Queer Animals
How Homosexuality Keeps the Straight Population Thriving.
Part three in the PRIDE series
“A book by Bruce Bagemihl called Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (1999, New York: St. Martin’s Press), catalogues what is known about the sorts of sexual unions that are formed within a wide variety of animal species, and discusses the influence of social attitudes on both the research performed and the conclusions drawn from it. All in all, it is a valuable compilation of fascinating and little-recognized information about the diversity of sexual expression in animals.” As cited in the book, The Root of Heaven & Earth by E. A. Grace
I prefer the word queer to homosexual in this context as “homo” defines “same,” whereas “queer” covers the spectrum from same to opposite to bisexuality which is the primary type of sexuality found in over 1,500 animal species spanning insects, birds, primates, fish, and mammals. Here are some interesting facts about gay animals to get this conversation started:
10 Animals Having Gay Sex
1) Giraffes have more same-sex activity than opposite sex activity including neck nuzzles that have been categorized as “flirting & foreplay” that can last for hours.
2) Both male and female bottlenose dolphins are generally bisexual, but males can sometimes engage in homosexual sex exclusively, including oral stimulation with their snouts.
3) Male lions are known to have sex with each other as a “bromance” to strengthen their bond in the pursuit to court female lions during mating season.
4) Female bisons only mate with bulls, on average, once a year; so when the male bison gets the urge to have sex beyond that, he mounts another male several times a day during mating season, making bison homosexual activity more common than heterosexual activity.
5) Female macaques form monogamous relationships with other females that include sex, grooming, sleeping with, and defending each other against enemies, whereas the male macaques tend to keep their same-sex escapades to one-night stands.
6) Female albatrosses are often monogamous for life and raise a chick together that is fathered by a male in a committed relationship outside of their own.
7) Bonobos, considered the closest living relative to humans, have been called sex-crazed, using sex to decrease tension, build bonds, experience pleasure, and climb the social ladder. Two-thirds of their homosexual activity is between females, but males are also getting plenty of same-sex action.
8) A fifth of all swan couples are gay and will even adopt and raise abandoned eggs and create monogamous, same-sex family units.
9) Male walruses are almost exclusively gay, until they reach sexual maturation and breed once a year with the opposite sex and enjoy same sex companionship the rest of the year.
10) Up to 8% of male sheep prefer to have sex with other males, even when female sheep are available.
Queer animals are known by scientists as a “Darwinian paradox,” as gay sex is nonreproductive. This is in direct opposition to the narrative of evolutionary theory used to discriminate against homosexuals based on the premise that only heterosexual sex is normal because it’s what keeps the species going. However, it turns out that is simply untrue. There are two primary ways we keep civilization going: procreating to populate and not over-procreating thereby draining the resources we need for the population we have created at any given time.
As cited in the book, The Root of Heaven & Earth by E. A. Grace, “…if you produce too many offspring, they will compete against one another for whatever food is available, possibly overrunning their environment so that the food supply gets used up, a whole bunch of them starve, and there’s a huge crash in the population. We’ve seen that sort of thing in deer populations, for example, when people have killed off their natural predators. For a little while there are way too many deer, and then suddenly there are way too few, because so many of them have starved. ‘So it’s just not an effective evolutionary strategy to keep pressing the limits of what the environment will sustain, because a collapse of that sort, even once every several generations, can incur such great losses as to overwhelm any temporary gain. The best long-term evolutionary strategy is to match the production of offspring to the resources available to them.’”
Point being, we’ve had this long-held belief that society continues to exist purely because we continue to procreate. However, creating life isn’t enough if we can’t sustain it. The animal kingdom seems to have an innate understanding of this that is also mirrored in humanity. When only a portion of society (animal or human) procreates, that leaves the other portion to help protect the young until they are old enough to procreate thereby keeping the population thriving. They do this not only by having an understanding of limited survival resources (food, water, etc.), but also by protecting the heard, pod, or flock from harm to help keep the young, who can procreate, alive. Same sex relationships create bonds and community which increases the survival for all.
Here's more from the book, The Root of Heaven & Earth by E. A. Grace, “And of course, the more intricately interwoven the bonds are in a group, the stronger that group cohesion is, and the greater its benefits … Which means they’re more likely to survive because they’re more likely to share food when they find it, to alert one another to danger … or even to risk themselves to protect other members of the group from danger—and to care for abandoned or orphaned young … it’s sort of like an insurance policy … Everyone invests in the group, and the group uses its resources to insure the welfare of its members.”
“… But if the males that bond only with other males never reproduce … from an evolutionary point of view, how are the genes of those individuals passed on? Think about wolves, for example. All wolves share the genes that define them as wolves, right? That is, any two wolves will have most of their genes—virtually all of their genes, in fact—in common, just because they’re wolves. As a general rule, each year only two wolves in each pack reproduce—the alpha male and female. That is, whichever pair happen to be the alpha pair that year. The others don’t do nothing, however. They help guard and care for the pups, and they hunt. Think of it as a reproductive strategy for the whole pack. The alpha female has a litter that includes, typically, about five pups, give or take. Meanwhile, she and all the other members of the pack engage in behavior that helps insure that those newborn pups live to adulthood. This gives good insurance that the genes held in common within the pack get passed on. If they all reproduced, scarce food resources would have to be allocated to all of the pups. And at the same time, there would be fewer hunting adults, because all the mothers would have to be on hand to nurse their pups. On the other hand, maybe they would all hunt, and the pups might be left unguarded and, for stretches of time, unfed. A much higher percentage of the pups would die. And even so, those that didn’t die from these causes would still compete with one another for limited resources, and possibly precipitate a food crisis in which much of the pack, if not the whole pack, could starve. So it’s a practical matter for wolves to have a limited number of reproducing members, with the others helping out.”
“… Animals that aggregate in a group of some kind—a pack, pod, flock, herd, etc.—in a certain sense function as a single organism. One of the things I tell my classes when we discuss evolution is to think of a whole species as you would a single animal … Think of the members of a wolf pack, say, as being like physically disconnected cells of the same organism—and with each ‘cell’ having almost exactly the same genes as every other ‘cell.’ The organism has to produce enough new cells with each generation to continue to exist—enough cells—not too many, not too few. If it overproduces, there’s not enough food to go around, and starvation and die-offs result. If it underproduces, the population gradually dwindles away, right? Long-term survival of the genes shared in common within this organism is best guaranteed by having the right number of members to fit well within its environmental niche.”
It turns out that our planet hasn’t survived this long based solely on survival of the fittest, but also on survival of the most cooperative. What the aforementioned book refers to as “a cooperation-based model of evolution.” Therefore, instead of Christians and other who judge the queer community based on a sense of threat they feel the LGBTQIA+ community poses to the traditional heterosexual family unity, they could be feeling gratitude to the queer community for helping the family model they prefer (male/female partnerships) to continue to survive.
Every year during pride month, there is a new pushback from the heteronormative narrative against the queer community. This year, the comment I heard most was that being LGBTQIA+ was a trend, something people were interested in because it was fashionable to be gay and had become more mainstream and accessible through advertisement that marketed a celebration of the gay lifestyle. I suppose there could be a grain of truth to that, but it’s a similar point my papa made in early 1990s when the AIDS epidemic brought awareness to the LGBTQIA+ community, into households all across the world, humanizing what it meant to be gay, especially for the generation coming of age at that time. My grandmother, who raised me, was a nurse during the AIDS crisis in Northern California; and she was one of the only nurses back then who were not afraid to touch, draw blood from, and give care to the legions of gay men who were dying in hospitals alone. She volunteered to work the night shift so that she could sneak lovers into the rooms to be with their partners and say goodbye as they passed from this world into the next. My papa, who also raised me, volunteered to take patients to and from their appointments, helping to clean them when they would inevitably be sick in the car. I had role models for caring and for being of service to others. While my papa was very compassionate, he was also confused by the sudden visibility of the gay community and asked, “When did so many people become gay?”
I maintain the same opinion today that I did back then when I told my papa, “It’s not that there are more gay people now than there used to be, it’s that the attention placed on AIDS has forced them from the shadows of the closets they have been hiding in for generations. You can’t see what you’ve never looked for and most people don’t look for what they don’t want to find—that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been there all along. I promise you, Papa, there were men in the navy with you who were gay. Just because they kept that hidden doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.” My papa was a bit taken aback by my words, but he took them in nonetheless. My papa loved and respected me; as I loved and respected him, and even when we didn’t see eye to eye on a subject to start with, he was always willing to consider an opposing view and change his perspective—this, along with being open-minded and curious (no pun intended), is a mark of intelligence and something we could all do better to embrace.
In that spirit, Julia Monk, a lead author and doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, was quoted in a Yale School of the Environment article as saying, “We propose a shift in our thinking on the sexual behaviors of animals. We’re excited to see how relaxing traditional constraints on evolutionary theory of these behaviors will allow for a more complete understanding of the complexity of animal sexual behaviors.”
Speaking of what we don’t want to see (because it can feel threatening to the status quo), the article continues, “Nonetheless, Monk notes that scientific questioning into the persistence of same-sex sexual behaviors has long been observed through the lens of a human society that has historically judged some behaviors to be ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal.’ This tendency, she says, has hindered our understanding of animal behavior in that it has promoted research that only confirms pre-existing assumptions or even averts important steps in the scientific process. ‘Once you really dig into the research on the behavior of animals you can’t help but be impressed by the diversity of life and how animals are out there defying our expectations all the time,’ she says. ‘And this should lead us to question those expectations.’”
I would add to this, as a conclusion, that perhaps homosexuality has always existed in the natural world and that both the animal and human kingdom is evolutionarily served by its existence; and therefore, homosexuality should be respected, not condoned.
Personal Note
If you’ve found value in my essays on conflict resolution, relationship dynamics, peaceful parenting, or the seven-piece series I’ve written on PRIDE, the four-part series on how to end mass shootings, or the five-part series on protecting children and reproductive freedom would you please consider a paid subscription to SageJustice.Substack.com for yourself and for a friend? A monthly subscription is just $5 a month, a yearly subscription is $45. Writers provide a much-needed service to the community. We gather information and turn it into inspiration, education and understanding to bring people together and solve universal challenges; and right now, we need your financial support. Thank you.
Thanks for reading and supporting The Sage Words substack. For more articles related to being queer, please see my full seven-piece PRIDE collection (most are only one to three minute reads):
Part 1: What Does it Mean to Be Queer? The Q in LGBTQIA+
Part 3: Queer Animals, How Homosexuality Keeps the Straight Population Thriving.
Part 4: In the Closet and How to Come Out
Part 5: Camping with my Girl How Gender Roles are Social Constructs
Part 6: Indoctrinated to Hate: The Power of the Media to Hurt and to Heal
Part 7: Drag Queens Were My Fairy Godparents—Feat. Trixie Mattel and The Trixie Motel
Sage Justice is achingly sincere. Balancing wisdom and humor she most often writes deeply personal solution based pieces about the enduring virtues that connect us all: love and healing. She is an award-winning playwright and critically acclaimed performing artist who has appeared on stages from Madison Square Garden in New York City, to The Comedy Store in Hollywood, California. Ms. Justice is the author of Sage Words FREEDOM Book One, an activist, a member of the Screen Actors Guild and an alumna Artist-In-Residence of Chateau Orquevaux, France. She is a co-founder of The Unity Project which fuses activism with art, to educate and inspire, with a special emphasis on community engagement to end homelessness. She has a series of short reels about living with the rare genetic disorder, Vascular Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome that you can find in a highlight reel on her Instagram page @SageWords2027.
Photo by Gracie Justice
Sage Justice is the author of “Sage Words FREEDOM Book One.” This series on PRIDE contains excerpts from “Sage Words LEGACY Book Seven.”
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