Eliot Schrefer - Queer Ducks (and Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality

FOR

KATHI, TEDDY, AND ROY

The Edinburgh Zoo has long been proud of its penguins. In fact, it has Europes oldest exhibit of them, dating back to 1913. One of their current birds was even knighted! Not that he can hold a sword or anything.

How do you determine if a penguin is male or female? Turns out that its not easy. Penguin males and females are the same size, and since their genitalia is tucked away, their sex is anyones guess. Only a modern blood test can tell for sure. Those werent around in 1913.

Prized animals + hard-to-determine sexes = one big old penguin sex scandal.

When the zoo received its initial population of penguins from Antarctica, they assigned them genders based on who was paired up with whom and who spent more time sitting on the eggs. The Scottish public flocked to the exhibit to meet Andrew, Bertha, Caroline, Dora, and Eric.

The trouble started soon after. First off, the zoo quickly realized that king penguins arent fully monogamous. Following some bird canoodling, zookeepers had to regretfully inform the public that their favorite penguin couples were all cheating on one another. After seven years of observations, they also concluded they had gotten some of the sexes wrong. Actually, they got a lot of the sexes wrong. Andrew became Ann, Bertha became Bertrand, Caroline became Charles, and Eric became Erica. They had gotten it right with only one penguin, Dora.

This regendering also fixed something that had been on the zookeepers mindstheyd been worried that some of the penguins were having homosexual sex! Phew. Not anymore, not with the new gender assignments. All fixed.

Until it wasnt. Penguins are gonna penguin, and the couples reshuffled. Everyone had had enough sex with everyone else at this point that the truth was unavoidable: the Edinburgh penguins were bisexual. The 1920s public had to come to terms with the fact that the heterosexual couple Eric and Dora were most definitely females, Erica and Dora. An early lesbian couple of penguins that had caused a stir, Bertha and Caroline, were still bonded togetherbut actually two males, Bertrand and Charles.

This was not an isolated case. Bi penguins have been stirring things up for over a century. The very first record of same-sex sexual behavior in penguins was in 1911, when explorer George Murray

Its not just penguins; a recent article in Scientific American notes substantiated, evidence-confirmed findings of same-sex sexual behavior in over 1,500 animal species. These arent rare anomalies: an explosion of research over the last twenty years has shown significant amounts of same-sex sexual behavior throughout the animal kingdom. The real number of species involved is surely much higher, as studies setting out to catalog homosexual behavior in the animal world are still rare.

I really wish Id had any inkling of all this queer behavior in nature when I was young. I was around age eleven when I started lingering over the Fruit of the Loom ads in my brothers Rolling Stone and realized I was attracted to other guys. An impossible thing had happened: up until then, Id just been me, but now I was gay. To make matters worse, everything Id ever heard indicated that gay was a horrible and unnatural thing to be. How could my internal life give me such a bummer of a plot twist? There had to be some explanation, so I looked up homosexuality in every encyclopedia I could get my hands on.

My findings were depressing. Some sources told me that homosexuality was a psychological disorder unique to humans, an illness that came to those with bad genes or who had grown up with too much attachment to their mother or father (or maybe too little, no one seemed to agree). Everywhere I looked, unnatural was the word that came up again and again.

The stakes of being unnatural were high. As I was starting college, a freshman in Wyoming, Matthew Shepard, was beaten, tortured, tied to a barbed-wire fence, and left to die because his killers hated his being gay. That was only the most famous case of the hundreds of people killed each year for being queer (with Black trans women making up a disproportionate number of cases).

So what is natural? Many of us were brought up with the Noahs ark version of life, which tells us that the proper order of things is a bonded male-female pair for every species on earth. Darwins theory of natural selection only seems to confirm itby his logic, only heterosexual pairings allow for the successful propagation of genes, making them the primary driver of evolution. If natural selection is working properly, the argument goes, homosexual desire shouldnt happen. Any sexual act that doesnt produce offspring doesnt help an animal get more of its genes into the next generation, and so is some kind of error.

These assumptions about the normalcy and biological fitness of only male-female pairings are perfectly reasonable. But what if theyre also... wrong?

Its been an important twenty years for the field of zoology. In 1999, researcher Bruce Bagemihl released his exhaustive, meticulously researched Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, and over the years that followed, in species after species, across the vertebrate and even invertebrate worlds, research has shown same-sex pairings in hundreds of animal species. And not just occasional link-upssometimes lifelong partnerships between animals of the same sex.

The reasons for this recent bloom in reporting are twofold: research attention is finally being paid to the issue, and old taboos against publishing such results are eroding. In the past, scientists would avoid publishing on queer animal behavior because they found it shameful, or because they worried the establishment might then question the accuracy of all their results. (George Murray Levick, the explorer who wrote about homosexual behavior in Adlie penguins in 1911, hid his observations using the Greek alphabet as codeand they were still cut from the official expedition reports.) As recently as 1980, a US government document removed all references to homosexual behavior from a scientists report on killer whales. It cant have been easy to fit a killer whale into the closet, but somehow they managed it.

Theres also a problem known as confirmation bias, a psychology term that basically means we tend to find what were looking for. Because we grew up with the assumption that those hetero Noahs ark animals are the natural way, when we see two animals mating, most of us interpret them as a male and a female. But most animals, like the penguins, are either absolutely or nearly monomorphic: to our eyes, they dont appear different from one another.

Think of the last time you saw two animals mating, whether on the Discovery Channel or in some awkward moment while you were walking through the park. Maybe it was a couple of cats in an alley, or some pigeons on a sidewalk, or a pair of beetlesall sexually monomorphic animals, so you actually didnt know the sex of the animals you saw. Even without consciously deciding it, the story you probably told yourself in that moment was that you saw a male and a female. That could very well have been a homosexual encounter you witnessed, but because most of us are underestimating the frequency of homosexual acts in the natural world, our minds subconsciously put the sex acts we observe into the heterosexual column. That confirms the whole hetero system all over again and makes us even