The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (42 page)

And these were only preambles to more questions. With the male of an albatross pair replaced by another female, every step of the species' normal, well-honed process for fledging a chick seemed suddenly to present a fresh dilemma. Ultimately, either the rules of albatrossdom were breaking down and the lesbian couples were booting up some alternate suite of behaviors, governed by its own set of rules, or else science had never thoroughly understood the rules of albatrossdom to begin with. And that's the whole point for Young: it's the complexity and apparent flexibility of the species that fascinates her—the puzzle those female-female pairs create at Kaena Point just by existing. She's not trying to explain homosexual behavior. She's trying to explain the albatross. And that's why the rest of the world's politicized reaction to her work caught her by surprise.

Many people who contacted Young after the publication of her first albatross paper assumed she was a lesbian. She is not. Young's husband, a biological consultant, was actually an author of the paper, along with Brenda Zaun (who is also not gay, for what it's worth). Young found the assumption offensive—not because she was being mistaken for a gay person but because she was being mistaken for a bad scientist; these people seemed to presume that her research was compromised by a personal agenda. Still, some of the biologists doing the most incisive work on animal homosexuality are in fact gay. Several people I spoke to told me that their own sexual identities helped spur or maintain their interest in the topic; Bruce Bagemihl argued that gay and lesbian people are "often better equipped to detect heterosexist bias when investigating the subject simply because we encounter it so frequently in our everyday lives." With a laugh, Paul Vasey told me, "People automatically assume I'm gay." He is gay, he added, but that fact didn't seem to detract from his amusement.

 

In retrospect, the big, sloshing stew of anthropomorphic analyses that Young's paper provoked in the culture couldn't have been less surprising. For whatever reason, we're prone to seeing animals—especially animals that appear to be gay—as reflections, models, and foils of ourselves; we're extraordinarily, and sometimes irrationally, invested in them.

Only a few months before I visited Kaena Point, two penguins at the San Francisco Zoo became the latest in a tradition of captive same-sex penguin couples making global headlines. After six years together—in which the two birds even fostered a son, named Chuck Norris—the penguins split up when one of the males ran off with a female named Linda. The zoo's penguin keeper, Anthony Brown, told me he received angry e-mail, accusing him of separating the pair for political reasons. "Penguins make their own decisions here at the San Francisco Zoo," Brown assured me. And while he stressed that there is no scientific way of determining if animals are "gay," because the word connotes a sexual orientation, not just a behavior, he also noted that, this being the San Francisco Zoo, "there's definitely a lot of opinion here, internally, that we give in and call the penguins gay." Another male-male penguin couple who fostered a chick at the Central Park Zoo was subsequently immortalized in 2005 in the illustrated children's book
And Tango Makes Three.
According to the American Library Association, there have been more requests for libraries to ban
And Tango Makes Three
every year than any other book in the country, for three years running.

What animals do—what's perceived to be "natural"—seems to carry a strange moral potency: it's out there, irrefutably, as either a validation or a denunciation of our own behavior, depending on how you happen to feel about homosexuality and about nature. During the Victorian era, observations of same-sex behavior in swans and insects were held up as evidence against the morality of homosexuality in humans, since at the dawn of industrialism and Darwinism, people were invested in seeing themselves as more civilized than the "lower animals." Robert Mugabe and the Nazis have employed the same reasoning, as did the 1970s antigay crusader Anita Bryant, who, Bruce Bagemihl notes, claimed in an interview that "even barnyard animals don't do what homosexuals do" and was unmoved when the interviewer pointed out what actually happens in barnyards. On the other hand, an Australian drag queen known as Dr. Gertrude Glossip has used Bagemihl's book to create a celebratory, interpretive gay-animal tour of the Adelaide zoo, marketed to gay and lesbian tourists. The book was also cited in a brief filed in the 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned a Texas state ban on sodomy and in a legislative debate on the floor of the British Parliament.

James Esseks, the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told me he has never incorporated facts about animal behavior into a legal argument about the rights of human beings. It's totally beside the point, he said; people should not be discriminated against regardless of what animals do. (In her book
Sexual Selections,
Marlene Zuk writes, "People need to be able to make decisions about their lives without worrying about keeping up with the bonobos.") That being said, Esseks told me, polls show that Americans are more likely to discriminate against gays and lesbians if they think homosexuality is "a choice." "It shouldn't be the basis of a moral judgment," he said. But sometimes it is, and gay animals are compelling evidence that being gay isn't a choice at all. In fact, Esseks remembers reading a brief mention of animal homosexual behavior during an anthropology class in college in the mid-1980s. "And as a closeted guy, it made a difference to me," he told me. He remembers thinking: "Oh, hey, this is quote-unquote natural. This is normal. This is part of the normal spectrum of humanity—or life."

But later in our conversation, Esseks paused and stayed silent for a while. He was thinking like a lawyer again now, and found a hole in that line of reasoning. "I guess some of these animals could actually be quote-unquote making a choice," he said. How could we, as humans, ever know? "Huh," he said. "I'm just stopping to think that through. I'm not quite sure what to do with that." Esseks had stumbled right back into what he originally identified as the underlying problem. Those wanting to discriminate against gays and lesbians may have roped the rest of us into an argument over what's "natural" just by asserting for so long that homosexuality is not. But affixing any importance to the question of whether something is natural or unnatural is a red herring; it's impossible to pin down what those words mean even in a purely scientific context. (Zuk notes that animals don't drive cars or watch movies, and no one calls those activities "unnatural.") In the end there's just no coherent debate there to have. Animal research demonstrating the supposed "naturalness" of homosexuality has typically been embraced by gay rights activists and has put their opponents on the defensive. At the same time, research interpreted—or, maybe more often, misinterpreted—to be close to pinpointing that naturalness in a specific "gay gene" can make people on both sides anxious in a totally different way.

In 2007, for instance, the neurobiologist David Featherstone, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and several colleagues, while searching for new drug treatments for Lou Gehrig's disease, happened upon a discovery: a specific protein mutation in the brain of male fruit flies made the flies try to have sex with other males. What the mutation did, more specifically, was tweak the fruit flies' sense of smell, making them attracted to male pheromones—mounting other males was the end result. To Featherstone, how fruit flies smell doesn't seem to have anything to do with human sexuality. "We didn't think about the societal implications—we're just a bunch of dorky biologists," he told me recently. Still, after publishing a paper describing this mutation, he received a flood of phone calls and e-mail messages presuming that he could, and would, translate this new knowledge into a way of changing people's sexual orientations. One e-mail message compared him with Dr. Josef Mengele, noting "the direct line that leads from studies like this to compulsory eradication of gay sexuality ... whether [by] burnings at the stake or injections with chemical suppressants. You," the writer added, "just placed a log on the pyre." (Earlier that year PETA and the former tennis star Martina Navratilova, among others, were waging similar attacks on a scientific study of gay sheep, presuming it was a precursor to developing a "treatment" for shutting off homosexuality in human fetuses.)

Still, many people who contacted Featherstone were actually grateful—for the same baseless prospect. Some confessed struggling with feelings for members of the same sex and explained to him, very disarmingly, the anguish they'd been living with and the hope his fruit-fly study finally offered them. There were poignant phone calls from parents, concerned about their gay children. "I felt bad in a way," Featherstone told me. It was hard not to be moved, and he would try to explain the implications, or lack thereof, of his research politely. "But there's also this liberal, modern side of me that's like: 'Take it easy, lady. Let your son be your son.'"

Not long ago, more than two years after the publication of the fruit-fly paper, a woman wrote to Featherstone about her college-aged daughter. The daughter couldn't shake an attraction to other girls but honestly felt she'd never be able to bring herself to accept it either. She was now contemplating suicide. "She feels that she is losing herself," the mother wrote, "that sweet, innocent light that is within her." Like many who reached out to Featherstone, the woman and her daughter seemed to take for granted that homosexuality was inborn—natural. Otherwise the situation wouldn't feel so torturously unfair. The mother begged Featherstone to rethink his unwillingness to turn his fruit-fly research into a treatment. "We all deserve a choice," she wrote.

 

Grasping for parallels with animals can create emotional truths, though it usually results in slushy logic. It's naive to slap conclusions about a given species directly onto humans.

But it's disingenuous to ignore the possibility of any connection. "A lot of zoologists are suspicious, I think, of applying the same evolutionary principles to humans that they apply to animals," Paul Vasey, the Japanese-macaque researcher, told me. There's an understandable tendency among some scientists to play down those links to stave off ideological misreading and controversy. "But broadly speaking, research on animals can inform research on humans," Vasey says. What we learn about one species can expand or reorient our approach to others; a well-supported findi ng about one animal's behavior can generate new hypotheses worth testing in another. "My research on Japanese macaques might influence how someone conducts their research on octopus or their research on moose. Or their research on humans," he said. In fact, it has influenced Vasey's own research on humans.

Since 2003, in addition to his investigation of female-female macaque sex, Vasey has also been studying a particular group of men in Samoa. "Westerners would consider them the equivalent of gay guys, I guess," he told me—they're attracted exclusively to other men. But they're not considered gay in Samoa. Instead, these men make up a third gender in Samoan culture, not men or women, called
fa'afafine.
(Vasey warned me that mislabeling the fa'afafine "gay" or "homosexual" in this article would jeopardize his ability to work with them in the future: while there's no stigma attached to being fa'afafine in Samoan culture, homosexuality is seen as different and often repugnant, even by some fa'afafine.)

In a paper published earlier this year, Vasey and one of his graduate students at the University of Lethbridge, Doug P. VanderLaan, report that fa'afafine are markedly more willing to help raise their nieces and nephews than typical Samoan uncles: they're more willing to baby-sit, help pay school and medical expenses, and so on. Furthermore, this heightened altruism and affection is focused only on the fa'afafine's nieces and nephews. They don't just love kids in general. They are a kind of superuncle. This offers support for a hypothesis that has been toyed around with speculatively since the 1970s, when E. O. Wilson raised it: if a key perspective of evolutionary biology urges us to understand homosexuality in any species as a beneficial adaptation—if the point of life is to pass on one's genes—then maybe the role of gay individuals is to somehow help their family members generate more offspring. Those family members will, after all, share a lot of the same genes.

Vasey and VanderLaan have also shown that mothers of fa'afafine have more kids than other Samoan women. And this fact supports a separate, existing hypothesis: maybe there's a collection of genes that, when expressed in a male, make him gay, but when expressed in a woman, make her more fertile. Like Wilson's theory, this idea was also meant to explain how homosexuality is maintained in a species and not pushed out by the invisible hand of Darwinian evolution. But unlike Wilson's hypothesis, it doesn't try to find a sneaky way to explain homosexuality as an evolutionary adaptation; instead, it imagines homosexuality as a byproduct of an adaptation. It's not too different from how Vasey explains why his female macaques insistently mount one another.

"What we're finding in Samoa now," Vasey told me, "is that it's not an either-or." Neither of the two hypotheses on its own can neatly explain the existence, or evolutionary contribution, of fa'afafine. "But when you put the two together," he said, "the situation becomes a whole lot more nuanced." It's significant that Vasey began his work in Samoa only after he'd gotten to the crux of the macaque situation. "The Japanese macaques," he told me, "in terms of my personal development, they raised my awareness of the possibility that homosexual behavior might not be an adaptation. I was more likely to put the two hypotheses together because I was just more sensitive, I guess, to the reality that the world ... is organized so that adaptations and byproducts of adaptations coexist and hinge and impinge on each other. Humans are just another species."

Vasey and VanderLaan's work in Samoa doesn't come close to settling theoretical questions about homosexuality. But unlike many biologists I spoke to, Vasey still seemed at ease discussing the speculative and even philosophical ties between animal and human sexuality. He's not concerned with how foolishly or maliciously his work might be misread. "If somebody wanted to make something out of it, they could," Vasey told me, "but they'd just look like some kind of misinformed hillbilly."