Did You Know? Nature is Queer!

By
Elena Bilheimer
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Elena Bilheimer, EcoNews Journalist

Male seahorse giving birth. | Credit: jidanchaomian, via flickr

In 2004, Roy and Silo, penguins at the Central Park Zoo, took the world by storm when they successfully became parents to a new baby chick named Tango. Although their story was hardly unusual, many were surprised to learn that Roy and Silo were both male penguins, who preferred male company, despite having access to potential female mates. The revelation that homosexual behavior in animals not only exists, but is found in around 1,500 species (that scientists know of so far!) was, and still is, shocking for many who have grown up with a paradigm of presumed heterosexuality in the natural world.

Preconceived notions and beliefs affect the way information is received and processed, and for all the work science does to avoid bias in its findings, the discipline itself and any studies of the natural world are not immune to these proclivities. Contrary to the previous understanding that humans are the exception in the natural order due to a varied spectrum of gender and sexual identities, it is becoming increasingly clear that queerness not only exists in the natural world, but has biological advantages and possibilities.

The Old Belief: Nature is Heteronormative

The idea that queerness in humans is unnatural can be traced to an Italian Dominican friar and priest named Thomas Aquinas in the mid 1200s. In the episode Lesbian Seagulls on the podcast You’re Wrong About, journalist and author Lulu Miller explained that although homosexuality had already been considered somewhat of a sin by the thirteenth century, Aquinas became infamous for popularizing the argument that homosexuality was a “crime against nature”.

Within fifty years, this proclamation effectively permeated society, making it so that sodomy — which was previously legal everywhere — became a crime that could be punishable by jail or death. In addition to shifting cultural perceptions and causing harm to many people’s lives, Aquinas’ conviction deeply influenced the way science was conducted, resulting in a centuries-long moratorium on any observations of same sex behavior in nature.

When Charles Darwin’s theories became prevalent hundreds of years later, in a rare convergence of ideologies, Darwin’s argument for the value of procreative sex and the passing on of the strongest genes endorsed the religious belief that homosexuality was unnecessary, abnormal, and a fluke. This further contributed to the erasure of any gathering of empirical evidence that would contradict these claims. In the podcast episode, Miller extrapolated on why homosexuality in nature was not well recorded for this period of time.

The first reason is what Miller called the Noah’s Ark bias. Although in some animal species the sexes look really different (this is called sexual dimorphism), many are sexually monomorphic, meaning that it is extremely difficult to tell the sexes apart without closer examination. Therefore, due to internalized biases, people easily assumed, and still do, that many animals are heterosexual.

The second reason results from self suppression, in which a scientist would see homosexual behavior and fail to mention it due to social stigma, fear of being ostracized, or fear of damaging an animal’s reputation. (In the 1960s, Valerius Geist, one of the foremost sheep researchers, didn’t publish his findings about bighorn sheep living in an almost entirely homosexual society until the age of six or seven because he didn’t want to tarnish the image of such “magnificent beasts”.) This relates to reason number three, which Miller labeled overt suppression, in which people and organizations would refuse to publish work with findings of homosexual behavior, often due to aversion or fear of retaliation.

The last reason that same-sex animal behavior is not more well known has to do with the way the information was presented, as many reports used judgemental language and word choice that made the behavior seem unusual and perverse — a complete anomaly rather than a regular occurrence. An example of this is the 1987 study of same-sex mating in butterflies which was entitled “A Note on the Apparent Lowering of Moral Standards in the Lepidoptera.”

The New Belief: Nature is Queer!

For many people in the United States, Roy and Silo were what Miller termed “a gateway story” into an awareness of same-sex behavior in animals. A children’s book about their lives entitled “And Tango Makes Three” by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell also contributed to an expanded understanding of this topic, even though it was one of the most challenged or contested books for about five years in the United States, according to the American Library Association.

In an interview on NPR, Eliot Schrefer, the author of “Queer Ducks (and Other Animals)”, explained that despite queerness in animals being a feature of the natural world forever, the suppression of this information has often contributed to a certain feeling of loneliness and alienation for many people who identify as LGBTQIA+.

“I’m not trying to argue for human behaviors from certain ways that animals can behave,” said Schrefer. He went on to say, “Instead, I’m trying to say that we can no longer argue that humans are alone in their queerness or in their LGBTQ identities. Instead, we are part of a millions-of-years tradition within the animal world of a variety of approaches to sex and a ton of advantages that come around from it.”

In addition to the iconic Central Park penguins, several other important social and historical factors contributed to the influx of research and knowledge about sexual diversity in nature. In particular, a study about same-sex behavior in the western gull (Loris Occidentalis) on two islands off the coast of Southern California published in Science Magazine in 1977 by George Hunt, an ornithologist, and Molly Warner Hunt, an anthropologist, had a huge impact. Bolstered by the fact that these observations were made by a straight, married couple, this study brought this information to the forefront of the scientific community. (These seagulls became somewhat of a gay icon, inspiring the song “Lesbian Seagull” sung by Engelbert Humperdinck.)

Then, in 1999, Bruce Bagemihl, a Canadian biologist and linguist, published “Biological Exuberance”, a compilation of thousands of observed diverse sexual behaviors and gender nonconformity among animals, including accounts from scientists who had previously suppressed the information due to the reasons mentioned above. Influencing each other, these scientific breakthroughs paired with relentless social activism helped pave the way for more public acceptance and funding toward this topic. Nowadays, a lot of new research in this field is driven by a new generation of queer scientists or those more accepting of queerness.

While some cultures have embraced this knowledge (for example, many Indigenous cultures recognize “two-spirit” gender identity), these events shed light on the ways in which the Western world has historically chosen to cherry pick the elements it likes from nature and hold them as a moral standard, while also separating humans as distinct and superior from other species in every other aspect. To put it simply, information about the natural world has often been filtered to find the facts that support the dominant and underlying systems in place, such as patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. 

As a record number of anti-LGBTQIA+ bills were introduced in 2023, it is important to recognize the real life implications of these prejudices that reinforce systems of oppression and contribute to the obfuscation of information that could help humans better understand their role in the wider web of life. This exemplifies the necessity of questioning who gets to speak for nature or construct the narrative that influences how humans relate to the environment around them.

“The living world exhibits monogamy, but it also exhibits orgies, gender transformation, and cloning,” wrote Alex Johnson in an Orion magazine article entitled “How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time”. “What, then, is natural? All of it. None of it. Instead of using the more-than-human world as justification for or against certain behavior and characteristics, let’s use the more-than-human world as a humbling indication of the capacity and diversity of all life on Earth.”

Some recent research suggests that same-sex behavior in animals has strong biological advantages, from strengthening social ties to helping animals adapt after predatory attacks. Other studies have failed to find a biological reason for same-sex behavior in certain species, leading to the current conclusion that some species (Japanese macaque monkeys in particular) might be doing it solely for pleasure rather than adaptive values. 

“The story of sexual fluidity in nature, animals being multiple sexes at once or changing sexes over a lifetime, that has been discovered to be such a deep part of nature, too,” said Miller in the Lesbian Seagulls episode. “Same-sex mating can strengthen hunting alliances. It can help resolve conflict during resource scarcity. It can reduce stress and strengthen social bonds, which is really good for fitness. And it can even increase the survival rate of offspring.”

Queer Ecology

The past few decades have given rise to a new field of study called queer ecology (or ecologies), which seeks to shift the way humans relate to nature and the natural world, especially in relation to the construction of harmful binaries (wild versus domestic, human versus nature, man versus woman etc.). The concept was first introduced by professor of environmental studies Cate Sandilands, and has since gained traction as an important intersectional approach to environmentalism that incorporates elements of ecofeminism, queer history, and environmental justice.

As stated on The Institute of Queer Ecology’s website, “Queer communities are uniquely positioned to lead on climate adaptation through embodied strategies already inherent or familiar to queer experiences. On an individual level, queer lives are mutable: we understand change and transformation in intensely personal ways. On a collective level, queer community is mutualistic: it is symbiotic, in-contact, relational; it is a space of eccentric economies and mutual support, of found families and utopian dreams, of care and connection and the net benefits species gift one another.”

Some Examples of Queerness in Nature

  • Penguins: While some questioned whether Roy and Silo’s partnership was influenced because they lived in captivity, there have been many examples of same-sex behavior in penguins in the wild proving otherwise. As early as 1911, George Murray Levick, a famous British scientist, observed continuous instances of homosexual behavior in Adélie penguins (he was so shocked by these revelations that he wrote his observations in Greek so as to not traumatize other researchers — a perfect example of self suppression). Since then, same-sex courtship displays have been frequently observed in multiple species.
  • New Mexico whiptail lizard (Aspidoscelis neomexicana): This entire species is made up of females, which means that the eggs develop into embryos without fertilization. However, unlike other species that reproduce this way and are considered asexual, the eggs are not genetic clones but rather contain a unique set of chromosomes derived from two sets of pairs resulting in the same genetic variety present in sexually reproducing lizard species. This means that the whiptail lizards’ DNA changes from generation to generation, better equipping them to adapt to environmental changes or other threats.
  • Seahorses: According to current scientific understanding, seahorses (and their pipefish and sea dragon relatives) are the only species of animal in which the male members experience pregnancy and give birth to their young. Through an elaborate courtship “dance”, females deposit their eggs into a male’s brood pouch where they are then fertilized and begin to grow and stretch the male’s abdomen. Birth occurs through contractions that expel the baby seahorses, some of which resemble miniature versions of adults, while some are still curled and covered by their egg membrane. While the reasons for this phenomenon are unclear, potential reasons for male pregnancy in these species include providing the opportunity for males to produce more offspring in a breeding season or for allowing females to start producing the next batch of eggs immediately.
  • Bonobos (Pan paniscus): Sharing more than 98 percent of humans’ genetic profile, bonobos are known for being female-centered and egalitarian, as well as for engaging in frequent sex in every partner combination, with female-female sex happening on the most frequent basis. Beyond physical pleasure, this species substitutes sex for aggression and capitalizes on the release of the bonding hormone oxytocin released during homosexual sex to strengthen the social alliances and release tensions.

This list is certainly not exhaustive, and there are many more wondrous examples of the ways in which the natural world can be surprising in its adaptability, fluidity, and incredible diversity. As Johnson wrote in the Orion magazine article, “Nature is mysterious, and our part in the pageant is shrouded in mystery as well. This means contradiction and paradox and irony. It means that there will always be an exception. Nature has always humiliated the self-congratulatory scientist.”

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Elena Bilheimer
Elena Bilheimer