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THE FABULOUS KINGDOM OF GAY ANIMALS | PAGE 1, 2, 3
Bagemihl ridicules ingenious explanations researchers have given for why animals might appear not to be straight arrows. It's dominance. It's a contest of stamina. It's barter for food. It's aggression. It's appeasement. They're confused and don't realize that they're both the same sex. It's a way of reducing tension. They're just playing! And my favorite: It's a greeting. Dominance is the most popular excuse, with animals portrayed as jockeying for status with the ferocity of assistant professors, when they're only fooling around. "At times, the very word dominance itself becomes simply code for 'homosexual mounting,' repeated mantralike until it finally loses what little meaning it had to begin with," Bagemihl writes. Captive animals are subjected to the prison comparison: They're like prisoners in an unnatural situation, so that's not real homosexual activity in that cage. While some captive animals adopt an "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with" philosophy, others decline to have sex with animals they don't care for. When it comes to animals in the wild freely choosing to pirouette, or give the Really Big Greeting, this explanation collapses. The idea that animals can't tell each other's gender and accidentally have sex or form homosexual pairs has the age-old appeal of making animals look really, really dumb, but doesn't hold up in the face of evidence that animals know quite well who they're hitting on. Sometimes it just seems better not to bring it up. One researcher discovered homosexual mounting in white-tailed deer, yet when an 800-page book on white-tails was published, the researcher co-wrote the chapter on behavior with no mention of it. A report on killer whale behavior that described homosexuality in male orcas was reissued as a government document for the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission with those passages -- and only those passages -- deleted. Popular books by scientists often include material that doesn't make it into journals. The authors relax, drop the jargon, tell anecdotes, speculate. But, seeking sympathy for the animals they love, most scientists balk at describing bisexuality and homosexuality in the animals. Will people be less likely to save the gorilla if the gorilla has a gay lifestyle? Bonobos are a partial exception. Recently a fair amount of information about bonobo sex lives has come out. Bonobos are new, bonobos are smart -- and it's hard to keep a camera on bonobos for longer than a minute without recording a sexual act of some kind. Yet popular books about the language capacities of bonobos, like Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's excellent "Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind," leave the impression of a pure-minded primate egghead. The lexigrams Kanzi and others are taught to use are not about sex. Yet see Page 67 for a thought-provoking diagram of hand gestures used during bonobo sex, ranging from "come here" to "move your genitals around." These signs, used by captive bonobos, were discovered by Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues. It's one of the classic errors in teaching animals language -- not letting them talk about what interests them. "Let's not discuss what you want to do with Panbanisha and Sherman. Let's talk about using the key to open the box and get some candy. No, actual candy." As for the perennial issue of tool use, an entire category of tools has gone unmentioned -- tools animals make and use to masturbate. Dolphins and porcupines masturbate with objects, and primates regularly modify objects into suitable sex toys. A female orangutan bit pieces of liana to the right size, a male orangutan made an orifice in a large leaf, and a female macaque had five methods of making toys out of leaves and twigs. If an ape discovered electricity, but used it to power a vibrator, we'd be unlikely to hear about it. Zoology adheres to a "folk model" of homosexuality as perverse, unnatural and bad, Bagemihl argues, and is far behind the humanities in recognizing it as a legitimate subject of inquiry. Bagemihl formulates the charmingly named theory of biological exuberance, of which homosexuality is one manifestation. He wants to unlink biological analysis from the idea that reproduction -- and hence, heterosexuality -- is all. Biology must accept the apparent purposelessness of sexualities, he argues. Sexual pleasure is "inherently valuable" and "requires no further 'justification.'" In support of this view, Bagemihl cites celibate animals, animals that exhibit shocking indifference to reproduction and species where sex is rare and difficult. He all but proves reproductive sex doesn't happen. But of course reproduction does take place and must take place for natural selection to occur. (If creatures lived forever, they wouldn't need to reproduce, nor would they evolve.) The riddle is how a process driven by reproduction produces nonreproductive creatures, but it's not a very hard riddle, and indeed abundance, flexibility and exuberance are part of it. Evolution is history. The forces of evolution operating in the past may have produced a creature that is fast, fierce or able to do calculus, but those forces don't direct a creature once it is born. Penguins who mated with other penguins of the opposite sex are the ones who left descendants, and every penguin is descended from penguins who committed at least one heterosexual act, but that doesn't mean this penguin, here and now, will commit only heterosexual acts. The capacity for pleasure that encouraged its ancestors to reproduce is available wherever the penguin chooses to direct it. Successful life forms are characterized by diversity, so changing environments don't wipe them out. That diversity often extends to sexuality. Thus bisexuality and homosexuality are characteristics not of twisted nature, but of generous nature. So what if animals are gay? Are people vindicated in our diverse sex lives by diversity in animals? If they put us on trial, can we bring as character witnesses lions who make the Sign of the Great Tawny Beast with same-sex lions? (And they do. Unless that's just a greeting.) No, not unless we would bring those same lions to testify that killing your new significant other's children is a useful way to free up their time for you and your future children. Animals do all kinds of things that we frown on for ourselves. But we can bring the lions to testify that there's nothing unnatural about human sex lives, that bisexuality and homosexuality are not among those twisted human inventions, like income tax, or graduate school, or step aerobics, that have no close analog in the wild. As Bagemihl says of this widely expressed idea, "What is remarkable about the entire debate about the naturalness of homosexuality is the frequent absence of any reference to concrete facts or accurate, comprehensive information about animal homosexuality." There's no longer any excuse. At more than 750 pages of profusely
illustrated, carefully referenced information, this is the ideal
book to slam down on the fingers of anyone who says homosexuality
isn't natural.
Susan McCarthy is a San Francisco writer and co-author with Jeffrey Masson of "When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals."
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