On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 Somak Ghoshal wrote :
My dear Friends,
The story gets curiouser and curiouser...
http://www.salon.com/it/feature/1999/03/cov_15featurea.html
The FABULOUS kingdom of GAY animals
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A BIOLOGIST OFFERS THE FIRST VISION OF A TANTALIZINGLY
DIVERSE NATURAL WORLD: NOT ALL ANIMALS ARE STRAIGHT ARROWS.
BY SUSAN McCARTHY |
The scientist gasps and drops the binoculars. A notebook falls from astonished hands. Graduate students mutter in alarm. Nobody wants to be the one to tell the granting agency what they're seeing. A female ape wraps her legs around another female, "rubbing her own clitoris
against her partner's while emitting screams of enjoyment." The researcher explains: It's a form of greeting behavior. Or
reconciliation. Possibly food-exchange behavior. It's certainly not sex. Not lesbian sex. Not hot lesbian sex.
Six bighorn rams cluster, rubbing, nuzzling and mounting each other. "Aggressosexual behavior," the biologist explains. A way of establishing dominance.
A zoo penguin approaches another, bowing winsomely. The birds look identical and a zoogoer asks how to tell males and females apart. "We can tell by their behaviour," a researcher explains. "Eric is
courting Dora." A keeper arrives with news: Eric has laid an egg.
They've been keeping it from us: There are homosexual and bisexual animals, ranging from charismatic megafauna like mountain gorillas to cats, dogs and guinea pigs. There are transgendered animals, transvestite animals (who adopt the behavior of the other gender but don't have sex with their own) and animals who live in bisexual triads and quartets.
Bruce Bagemihl spent 10 years scouring the biological literature for data on alternative sexuality in animals to write "Biological
Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity," 768 pages about exactly what goes on at "South Park's" Big Gay Al's Big Gay Animal Sanctuary. The first section discusses animal sexuality in its many forms and the ways biologists have tried to explain it away. The second section, "A Wondrous Bestiary," describes unconventional sexuality in nearly 200 mammals and birds -- orangutans, whales, warthogs, fruit bats, chaffinches.
Bagemihl's dry style is obedient to the precepts of scientific writing. He explains why animals can be called homosexual or bisexual, but not gay, lesbian or queer, and he follows the rules -- though
"homosexual" frightens some who prefer terms like male-only social
interactions, multifemale associations, unisexuality, isosexuality or
intrasexuality. (Fortunately, as a book reviewer, I am not bound by this rule. We're talking gay animals!)
Yet the book is thrillingly dense with new ideas, and with scandalous animal anecdotes. In other words, an ideal bedside read. It's not just about hot sex. Bagemihl includes nonsexual bonds. Friendships. Female grizzlies sometimes form partnerships, traveling together, defending
each other, raising cubs together and putting off hibernation in what seems to be an attempt to stay together longer.
Nor is it all cuddling and consensuality. Bagemihl chronicles homosexual incest (foxes), rape (albatrosses) and homophobia
(white-tailed deer).
His favorites are beasts with "a special courtship pattern found only in homosexual interactions." Two percent of male ostriches ignore females and court males with a lively dance that involves running
toward your chosen partner at 30 mph, skidding to a stop in front of him, pirouetting madly, then "kantling," which includes crouching, rocking, fluffing your feathers, puffing your throat in and out and twisting your neck like a corkscrew. A male ostrich courting a female omits the speedy approach, shortens the display, adds a booming song and may include symbolic feeding displays. Male ostriches have not been seen actually having sex, unlike male flamingo pairs, who mate, build nests and sometimes rear foster chicks.
Some homosexual animals have one-night stands and some have long marriages. Gay and lesbian geese stay together year after year.
Bottlenose dolphins don't form male-female couples, but males often form lifelong pairs with other males. Some are interested only in males, but others are bisexual and happily indulge in beak-genital propulsion and more with male or female alike. Male black swans court and form stable pairs. With two males, they are able to defend huge territories from other swan couples, which sounds like a double-income-no-kids situation except that they often manage to wangle some eggs from somewhere -- all right, they steal them -- and become model
parents, twice as successful as straight parents.
There's a certain temptation to leaf through the bookshouting "Caribou?
ay! Red-necked Wallaby? Gay! Golden Plover? GAY GAY GAY!" But of course
it's not that simple.
All bonobos and 1 percent of ostriches participate in homosexual activities -- so within the animal kingdom there is tremendous
iversity of sexualities. Moreover, the world is full of animals
who are straight. But we know so little about the sex lives of most animals that we must be cautious in our assumptions. Many creatures have never been seen having sex of any kind. The black-rumped flameback has been observed in male-male mating, but never male-female mating. Yet presumably they don't buy baby flamebacks at the corner store.
As for why some animals are bisexual or homosexual, Bagemihl gives the
subject brief, annoyed discussion: Obviously it involves both nature and nurture, both environment and biology. He notes that different groups of Japanese macaques have different levels and kinds of
homosexual behavior -- which he interprets as a cultural difference.
Besides showing the prevalence of alternative sexuality, Bagemihl tells a fascinating story of the suppression of this vast body of information.
"Zoology is a very conservative profession," and focusing on animal
homosexuality is not the road to success. One researcher documented
homosexuality in sheep, but didn't publish until she got tenure.
Surprisingly often, observers don't know what they're seeing. If males and females look alike, researchers assume that when they see animals mating, they are seeing a male and a female, and the one on top is the male. Thus, the penguin Eric, later renamed Erica. If they switch
positions, no doubt it's just confusion. Often, it's plain that animals are engaging in homosexual behavior -- short of wearing gay pride T-shirts, there's no way those walruses could be clearer -- but the observer can't fathom it.
One unusually candid biologist wrestled with the realization that the
bighorn rams he studied frequently had sex with each other, and weren't just showing nice wholesome aggression. "To state that the
males had evolved a homosexual society was emotionally beyond me. To
conceive of those magnificent beasts as 'queers' -- Oh God!" 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
favourite: 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 behaviour 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.
SALON | March 15, 1999
Susan McCarthy is a San Francisco writer and co-author with Jeffrey Masson of "When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals."
Group Site:
http://www.gaybombay.info
==========================
NEW CLASSIFIEDS SECTION
SEEKING FRIENDS? VISIT
www.gaybombay.info
click on classified section and type your message in the post section once the link opens
This message was posted to the gay_bombay Yahoo! Group. Responses to messages (by clicking "Reply") will also be posted on the eGroup and sent to all members. If you'd like to respond privately to the author of any message then please compose and send a new email message to the author's email address.
For Parties and events go to: http://calendar.yahoo.com/YYY,04497/srt,0/gaybombaygroup/?v=42&POS=
Post:- gay_bombay@yahoogroups.com
Subscribe:- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Digest Mode:- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
No Mail Mode:- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Individual Mail Mode:- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Contact Us:- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Archives are at http://www.mail-archive.com/gay_bombay%40yahoogroups.com/maillist.html
| Yahoo! Groups Sponsor |
| Get unlimited calls to U.S./Canada |
Yahoo! Groups Links
- To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gay_bombay/
- To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
