAL
• IS MY PET GAY?
• CAN ANIMALS BE GAY? PENGUS, FLAMGOS AND WHAL THK SO
• CAN ANIMALS BE GAY? EXPLORG THE TTH BEHD SAME-SEX BEHAVR THE ANIMAL KGDOM
• WHAT ANIMALS CAN BE GAY: UNRSTANDG HOMOSEXUALY THE ANIMAL KGDOM

CAN ANIMALS BE GAY?

” But the journal that published the paper, Blogy Letters, sent out a prs release a few days after the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.

CAN ANIMALS BE GAY?

In 1999, Bagemihl published “Blogil Exuberance, ” a book that pulled together a lossal amount of prev piecemeal rearch and showed how blogists’ bias had margalized animal homosexualy for the last 150 years — sometim nocently enough, sometim an eptn of anthropomorphic disgt.

Given this big umbrella of theory, the very existence of homosexual behavr animals n feel a ltle like imperable nonsense, somethg a rearcher uld spend years bangg his or her head agast the wall liberatg.

The difficulty of that challenge, more than any implic or explic homophobia, may be why past blogists skirted the THE LAST DECADE, however, Pl Vasey and others have begun velopg new hypoth based on actual, prolonged observatn of different animals, cipherg the ways given homosexual behavrs may have evolved and the evolutnary role they might play wh the ntext of dividual speci. So far, the only real ncln this relatively small body of lerature seems to pot to, llectively, is a kd of flatg, meta-ncln: a sgle explanatn of homosexual behavr animals may not be possible, bee thkg of “homosexual behavr animals” as a sgle scientific subject might not make much sense.

CAN ANIMALS REALLY BE GAY?

But we’re quick to nceive of that great range of activi the way most handily tracks to our anthropomorphic pot of view: put crassly, all those different animals jt seem to be dog gay sex stuff wh one another. ”Somethg siar may be happeng wh what we perceive to be homosexual sex an array of animal speci: we may be groupg together a big grab bag of behavrs based on only a superficial siary.

11 ANIMAL SPECI THAT PROVE BEG GAY IS NATURAL

The Stanford blogist Joan Roughgarn told me to thk of all the animals as “multaskg” wh their private ’s also possible that some homosexual behavrs don’t provi a nventnal evolutnary advantage; but neher do they upend everythg we know about blogy. Young found the assumptn offensive — not bee she was beg mistaken for gay, but bee she was beg mistaken for a bad scientist; the people seemed to prume that her rearch was promised by a personal agenda. Several people I spoke to told me their own sexual inti eher helped spur or mata their tert the topic; Bce Bagemihl argued that gay and lbian people are “often better equipped to tect heterosexist bias when vtigatg the subject simply bee we enunter so equently our everyday liv.

” He is gay, he add, but that fact didn’t seem to tract om his RETROSPECT, the big, sloshg stew of anthropomorphic analys that Young’s paper provoked the culture uldn’t have been ls surprisg. For whatever reason, we’re prone to seeg animals — pecially animals that appear to be gay — as reflectns, mols and foils of ourselv; we’re extraordarily, and sometim irratnally, vted a few months before I vised Kaena Pot, two pengus at the San Francis Zoo beme the latt a tradn of ptive same-sex pengu upl makg global headl. And while he strsed that there is no scientific way of termg if animals are “gay, ” bee the word nnot a sexual orientatn, not jt a behavr, he also noted that, beg the San Francis Zoo, “there’s fely a lot of opn here, ternally, that we give and ll the pengus gay.

IS MY PET GAY?

” Acrdg to the Amerin Library Associatn, there have been more requts for librari to ban “And Tango Mak Three” every year than any other book the untry, three years animals do — what’s perceived to be “natural” — seems to rry a strange moral potency: ’s out there, irrefutably, as eher a validatn or a nunciatn of our own behavr, pendg on how you happen to feel about homosexualy and about nature. Durg the Victorian era, observatns of same-sex behavr swans and sects were held up as evince agast the moraly of homosexualy humans, sce at the dawn of dtrialism and Darwism, people were vted seeg themselv as more civilized than the “lower animals. ” Robert Mugabe and the Nazis have employed the same reasong, as did the 1970s anti-gay csar Ana Bryant, who, Bce Bagemihl not, claimed an terview that “even barnyard animals don’t do what homosexuals do” and was unmoved when the terviewer poted out what actually happens barnyards.

Gert Glossip has ed Bagemihl’s book to create a celebratory, terpretive gay animal tour of the Alai zoo, marketed to gay and lbian tourists. The book has also been ced a brief filed for the 2003 Supreme Court se that overturned a Texas state ban on sodomy and, siarly, a legislative bate on the floor of the Brish Esseks, director of the Lbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgenr Project at the Amerin Civil Liberti Unn, told me he has never rporated facts about animal behavr to a legal argument about the rights of human begs.

CAN ANIMALS BE GAY? PENGUS, FLAMGOS AND WHAL THK SO

”) That beg said, Esseks told me, polls show that Amerins are more likely to discrimate agast gays and lbians if they thk homosexualy is “a choice. Those wantg to discrimate agast gays and lbians may have roped the rt of to an argument over what’s “natural” jt by assertg for so long that homosexualy is not.

Animal rearch monstratg the supposed “naturalns” of homosexualy has typilly been embraced by gay rights activists and has put their opponents on the fensive.

CAN ANIMALS BE GAY? EXPLORG THE TTH BEHD SAME-SEX BEHAVR THE ANIMAL KGDOM

At the same time, rearch terpreted — or, maybe more often, misterpreted — to be close to ppotg that naturalns a specific “gay gene” n make people on both sis anx a totally different 2007, for stance, the Universy of Illois at Chigo nroblogist David Featherstone and several lleagu, while searchg for new dg treatments for Lou Gehrig’s disease, happened upon a disvery: a specific prote mutatn the bra of male u fli ma the fli try to have sex wh other mal. ” (Earlier that year, PETA and the former tennis star Marta Navratilova, among others, were wagg siar attacks on a scientific study of gay sheep, prumg was a precursor to velopg a “treatment” for shuttg off homosexualy human fet.

(Vasey warned me that mislabelg the fa’afafe “gay” or “homosexual” this article would jeopardize his abily to work wh them the future: while there’s no stigma attached to beg fa’afafe Samoan culture, homosexualy is seen as different and often repugnant, even by some fa’afafe. Wilson raised : If a key perspective of evolutnary blogy urg to unrstand homosexualy any speci as a beneficial adaptatn — if the pot of life is to pass on one’s gen — then maybe the role of gay dividuals is to somehow help their fay members generate more offsprg.

And this fact supports a separate, existg hypothis: maybe there’s a llectn of gen that, when exprsed a male, make him gay but when exprsed a woman, make her more fertile.

WHAT ANIMALS CAN BE GAY: UNRSTANDG HOMOSEXUALY THE ANIMAL KGDOM

Like Wilson’s theory, this ia was also meant to expla how homosexualy is mataed a speci and not phed out by the visible hand of Darwian evolutn. But unlike Wilson’s hypothis, don’t try to fd a sneaky way to expla homosexualy as an evolutnary adaptatn; stead, imag homosexualy as a byproduct of an adaptatn.

“The Japane maqu, ” he told me, “ terms of my personal velopment, they raised my awarens of the possibily that homosexual behavr might not be an adaptatn. Another claimed, “Darwian Fundamentalists Dperate to Ratnalize Homosexualy, ” and cleared the way for a menter to somehow bemoan Vasey’s fdgs as “jtifitn” for gay men “to sexually abe their nephews.

A rrectn was ma onApril 18, 2010: An article on April 4 about same-sex pairgs animals misspelled the surname of a director at the Amerin Civil Liberti Unn who works on gay issu and who mented about animal behavr as applito the rights of humans. *Note: We tentnally do not e terms such as “heterosexual” or “homosexual” to prevent any nflatn between human sexualy and nonhuman animal sexual behavrs.