Drag shows, Pride parades, concerts and clubs. As a queer kid in rural Pennsylvania, my high school class full of children of grape farmers, that aspect of queer culture always seemed worlds away to me. I yearned to be there, to go to the fabled “big city,” to tick boxes off of my to-do list and prove that I was one of them.
While I enjoy every moment I have now that I’ve experienced these things, and partying is a huge part of queer joy, a part of me felt it was an inauthentic representation of my experience.
What I didn’t experience in the community, I found in nature. Ignorant kids at recess didn’t mean anything to me when I had piles of dirt and bugs to play with and birds to watch in the trees that wound themselves up and into the wire fence at the edge of the playground.
It got me thinking about what other ways Mother Nature could affirm me.
It reminded me of sitting in front of the TV watching nature documentaries like a nerd and finding out that animals found in the wild could actually be gay. It reminded me to use her as a sword against those same ignorant kids at recess, or more accurately thinking I could and getting too scared to actually say anything. It got me thinking that this could be the part of the community I was missing. If people didn’t understand me, I was sure that Mother Nature would.
One of the most interesting examples of homosexuality in the animal kingdom is actually the oldest living land animal ever. Jonathan is a Seychelles giant tortoise who was born around 1832, and since 1991 has had a companion in Frederik (formerly Frederika) another tortoise thought to be a female because of their mating habits.
Jonathan’s veterinarian, Joe Hollins, said to Guinness World Records in 2022, “In spite of his age, Jonathan still has good libido and is seen frequently to mate with Emma and sometimes Fred – animals are often not particularly gender-sensitive!”
Senior environmental studies major Anna Penkalski agreed with this sentiment.
“It shows people that being gay is fucking normal! Homosexuality is common and documented in over 1000 different species,” she said.
For Penkalski, the interesting part doesn’t stop at pure sexuality. “Sexuality is sadly still really misunderstood in many species … but research is increasingly seeing that permanent homosexuality is common in both monogamous and non-monogamous species.”
This shows that homosexuality in animal species could be motivated by more than just sexual desire, that animals don’t just have flights of fancy with members of the same sex. That they don’t just go through a “phase” before setting out to mate in the “real” way.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Barry Yeoman, a writer at the National Wildlife Federation, goes into more detail about the spectrum of animal homosexuality. He references Janet Mann, a behavioral ecologist who works with bottlenose dolphins, who says there are “several reasons for [their] homosexual behavior, including dominance and practice…sometimes, though, it’s just about relationship building.”
At first glance, this seems to discount the idea that animal homosexuality isn’t just a “practice round” before the real thing. While in reality, it proves our similarities. Both humanity and the animal kingdom have a variety of experiences in regards to sexuality. Not everyone settles down with a partner, or even sees sexuality as connected to romance or love.
Further in the article, Julia Monk, an bisexual ecologist at the University of California, explained that “the primordial default wasn’t heterosexual. Maybe early animals just had sex. After all, differentiating between males and females requires physical differences between sexes, along with advanced recognition skills, both of which evolved over time.”
If her hypothesis was true, that would make queerness older than humanity itself, and older even than the concept of recognizing that there were more than one sex at all.
Though Monk goes on to warn people against using her research to prove that queerness is natural, she says that “We need to understand how our cultural norms are constantly being projected onto our understanding of animals and the natural world.”
Humans just think that because we can reason and make norms and laws, that everything and everyone should follow those laws. That anything different is wrong, or bad. Well, in Mother Nature’s eyes, we’re all just animals. And I’m sure little kid me, playing in the dirt with the bugs, would be happy to hear that.