Bruce Bagemihl - Biological Exuberance

In a similar vein, one scientist who observed a pair of female Chaffinches hedged his bets by saying only that “female-plumaged” birds were involved, leaving open the possibility that one might still have been a male (and consequently part of a heterosexual pair)—even though there was absolutely no evidence that either bird could have been a male. He finally had to concede that the birds “were surely females.” Sometimes this strategy backfires, as in the case of an early description of courtship display in Regent Bowerbirds (mentioned previously), in which the presumed “female-plumaged” birds both turned out to be males—and therefore still participants in homosexual activities. 59These cases show that scientists are sometimes reluctant even to commit to the sex of the animals they are observing if it seems that homosexuality might be involved—in stark contrast to the haste with which they usually judge (or assume) participants to be opposite-sexed on the scantiest of evidence.

In the 1890s, Oscar Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, characterized homosexuality as “the Love that dare not speak its name,” referring to the silence and stigma surrounding disclosure of homosexual interests and discussion of same-sex activities. 61An analogue to this silencing and stigmatization exists in the pages of zoology journals, monographs, and textbooks, and in the wider scientific discourse. Discussion of homosexual activity in animals has frequently been stifled or eliminated, and a number of examples can only be considered active suppression of information on the subject. When several comprehensive reference works devoted to every conceivable aspect of an animal’s biology and behavior are published, including chapters by scientists who originally observed homosexuality in the species, and yet consistently no mention is made of that homosexual behavior, one has to wonder about the “objectivity” of these scientific endeavors.

At one extreme, there are cases of apparently deliberate removal of information. In 1979, a report on Killer Whale behavior was issued by the Moclips Cetological Society, a nonprofit scientific organization devoted to whale study. Sexual activity between males—classified explicitly as “homosexuality” in the report—was discussed at some length, concluding with the statement, “Homosexual behavior has been observed in many animals including cetaceans, canids, and primates, and, in some cases, it has significance for social order.” A year later, when this report was published as a government document for the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, all mention of homosexuality was eliminated even though the remainder of the report was intact. 62At the other extreme are cases where homosexuality is discussed but is buried in unpublished dissertations, obscure technical reports, foreign-language journals, or in articles whose titles give no clue as to their content. For example, the earliest reports of same-sex courtship and mounting in wild Musk-oxen appeared in an unpublished master’s thesis at the University of Alaska and a (published) report for the Canadian Wildlife Service. Consequently, a study on homosexual activity in captive Musk-oxen conducted more than 20 years after the initial discovery fails to mention any occurrence of this behavior in the wild. Similarly, the first reports of Walrus homosexual activity, complete with photographs, were published in an article with the rather opaque title of “Walrus Ethology I: The Social Role of Tusks and Applications of Multidimensional Scaling,” while all records of homosexual behavior in Harbor Seals are contained in unpublished reports and conference proceedings that are only available at a handful of libraries in the world. This perhaps explains why virtually every subsequent discussion of homosexuality in animals omits any mention of these two species. 63

Between these extremes are numerous examples where homosexuality is “overlooked” or fails to gain mention. Describing itself as “the culmination of years of intensive research and writing by more than 70 authors”—all experts on the species—the massive book White-tailed Deer: Ecology and Management (1984) presents in minute detail every imaginable aspect of this animal’s biology and behavior, no matter how obscure or rare. There’s even room in the book’s nearly 900 pages for lengthy discussion of “abnormal” and pathological phenomena (a category in which homosexual activity is often placed). Although the chapter on behavior was coauthored by the scientist who originally described homosexual mounting in White-tailed Deer, there is no mention anywhere in the book of this particular behavior. Nor is there discussion of the transgendered deer found in Texas, even though a whole chapter is devoted to this regional population. A decade later, the same scenario was repeated when another volume of the same scope and on the same species was put out by the same publishers. Similarly, a standard scientific source book, The Gray Whale, Eschrichtius robustus (1984), omits any reference to homosexuality in this species even though it includes a chapter by the first biologist to record same-sex activity in Gray Whales. 64Several comprehensive reference volumes on woodpeckers fail to mention homosexual copulations in Black-rumped Flamebacks, even though no other (hetero)sexual behavior has ever been observed in this species. This omission cannot be due to the putative rarity or “insignificance” of such behavior, since one book does mention another behavior that has only ever been observed once in wild woodpeckers—bathing. 65Other in-depth surveys of individual species follow suit, eliminating any mention of homosexuality even when they make direct use of other information from the very sources that describe same-sex activity. 66

Because of the omission and inaccessibility of information on animal homosexuality in the scientific literature, many zoologists are themselves unaware of the full extent of the phenomenon. One of the most unfortunate consequences of this is that misinformation (and absence of information) about the subject is widely disseminated and perpetuated from one source to the next. On discovering homosexual activity in a particular species they are studying firsthand—and being unable to find more than a handful of comparable examples in a cursory literature search—many zoologists acquire the mistaken impression that their observations of this behavior are somehow unique or unusual. At that point they may issue blanket statements to the effect that homosexual activity is rare or previously unreported in the form or species they are observing. Such statements are then often repeated by other biologists and become definitive pronouncements on the subject. As recently as 1993, for example, a scientist reporting on Hooded Warblers could claim that male homosexual pairs had not previously been seen in wild birds—when, in fact, such pairs were documented more than a quarter century earlier in Antbirds, Orange-fronted Parakeets, Golden Plovers, and Mallard Ducks, and thereafter in Black Swans, Scottish Crossbills, Black-billed Magpies, and Pied Kingfishers, among others. 67Scientists studying same-sex pairs of Black-headed Gulls in captivity asserted in 1985 that this behavior had yet to be seen in this species in the wild—apparently unaware of a description of a male homosexual pair in wild Black-headed Gulls published in a Russian zoology journal just a year earlier. And researchers who discovered same-sex matings in Adélie and Humboldt Penguins and in Kestrels stated that they did not know of any comparable phenomena in other species of penguins or birds of prey, when in fact homosexual activity in King Penguins, Gentoo Penguins, and Griffon Vultures had previously been reported in the literature. 68