Unnatural Acts in Nature The Scientific Fascination With Queer Animals Jennifer Terry

"Unnatural Acts" in Nature: The Scientific Fascination with Queer Animals
Terry, Jennifer, 1958-
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 6, Number 2, 2000, pp. 151-193 (Article) Published by Duke University Press
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UNNATURAL ACTS IN NATURE

The Scientic Fascination with Queer Animals
Jennifer Terry
Nature is a topic of public discourse on which much turns, even the earth. . . . In the United States, storytelling about nature, whatever problematic category that is, remains an important practice for forging and expressing basic meanings. . . . A recent visit to the San Diego Zoo conrmed my conviction that people reafrm many of their beliefs about each other and about what kind of planet the earth can be by telling each other what they think they are seeing as they watch the animals. Donna Haraway In primates, including humans, eye contact is a mutual behavior that is loaded with signicance. It may represent a struggle for dominance between rivals, or, as anyone who has spent time in a singles bar or a gay bar will be aware, it can be a powerful cue to sexual arousal. Primates have developed uncannily precise mechanisms for determining, from the visual image of another individuals eyes, whether or not that individual is looking at them. Simon LeVay We behave sexually like other mammalsapes, horses, dogs. Centuries of suppression alter us not a jot. It is a sterling proof that instinct, not vanity-calling-itself-reason, is our guide. Philip Wylie
Unbeknownst to them, animals help us tell stories about ourselves, especially when
it comes to matters of sexuality. As Donna Haraway notes, humans desire to watch animals is seldom, if ever, innocent; instead it is shaped by conscious and unconGLQ 6:2 pp. 151193 Copyright 2000 by Duke University Press
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scious investments in making claims about human life. This phenomenon is most pronounced in the human fascination with animal sexual behavior. Laboratories, like zoos, are sites of voyeurism. We look to the sexual behavior of animals to give meaning to human social relations, and by doing so, we engage in imaginative acts that frequently underscore culturally dominant ideas about gender and sexuality. What are the scientic and popular investments in watching homosexual behavior in animals? What professional, political, and personal stakes are involved? What possibilities do animals, behaving in a queer manner, open up for humans interested in making sense of sexuality? This article considers these questions by examining what Haraway calls the congested trafc between how we dene nature and culture as it characterizes much of the recent scientic observation of animal sexual behavior.1 More precisely, I explore how animals provide models for scientists seeking to determine a biological substrate of sexual orientation. This survey is not exhaustive; the examples I have chosen highlight some of the ways that sexual orientation is dened by various researchers watching different species for assorted reasons under varying material and historical conditions. Historical shifts in the conceptualization of homosexuality in both mainstream and gay and lesbian contexts are reected in these examples. I treat each example as a nodal point on a discursive eld in which the terms of gender, sexuality, and sexual identity are being transformed as scientists, like many of us, attempt to think about sexual variance, whether in local or in universal terms. It is possible to identify shifts in the ways humans think about sexuality by observing how some of them design and conduct scientic research and how they report their ndings on the timely topic of homosexuality. Indeed, some scientic reports on homosexual behavior in animals inadvertently unsettle or consciously challenge certain dominant ideas about gender and sexuality. To be sure, disciplinary differences give rise to contrasting agendas, varying denitions of homosexuality, divergent methods, and distinct relationships to the creatures under study. The neuroanatomists and geneticists featured in this article observe and manipulate laboratory animals to determine the structure and function of isolated biological processes thought to cause similar behavior across species. Their favored species are those whose biological makeup is seen to be homologous to that of humans. In these disciplines the trafc between nature and culture moves in a particular direction: scientists take animal physiology, anatomy, and behavior to be the natural or essential foundations for understanding the sexual expression of humans. By contrast, the primatologists I examine explore the factors, both biological and social, that shape a particular species sexual relations in the context of its life patterns and environment. The primatologists method suggests, but it does not
SCIENTIFIC FASCINATION WITH QUEER ANIMALS
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assume, that what is true for monkeys is true for humans. In the example I discuss, researchers took fewer liberties when linking homosexuality in rhesus monkeys to homosexuality in humans, even though the terms they deployed have rich associations with human affectional and sexual relations. Their circumspection, I argue, is related to the social, historical, and disciplinary context in which the research took place: that of the 1970s, when second-wave feminist ideas inuenced the work of some primatologists. Again by contrast, biologists seeking to remedy the breeding problems of livestock are not principally concerned about the light that their data on homosexual sheep may shed on human sexual behavior. They have a pragmatic interest in allaying the economic losses sustained by sheepherders because of lowered levels of breeding. While pursuing this interest, they reverse the trafc from culture back to nature, borrowing popular terms and meanings from gay male culture among humans to make sense of the sexual behavior of rams. These seemingly distinct disciplinary approaches and projects are brought together through the handiwork of popular journalism, which has made a thriving business out of reporting scientic research on queer behavior in animals. Such reports feed a popular appetite for deciphering human sexual relations by drawing parallels between animal mating patterns and human experiences of sexual attraction, dating, marriage, divorce, promiscuity, and homosexuality, often humorously simplifying or exaggerating the actual scientic ndings. Popular journalists tend to take liberties with scientic research on homosexuality in animals, emphasizing its relevance to homosexuality in humans. But press releases written by the scientists themselves frequently stress the connection between animal research and human life as well. The variously intended studies of animal sexuality that follow shufe the terms for categorizing sexual behavior to various ends: some make no explicit claims about human sexuality; others are aimed primarily at explicating human sexuality by studying animals; still others project aspects of contemporary gay culture onto animals. In doing so, the popular media collude with certain scientic approaches by encouraging humans to see themselves in animals. My study of the trafc in meanings between the animal kingdom in general and the human world on the changing conceptualizations of sexuality begins with a look at some of the broad assumptions that structure this work. Following a sketch of the ways that scientists have dened the terms sexuality, gender, and sexual orientation in recent studies of homosexuality in humans and animals, I turn to particular scientists and their subjects as they reect and produce the dense meanings now attributed to queer sexuality.
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What Counts as Sexuality?

Throughout the twentieth century the term sexuality, when used in biological studies of animals and humans, has been dened primarily in terms of heterosexual reproduction. While investigating the interstices of copulation, however, researchers have tried to make sense of other kinds of behavior that seem related to sexual stimulation but do not pertain exclusively to reproduction. Quite often these nonreproductive behaviors have been seen as linked to the establishment of social relations, including cooperation and hierarchies, and have been interpreted not in terms of pleasure and desire but as signals of patterns of dominance, submission, reciprocity, and competition and an assumed struggle for survival. In some cases such an interpretation desexualizes these behaviors; in other cases it broadens the scope of what counts as sexuality.2 As popular denitions of human sexual expression have broadened to encompass much more than reproduction alone, the scientic terms for what counts as sexual expression among animals have expanded as well to include an ensemble of acts. This expansion is signaled by the distinction we now nd between reproductive behavior and non-reproductive sexual behavior.3 The distinction is frequently blurred, but nonreproductive sexual behavior is a recently coined, dressedup term designating, for the most part, what used to be called inversion, substitution, perversion, or counterfeit sex in psychiatric as well as biological discourses. In other words, it encompasses masturbation, homosexuality, oral and anal sex, and polymorphous perversity, acts that for some species are placed under the heading of courtship. What makes them sexual is their association with instinctual sex drive, sensual pleasure, and genital stimulation. Hence, in the move toward more specic meanings of the term sexuality in the sciences, heterosexual intercourse for the purpose of reproduction is split off from other expressions of sexual drive or desire. This trend reects some of the renements in denitions of sexuality that we nd in the broad cultural context of the twentieth century: sexuality has come to be related more centrally to bodily pleasures and desires, irrespective of the aim of reproduction. To many biologists and ethologists, however, the problems presented by nonreproductive sexual behavior have to do mainly with how it thwarts, disturbs, or, in the best light, merely supplements heterosexual reproduction.4 Even as sexual variance among animals and humans is acknowledged, most scientists continue to conceptualize sexuality narrowly in terms of the evolutionary imperative of reproduction. Thus reproductive heterosexuality provides the master narrative in studies of animal sexuality and tethers queer animal behavior to the aim of dening reproduction as the ultimate goal of sexual encounters.
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An entertaining example of scientists contending with the meaning and signicance of nonreproductive sexual behavior within this master narrative came in the form of an accidental discovery of homosexuality between male octopuses deep in the Pacic Ocean a thousand miles off the coast of Guatemala. In October 1994 the New York Times reported that two marine zoologists, while surveying a hydrothermal vent for patterns of life, inadvertently captured on videotape an unusual mating scene that raised all sorts of questions about what is going on down there. In this primal scene, Richard A. Lutz of Rutgers University and Janet R. Voight of the Field Museum of Natural History witnessed a fteen-inch, white, thin-skinned octopus using its sex organthe one of its eight arms that is structurally similar to a mammals penisto penetrate a brownish-gray, six-foot-plus octopus of another species (g. 1). Using an apparent contradiction in terms, Voight stated, It was the rst time same-sex octopus reproductive behavior has been observed between deep-sea octopuses and the rst time two different species of octopuses have been seen mating.5 What is same-sex reproductive behavior when it occurs in these creatures that only reproduce heterosexually? Why would these zoologists deploy such an internally contradictory term to describe what they had seen? The answer lies in their tentative explanation for this strange close encounter in the deep. Lutz and Voight speculate that it probably resulted from a shortage of female octopuses at the ocean bottom.6 Thus they interpret the transspecial homosexual assignation, complete with the copulatory pattern of hyperventilation by the penetrating partner, in sociobiological terms as something like a last resort for males trying to satisfy the instinct to reproduce. Accordingly, they are not gay octopuses, in spite of how the story was humorously recounted on Morning Zoo talk radio the day it appeared in the New York Times. The researchers persistent subordination of homosexuality to heterosexual instinct was turned on its head by commuter-hour shock jocks cracking anxiety-ridden jokes about the prospect of being approached by a homo octopus in a singles bar. Popular reporting had made a leap from octopuses to men, reecting the broad post-Darwin belief that animals are simply primitive humans whose behavior always reects on ours. But as Lutz and Voight see it, the two mismatched creatures are simply horny opportunists trying their reproductive luck with anything that moves, not missing a chance to pass on their genes just because the partner they encounter seems a little unusual. Mistaken identity and the instinct to pursue pure pleasure notwithstanding, the octopuses behavior is dened in such a way that sex and reproduction are one. Quite simply, Lutz and Voight, like many ethologists and biologists, cannot think outside the framework of heterosexual reproduction in explaining this culturally potent affair.
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Figure 1. Octopus sting, Nature, 13 October 1994, 563. Video image produced by A. Giddings, E. Krisof, W. Lange, R. Grieve, and R. Lutz
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Nevertheless, the fact that we now nd a distinction in some scientic studies between reproductive behavior and nonreproductive sexual behavior represents not only a signicant shift in the conceptualization of sexuality but also an opening of interpretive possibilities for new stories to be told. The lead segment of a 1992 Nightline broadcast on the bonobo, a peaceful and highly promiscuous species of pygmy chimpanzees, illustrated this point well, since it involved animals closely related to humans. Filling its late-night-infotainment niche, Nightline missed no opportunity to exploit the desire of humans to see themselves reected in monkeys, opening with a slapstick bout between the Three Stooges and cutting to monkeys engaged in rough-and-tumble play. The show was dedicated to recent research about the social relations among the female-dominant bonobo, one of mans [sic] closest relatives and a species said to resolve conicts and establish hierarchies in cooperative and decidedly sexual ways. But their sexual behavior was dened by interviewed primatologists much more in terms of bodily pleasure than of reproduction. With highly ambiguous video images running, Frans de Waal pointed out a pair of juvenile bonobos having oral sex. In another sequence two females averted a dispute over food by engaging in sex. As footage of other primate species ran, the voice-over narrator remarked that among primates in general . . . much of what we consider grossly illegal human behavior is not only legal but natural. To illustrate, he contrasted the commonplace incidence of incest among gibbons, sexual harassment among vervet monkeys, and rape among orangutans, where it is the rule, not the exception, during sexual encounters. The narrator noted that each of these less favorable behaviors was commonly exhibited by our other close relatives, with which we may also share some genetically based behavior. But humans, he suggested, might have the moral capacity as well as the genes to choose the more sociable bonobo behavior over the violent, antisocial, misogynist behavior of our other cousins in the primate world. Far from calling for abstinence, he rendered the bonobo in a favorable light, expressing free love reminiscent of the 1960s, with a feminist twist: polymorphous perversity and promiscuity are positive qualities, and females call the shots in a manner that promotes consent and cooperation, not coercion. To use Haraways terms, the trafc between nature (read: animal relations) and culture (the human meanings given to these relations) was thick throughout this Nightline broadcast. Using culturally laden terms like sexual harassment and rape from a modern Western juridical framework to describe ape behavior, the script enacted the kind of trafc that Haraway sees as central to the way that we use animals to tell stories about ourselves. But the Nightline segment took for granted that sexuality is not merely denable in terms of reproduction. In
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broadening the scope of what counted as sexuality, the experts comments also underscored Haraways point about the problematic, powerful act of looking to animal behavior to give meaning to human social relations even as both human and animal sexual behaviors are emptied out or, at the very least, reduced in complexity and ambiguity to the terms of contemporary political debate. Animal studies increasingly reect the ways that the discourse of sexuality has expanded and changed in Euro-American culture over the past century or so. Of course, research on animals is often publicized as a means not merely to gain insight into any individual species but also to understand something about human social organization. Hence it should come as no surprise that studies on homosexuality in all manner of fauna cropped up in the late 1950s and have proliferated during the last thirty years. Indeed, science is never outside culture or history. The past three decades have been marked by the movement for gay and lesbian liberation, the dramatic expansion of lesbian and gay subcultures in most major American cities, the explosion of cultural expressions of queer subjectivity, and the elaboration of a discourse of the self that includes sexual orientation as a key part of identity. Given the investment in a continuum of animal and human behavior since nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, it is not surprising that scientists have been busy at work in laboratories, trying to make sense of homosexuality and prodding animals to exhibit the love that dares not speak its name.
Gender Trouble in Animal Science

Much recent biological research on sexual orientation draws on traditional assumptions about gender and sexuality in animals and humans. Male sexuality is dened as active and primary, female sexuality as passive and merely responsive to male sexuality, and sexuality is understood as linked chiey to reproduction. In gender studies and, indeed, in popular culture, critical debates concerning the complexity of sexual expression and especially of womens sexual autonomy and agency seem to have occurred out of earshot of many scientists involved in this area. Or perhaps, to put it less charitably, these scientists have been made sufciently uncomfortable by such cultural developments to be inclined to use nature to counter or contain them. The traditional gender bias of these studies stems in part from the fact that almost all biological research on human sexual orientation based on animal behavior focuses on male homosexuality; little of it deals directly with female homosexuality. These studies narrowly circumscribe the ground from which speculation on the origins and expression of female homosexuality is generated, usually by way of
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paltry or clumsy extrapolations.7 The very techniques and methods used for dening and measuring sexual orientation and behavior in animals and humans tend to operate in what Thomas Laqueur has called a two-sex system, which casts male and female sexual behaviors in stereotypical terms as fundamentally different and opposed to one another, with the former being superior to the latter and thus the focus of greater attention.8 Therefore the invisibility of female homosexuality is, in signicant ways, guaranteed by the assumptions and techniques of these studies. One cannot simply invert the hypotheses concerning the biology of male homosexuality and come up with an adequate biological let alone cultural explanation for lesbianism, even though many scientists suggest as much.9 The framework and methods of most recent studies on biology and male homosexuality preempt understandings of the sexual subjectivities of female animals and women and even of many male animals and men. But a few studies, intentionally or not, unsettle traditional assumptions or at least reveal the changing cultural and scientic terrain on which discussions about gender and homosexuality take place. I want to turn now to some contrasting examples of scientic research on homosexuality in animals in order to do two things: rst, to look closely at how sexuality and sexual orientation are dened in different laboratory and social contexts, and second, to show how scientic research reveals the trafc in meanings between animal behavior and human behavior when it comes to the pressing cultural questions of gender, sexual diversity, and sexual identity. In the rst set of studies below, researchers labor to isolate in laboratory animals specic anatomical elements, physiological processes, and acts perceived as homologous to phenomena in humans. In quite explicit terms these studies rely on animals to reveal the natural and essential bases of homosexuality in humans. In contrast to a species-centered approach, this approach takes body parts and processes to be interchangeable across species and thus decontextualizes them from the ensemble of biology and behavior of a particular species. The trafc moves from animals to humans, directed by neuroscientists and geneticists whose reductionist method obliges them to bracket certain questions that cannot readily be tied simply to biological phenomena.
Laboratory Animals
In the early 1990s newspapers and magazines across the United States, including Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Mirabella, and the Atlantic Monthly, began to parade headlines announcing that sexual orientation was rooted in biology. The impetus for these reports was the discovery, announced in 1991 by Simon LeVay, then a neuroanatomist at the Salk Institute in San Diego, that a tiny section
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of the human brain the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (or INAH3) was less than half as big in gay men as in heterosexual men.10 LeVay stated that it was about the size of the average (heterosexual) womans INAH3. In spite of the very tentativesome have even said speculativenature of his research,11 the skepticism of LeVays scientic colleagues was overshadowed by the enormous interest of the general public in his discovery of an essential biological difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals. The press repeated a common sleight of hand, turning a purported correlation between a minute anatomical structure and human sexual orientation into the possible cause of homosexuality. The headlines cried out: Is Homosexuality Hard-Wired? New Work on the Hypothalamus Suggests the Answer May Be Yes!12 Among the points of controversy surrounding his research, LeVays reliance on previous studies of animal sexual behavior is worthy of note. Indeed, his own expertise as a neuroanatomist structured the uses to which he put animals in the laboratory: in neuroanatomy, rats, mice, and monkeys are manipulated and observed precisely for what they might reveal about analogous anatomical and physiological components in humans. Hoping to explicate human sexual behavior, neuroanatomists like LeVay are drawn into watching animals. What LeVay and the journalists who reported his research had in common was an interest in how homosexuality in animals might tell us something about human behavior. In this way they expressed an obviously widespread cultural wish. Most neuroanatomical studies seeking to determine the etiology of homosexuality in humans are based on hormonal studies of rodents that emphasize distinctions between male-typical and female-typical behavior.13 We might want to ask why rodents are often the animals on which theories about sexual orientation and sex differences are tested. Certainly, they are relatively easy and cheap to breed and to care for in laboratories. Their gestation periods are short, so it is easy to watch their developmental processes. Furthermore, the behaviors of mounting and lordosis are believed to be more strictly controlled by the neuroendocrine system in rodents than, for example, in primates, whose behavior is assumed to be mediated more by social organization and environment (g. 2).14 Thus rodents are seen to be more useful for isolating discrete physiological functions as they relate to anatomical elements.15 But these laboratory advantages lead to serious conceptual blind spots, especially when such studies are used to explain human sexual behavior. The common assumption that the sexual behavior of rodents or any other creatures can be summed up in terms of stereotypes related to reproduction not only overshadows signicant aspects of rodent sexual behavior but falls far short of explaining
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Figure 2. Rats mating, Newsweek
the intricacies of human sexuality.16 As feminist biologist Lynda I. A. Birke has noted, gender typicality, because it sets up an opposition between male and female behaviors, provides almost no tools for understanding the range of variance in behaviors between the two poles of gender, including behaviors exhibited by some male and female rats who alternate between mounting and being mounted. In addition, behavior exhibited by both sexes is overlooked in the interest of identifying the operations of heterosexual reproduction.17 Even in many rodent species (to say nothing of the more socially complex primate species), typical female behavior involves the active soliciting and choosing of males rather than simply lordosis.18 Assuming that gender typicality is the same across species allows researchers to ignore or misunderstand variance among individual animals and across species. This is precisely what happens in much of the research on human sexuality and sexual orientation that relies on the use of rodents. In devising his hypothesis about the homosexual hypothalamus, for instance, LeVay drew on several studies of the neuroanatomical differences between the brains of male and female rats. His research therefore relied heavily on the organizational-activational hypothesis (the Phoenix model), which under-
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pins most biological research on homosexuality and on differences between men and women in the brain and behavior. The Phoenix model, devised in research published in 1959 on the mating behaviors of female guinea pigs, remains a basis of research on sexual orientation in animals and humans.19 It holds that what happens in the earliest stage of development, when the gonads and the brain form, largely determines the anatomical and behavioral characteristics of an individual, especially with regard to sexuality. (This key period starts in the gestational stage and ends shortly after birth; it varies slightly from species to species.) According to the hypothesis, all mammalian brains are originally female in structure. The brains of males are differentiated from those of females only through a developmental process induced by male sex hormones (androgens), which are produced by the male fetus. The normal female brain, because it is not exposed to the same levels of androgens, remains more like its original form. By contrast, the male brain progresses to what is taken to be a more developed morphology, expressed in the active behaviors of sexual initiative and mounting. It is believed that androgens in males give rise not only to male genitalia but also to enhancements in the brains hormonal system that regulate everything from sexual behavior to mathematical ability. Females brains are inuenced by the production of the hormones estrogen and progesterone, which also regulate the menstrual or estrous cycle. But in both sexes, male and female sex hormones are present. This leaves open the possibility that some individuals will express hormonal and morphological variations that place them between the opposing poles of male and female. These variations are seen to be the source of sexually anomalous behavior, including masturbation, the adoption of atypical sex roles, and homosexuality. The Phoenix model holds that the process that causes male homosexuality is akin to the one that causes female heterosexuality. That is, low levels of male hormones in the earliest developmental period cause the original female structure of the brain to be retained. Conversely even though they did not study female homosexuality the Phoenix research team hypothesized that females exhibiting homosexual behavior are akin to heterosexual males, having a primarily male brain organization as a result of exposure to high levels of androgens. Studies suggesting that gay men and straight women have more sophisticated verbal skills than heterosexual men are predicated on this hypothesis.20 Accordingly, we would expect to nd as many math whizzes and sexual predators among lesbians as among straight men and fewer among both straight women and gay men. The Phoenix model, based on data gathered from guinea pigs, has led to many studies seeking to link hormonal abnormalities with homosexuality in
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humans.21 The assumption is that an individuals brain is xed as either masculine or feminine from an early age (the organizational stage). Any subsequent production or circulation of hormones in the body will not change that fundamental anatomical structure or subsequent sexual orientation. In fact, according to this model, a gay man with high levels of testosterone in adulthood would still be oriented (or activated) toward men, because he would presumably have been androgen-decient when his brain was formed.22 Likewise, hardwiring for lesbianism would make some women lesbians for life even if their estrogen levels soared in adulthood. How does this model pertain to LeVays research on the hypothalamus? LeVay focused primarily on a distinction he found between samples of autopsied brain tissue from men he classied as either heterosexual or homosexual. He included small samples of brain tissue from women whom he inexplicably assumed were heterosexual, and otherwise he relied on previous research reporting that an adjacent area of the anterior hypothalamus was, on average, proportionately smaller in females than in males.23 Thus he hypothesized that the INAH3 was small in individuals sexually oriented toward men (homosexual men and heterosexual women) and, by extension, that it would be large in individuals sexually oriented toward women (heterosexual men and homosexual women). He based this hypothesis on animal studies that used the Phoenix model: that female-typical behavior and anatomy resulted from a deciency of androgens and that male-typical behavior and anatomy resulted from the early presence of them.24 Accordingly, homosexual men would act and look more like women in general and would be lordotic. Likewise, lesbians would be masculine and would engage overwhelmingly in mounting behaviors. But in a sleight of hand, LeVay inserted a denition of sexual object choice where sexual role had been in the Phoenix model and the rodent research of Gorski, Shryne, and Southam: the key element of the lordotic reex was replaced with the characteristic of desire for men, a culturally complex and multifaceted phenomenon.25 This sleight of hand raises a number of troublesome questions. We might want to ask, for example, how a mans desire for men differs from a womans desire for men. What cultural conventions and morals inuence each of these expressions of desire? What various psychic investments are at play in womens desire for men and in mens desire for men? How might these investments vary cross-culturally or in relation to such factors as ethnic, age, and socioeconomic class differences among sexual partners? Indeed, even thornier questions arise. Is the desire to be mounted necessarily the same as having desire for men? The butch leather daddy who cruises a bar looking for a boy to top may have a desire for men but cer-
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tainly not for being mounted. Similarly, a fem lesbian may walk into a bar looking to be mounted, but only by the butch dyke of her choice. These questions undermine LeVays assumption that a desire for men is interchangeable with a desire to be mounted and that both are grounded in a tiny region of the brain. Indeed, the lordotic reex may be just as culturally complex as the desire for men, since to present oneself for mounting, at least in this culture, implies all kinds of meanings for men and women, queer or straight. But my main point is that LeVay exchanged what he believed was the biologically driven desire to be mounted for a biologically driven desire for men, which, as he noted, straight women and gay men have in common. On closer scrutiny, the problems caused by LeVays reliance on rodent studies deepen. LeVay focused on a part of the brain, the INAH3, because he assumed that it was the human equivalent of a structure in rats known as the sexually dimorphic nucleus of the preoptic area. Even though this structure is not present in the rats close relative, the mouse, LeVay used this research to claim that the same structure was present and functioned in the same way in the human brain.26 Moreover, he conjectured that since the structure in rats formed in early life, and since laboratory experiments indicated that it regulated rates of mounting, the INAH3 must do the same. In the rat study, the smaller the structure in a male, the lower his rate of mounting either of males or of females. The problem is that LeVay wanted to show that in humans, the smaller INAH3 was correlated with male homosexuality, not with rates of mounting. Thus relying on animal studies primarily focused on sexual mode in terms of either mounting or lordosis cannot explain why a gay man may be entirely male-typical in sexual behavior but prefer to mount another man, or why a lesbian may be lordotic with women but not with men. Of course, an individuals preferences and desires may change in relation to particular partners and contexts and may be inuenced by kind and amount of sexual experience. Surely mounting and being mounted do not constitute the universe of sexual possibilities. None of these variations or contingencies is accounted for in the rodent model on which LeVay relied. Like rodents, monkeys are commonly used in neurohormonal and neuroanatomical studies on homosexuality, even though primatologists note that their behavior is signicantly affected by patterns of social organization and conditions of rearing. In the context of LeVays research, monkeys offered evidence of how particular anatomical structures and physiological processes indicated a biological underpinning of homosexuality. LeVay turned to an earlier study of eleven male rhesus monkeys and used it to posit the unique functions of the INAH3 with regard to human sexual orientation.27 To determine the function of the monkeys
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hypothalamus, researchers in that study had surgically oblated or damaged it in six of the subjects and had used the remaining ve as a control population. They had then placed each male in a small cage with an estrous female to see if they would mate. The injured monkeys mounted females less frequentlyperhaps due to the shock of the injury itself but they did masturbate. LeVay used this research to make the point that the injury impaired heterosexual behavior but not sex drive. He then drew a homology between the damaged hypothalamus in the monkey and the nearly nonexistent INAH3 in gay men, noting that each diverted the males attention from females but did not block libido. However, this research did not test for male homosexual behavior in the monkeys, so we cannot know whether the injured monkeys would have selected male partners more often than female partners. LeVays appropriation of this study made male homosexuality the functional equivalent of masturbation and sidestepped a perhaps important point about the relationship between the hypothalamic structure and its function, especially with regard to sociality in the selection of partners. In studies of laboratory animals, the simplicity of observation and quantication of their sexual behavior disguises the problem that overt behavior alone cannot tell us much about sexual fantasy, psychically based libidinal investments, or the complexity of sexual desire. The biological reductivism that underpins this kind of research leads scientists to imagine animals and humans as isomorphic, so that a brain fragment or a minute gesture is seen to be analogous across species. But how can we assume that the meaning, signicance, and aim of mounting or being mounted in rats is the same as for humans at various historical moments and in various cultural contexts? We have only the overt behavior and hormonal activities of these caged animals on which to project all kinds of meanings of sexuality. Seeing animal behavior as a natural and elementary foundation for understanding human behavior allows scientists, with the help of the popular media, to project onto animals historically and culturally contingent aspects of human sexual identity, as if these aspects were universal and indicative of a primordial essence.
Conga-Line Orgies of Mutant Gay Fruit Flies

At the height of the 1995 gay and lesbian pride season, Time featured a story reporting that gene transplants offer clues to the origins of homosexuality. Over an image of a fruit y conga line, the subtitle read: DNA transplant made these male fruit ies turn away from females. What does that say about the origins of homosexuality? (g. 3). The will to causation was foregrounded in this
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Figure 3. Fruit y conga line, Time, 12 June 1995, 60. Permission granted by Time-Life Syndication
article, which summarized the ndings of biologists Ward Oldenwald and ShangDing Zhang of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who, by transplanting a single gene into male Drosophila, had caused them to display homosexual behavior. Strange things occurred in the gallon-sized culture jars of the NIH laboratory, where in some experiments, the female ies are cowering in groups at the top and bottom of the jars. The males, meanwhile, are having a party no, an orgy among themselves. With a frenzy usually reserved for chasing females, the males link up end-to-end in big circles or in long, winding rows that look like winged conga lines. As the buzz of the characteristic fruit y love song lls the air, the males repeatedly lurch forward and rub genitals with the next ones in line.28
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Such an image might amuse camp-inspired gay and lesbian readers who recall male conga-line dances from 1930s Busby Berkeley screen extravaganzas or 1970s queer disco culture, while for homophobic readers it might conjure the specter of gay bathhouse promiscuity gured in the popular media as ground zero for the AIDS epidemic. In any case, as Time reported it, those crazy ies were having a ball. Oldenwald and Zhang, with no apparent sense of irony or humor, claimed that the mutant fruit ies were gay and, moreover, that genetic manipulations made them that way. Thus, during the heady moment of gay and lesbian pride marches across the United States, Time readers witnessed the popular reication of sexual behavior into a category of identity: the mutant gay fruit y had arrived just in time to join the festivities. Indeed, Oldenwald and Zhangs ndings were publicized beyond the scientic community as more than a mere matter of curiosity because, as the Time reporter noted, humans had a related gene that might have a similar function. Thus geneticists and popular journalists colluded in inviting a lay audience to see aspects of human behavior reected in insects, and vice versa. Although Oldenwald and Zhang did not hesitate to classify the mutant ies in terms of identity that is, as gay fruit ies rather than simply as ies that exhibited homosexual behavior they did not claim that a single gene made a person homosexual. Instead they claimed that their research offered insights into how genetic makeup, through a complex series of biochemical reactions, inuences sexual orientation. Nevertheless, Time banked on the popular appeal of stories about the biological causes (not merely the correlates or cofactors) of homosexuality. Thus all those who worried about what made a person gay were treated to scientic evidence that homosexuality probably originated in the genes, and so it was not something that one could catch. Fruit ies are handy little creatures to use in genetics research, since they breed quickly and take up little space. Phenotypic markers are easy to distinguish and to rely on for evidence of dominant and recessive genes, as well as of the effects of engineered mutations. Geneticists can isolate and manipulate genetic markers not only to see how a gene works in a particular species but to draw analogies to the genes of related species, including humans. The idea of using Drosophila to study the genetics of human sexual orientation has been promoted by other NIH researchers, namely, Angela M. L. Pattatucci and Dean H. Hamer, famous for a now controversial study reporting a genetic marker for male homosexuality in humans on a region known as the Xq28 of the X chromosome.29 In a 1993 paper they referred to Drosophila as a promising organism to study the genetics of sexual orientation for several reasons: (1) its versatility as a species and its short cycle of
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reproduction make it well suited to genetic, molecular, and developmental investigations; (2) its anatomy is well characterized, and there is a large body of data on its neurogenetics; and (3) because its courtship behavior is stereotypical in both the male and the female, it is a useful species for isolating the few relevant variables at issue in research on genetic inuences relating to sexual orientation.30 To this list we might add the convenience of not having to contend with the complexities of sexual fantasy or the question of the ies self-identication as they bear on sexual orientation, matters that commonly concern sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists who study homosexuality among humans. These research advantages appealed to Oldenwald and Zhang as well. In brief, their experiments involved a gene that produces a protein enabling cells to use an amino acid called tryptophan. When a mutation in this gene occurs, the ies cannot process tryptophan properly, and a number of phenotypic characteristics result, including white eyes. Normally, the white gene is active only in certain cells, including brain cells, and does nothing to disrupt standard sexual behavior.31 But Oldenwald and Zhang inserted a version of the gene into ies at the embryonic stage to make it activate in every cell of the body. As the ies matured, every cell drew tryptophan from the blood, causing a shortage of the amino acid in the brain. Because of this shortage, the brain was unable to make enough of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which carries messages between nerve cells. Oldenwald and Zhang hypothesized that the shortage of serotonin resulted in the unusual sexual behavior that manifested itself in the male-only conga lines. This hunch is backed up by pharmacological research on drugs like the serotonin-boosting antidepressant Prozac, which is also said to diminish sexual desire. Low levels of serotonin in the brain have been linked not only to depression and violence but to heightened sexual activity, including homosexuality, in laboratory rats, mice, cats, and rabbits, measured in sex-specic rates of mounting and lordosis. Although Oldenwald and Zhang made no comment about it, extrapolating from mammal studies becomes clumsy here, since fruit y sexuality is marked by other behaviors than mounting and lordosis.32 Perhaps more important for our purposes, the serotonin hypothesis does not adequately explain why shortages of serotonin led to homosexual rather than heterosexual activity among the ies. Furthermore, when transplanted into female ies, the gene in question produced no unusual sexual behavior, indicating that any genetic mechanisms at play here related only to homosexuality in males. Returning to the broader theoretical question of how studies on animal sexuality bear on our understanding of human sexuality, we might ask how Oldenwald and Zhangs research and popular reports about it have generated meanings about human social and sexual relations. After all, their research purports to have some relevance
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Figure 4. Gay men in the March on Washington, Time, 12 June 1995, 61. Permission granted by Time-Life Syndication
for understanding the origins of human homosexuality (even though it appears to shed no light on female homosexuality). While they were somewhat circumspect about the comparison to humans, magazine articles about their study drew on popular understandings of gay culture to translate their ndings into lay terms. Indeed, the Time report, by juxtaposing the magnied image of the fruit y conga line with a photograph of four presumably gay men, arm in arm, facing the Capitol in Washington,
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D.C. (g. 4), suggested a conceptual isomorphism between homosexuality in ies and in men. Surrounding the latter image, Time offered a brief discussion of the political debates engendered by the evidence of biological correlates for homosexuality, quoting a Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund representatives optimistic assessment that this kind of research might make straight people more open-minded about equality for gay Americans. By contrast, gay historian Martin Duberman warns that any nding will be used and twisted for homophobic purposes. As if to conrm Dubermans fear, Lou Sheldon, spokesperson for the right-wing Traditional Values Coalition, claims that if a biological cause of homosexuality is found, we would have to come up with some reparative therapy to correct that genetic defect.33 What denitions of homosexuality are assumed in and generated by this research? What are the imagined relationships between sexual behavior and identity in these ies? What stories do they allow us to tell? One way to approach these questions is to examine more closely what the researchers took to be telltale signs of homosexuality. We could simply say, as the researchers seemed to do, that the genetically altered males were gay because of their participation in the maleonly conga line. But this claim is tricky, because the mutated gene did not cause ies to cease heterosexual relations altogether. In the vernacular of the Time reporter: If a gay y is surrounded by females instead of males, hell fertilize the lady ies. So strictly speaking, the NIH ies are not homosexual but bisexual.34 Furthermore, in one experiment a small group of straight ies (i.e., the genetically unaltered male ies) was mixed with a larger group of gay ies to produce results that suggested that homosexuality was contagious, if only momentarily. While the gay ies formed a conga line, the straights stayed to the side at rst. Within a few hours the straights joined in and, for a time, acted gay. In addition, when female ies were introduced to the orgy, male suitors rarely abandoned their male partners to court females. Is the distinction made between gay and straight male ies based on degrees or duration of homosexual versus heterosexual activity, as Kinseys seven-point scale is?35 If so, does genetic mutation play a role in setting these degrees? The situation is complex and murky among fruit ies. Can it be any less so among humans? A nal word about the social and political context of this NIH-funded study: Hamer and Pattatucci, under the auspices of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a body overseen by the NIH, had been conducting research funded mainly with moneys earmarked for research on the possible genetic underpinnings of AIDS-related cancers. They incidentally discovered the signicance of the Xq28, as they told their critics, who had accused them of doing work that was politically motivated (both researchers are gay) and unrelated to cancer.36 In interviews and
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writings Hamer and Pattatucci frequently reiterated that their research, much of which relied on data from research on animal sexual behavior, sought to understand the genetic factors operating in relation to homosexuality in humans.37 While they conceded that genetic and biological factors might play a more subtle role in human sexual behavior, they argued for investigating the evolutionary origins of this behavior by studying the more stereotypical behavior of creatures such as fruit ies. This perspective is shared by Oldenwald and Zhang, although they have given little commentary on the social and political implications of their work. That both projects came out of the NIH, a governmental body dedicated to research on pressing medical problems in the United States, suggests that the NIH during the mid-1990s had become a center for research on the genetics of homosexuality. While much of the research funded by the NIH and the NCI is exploratory and not intended for direct application in clinical contexts, it is signicant that studies on homosexuality in both animals and humans were undertaken through a branch of the government dedicated to medical research. Perhaps it is overstating the case to say that such a connection recalls the common understanding of homosexuality as a medical aberration. After all, studies on such seemingly benign conditions as left-handedness are also funded by the NIH. But ethical and political questions surround research that focuses on the genetics of homosexuality, removing it from the realm of pure science and placing it at the center of magazines and news reports about the prospect of prenatal testing for sexual orientation and elective abortions, even though that prospect is technically unfeasible at the moment.38 Geneticists studying the sexual behavior of fruit ies believe that one can isolate a genetic marker or mechanism that gives rise to homosexuality. Since humans may share a similar genetic structure, these scientists suggest, what we learn about fruit ies could help us understand something about the biological correlates to homosexuality in humans. Like neuroanatomical studies, this research is meant to shed light on homosexuality not only in fruit ies but also in other creatures. The transspecial approach contrasts signicantly with the species-centered approach, which places homosexual behavior in the context of behavioral patterns of a species and of the environmental inuences that shape them. The primatological research to which I turn next makes no explicit claims to explain human behavior by watching animals. This may seem paradoxical, given that primates are more closely related to humans than rodents and fruit ies are. But it is a crucial disciplinary and methodological difference that distinguishes the following study from what I have examined so far. Here we encounter a culturally rich vocabulary for describing homosexuality among rhesus monkeys, and this vocabulary, among
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other things, signals the close relation between humans and monkeys. But we nd no explicit assumption that the hormonal activity and the sexual behavior under observation are homologous to such activity and behavior in humans. Instead the discursive eld in which this example occurs, together with the researchers choice of methods, highlights individual behavioral and social variability in a nonreductive fashion, leaving open the possibility of drawing analogies across primate species without assuming isomorphic homologies between them.
Female Homosexuality in Nonhuman Primates

The assumption that human homosexuality is biologically and behaviorally identical to animal homosexuality is not present in all studies seeking to nd a biological substrate to homosexual behavior. A 1979 study by primatologists Jean S. Akers and Clinton H. Conaway looked at homosexual activity among adult females in a group of Macaca mulatta (rhesus monkey) to determine whether hormonal activity stimulated homosexual relations. In contrast to the researchers examined above, Akers and Conaway focused on the social behavior of primates as a signicant variable, along with biology, in all sexual encounters. Their framework assumed that context-specic interpretation is required to determine the discrete social and biological elements at play in each sexual encounter. For instance, mounting in one encounter may differ considerably in meaning from mounting in another. Compared with the overwhelming majority of neuroanatomical and genetics studies, this research portrayed a more complex understanding of homosexuality in a much broader scheme than that represented by the simple dichotomy of mounting and lordosis. Using the term homosexual in reference to strong affectional ties involving courtship and physical contact between females, Akers and Conaway deployed a more elaborate scheme to characterize the repertoire of sexual behavior that encompassed matters of social organization.39 Like many other primatologists, they rendered a picture of primate life that is closely related to human life, but they did so without assuming that elemental aspects of biology and behavior in rhesus monkeys are necessarily homologous to human biology and social organization. Funded by the NIH, Akers and Conaway conducted their research in the 1970s at the Caribbean Primate Research Center in Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico, where Robert Yerkes and subsequent generations of primatologists conducted primate research for the greater part of the twentieth century. Akers and Conaway observed 640 hours of activity among eight adult females and two adult males in an outdoor corral twenty-ve feet by twenty-ve feet. Their express aim was to determine whether there was a correlation between female homosexual behavior and hormonal activity
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Figure 5. Hide-and-seek in Macaca mulatta. Permission granted by Archives of Sexual Behavior, Kluwer/Plenum Publishers
during the monkeys menstrual cycles. They were interested in ascertaining the mounting females hormonal dispositions but, more important, in identifying the range of behaviors associated with female homosexuality as they related to menstrual activity in Macaca mulatta.40 Akers and Conaway had no explicit interest in extrapolating their ndings to human homosexual behavior, and it is noteworthy that their research received no attention from mainstream journalists when it appeared in 1979, at the apex of second-wave feminism and well before the recent wave of interest in biological studies of male homosexuality. But the broad focus of their study, like that of feminist primatologists at about the same time, emphasized the importance of reciprocity and affection in female sexual desire, thus paralleling feminist discussions about womens cooperation and desire for affection in sexual bonds.41 What captured Akers and Conaways interest were the complex social and sexual negotiations that established strong affectional bonds between particular female monkeys. Hence they devoted the greater part of their article to describing and documenting an ensemble of elements featured in these negotiations. Akers and Conaway observed an array of activities, from solicitation patterns to genital contact, that constituted female homosexuality.42 The bout, or approach between two partners, involved circling, jumping up and down, and playing hide-and-seek (g. 5). The monkeys occasionally kissed by touching their lips and tongues, and
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Figure 6. Ventral hug in Macaca mulatta. Permission granted by Archives of Sexual Behavior, Kluwer/Plenum Publishers
wrapped their limbs around each other in a ventral hug, which was often enhanced when one female stimulated her own or her partners clitoris (g. 6). Several kinds of mounting were identied, including the so-called homosexual mounting position (g. 7), in which the mounter climbed on the mountees shoulders, placed her feet on the mountees hips, and rubbed her genitals on the mountees rump. This was a slight modication of the heterosexual mounting position, which, interestingly, could be effected by two females, since it was dened by the mounters posture, not by the sexes of the participants (g. 8).43 The homosexual mounting position was superior for allowing the mounter to rub her genitals on the mountees
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Figure 7. Homosexual mounting position in Macaca mulatta. Permission granted by Archives of Sexual Behavior, Kluwer/Plenum Publishers
rump. Finally, in the mount refusal, the monkey chosen for mounting sat down or ran away, which occurred in only 6 percent of female-initiated mounts versus 29 percent of male-initiated mounts. Akers and Conaway paid some attention to behaviors related primarily to pleasure and sexual release. For example, they reported that the female monkeys commonly masturbated, and they observed a clutching reaction that occurred during mounts, in which the mountee turned her head around backward and upward to look at the face of the mounter (g. 9).44 The study found some correlations between homosexual behavior and hormonal activity: for the mounter, homosexual activity was highest in the follicular stage
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Figure 8. Heterosexual mounting position in Macaca mulatta. Permission granted by Archive of Sexual Behavior, Kluwer/Plenum Publishers
of the menstrual cycle, and for the mountee, in the ovulatory stage, while homosexual activity was consistently low for both during the luteal period. But since many monkeys engaged in a range of courtship activities, including mounting, throughout their cycles, Akers and Conaway stressed two equally signicant ndings: (1) although homosexual activity could be linked to the menstrual cycle, strong bonds between females are not totally bound by endocrine factors, and (2) simultaneously with heterosexual activity, bonds between females were maintained or intensied.45 For the authors, the evidence for social cohesion produced by sexual contact was strong. Some females formed ongoing, though usually nonmonogamous, relationships with one another, and they usually had a favorite place in the corral to have sexual contact. The mounter was usually a high-ranking female, indicating that social hierarchy played a role in matings, but high-ranking females often solicited mounts from subordinate females by presenting themselves for mounting. Thus mounting itself was not an indication of dominance but more consistently had the effect of creating social cohesion and support among partners. High-ranking females tended not to have homosexual contact with close rivals. One dominant female preferred to be mounted by another female, leaving a male in the lurch. It was quite apparent that alliances between females were not easily disrupted by interloping males; females frequently showed a preference for contact with each other over contact with males.
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Figure 9. Clutching reaction in Macaca mulatta. Permission granted by Archives of Sexual Behavior, Kluwer/Plenum Publishers
In summarizing the social signicance of homosexual relationships among female Macaca mulatta, Akers and Conaway repudiated the sexual inversion model, which continues to dominate animal research on the subject, and urged other researchers to recognize that the homosexual relationship appears to allow for the expression of many behaviors which are not masculine or feminine.46 They also noted that mounting is a normal part of the sexual repertoire of many species for both males and females. In bold terms, they concluded that homosexual activity in adult nonhuman primates is not simply training for heterosexuality; it exists concurrently with heterosexual activity and is sometimes preferred to it. Akers and Conaways eld of vision and methods of observation allowed them to map sexual encounters across a range of behaviors, and thus they expanded the meaning of homosexuality to allow many more possibilities than those presented in other research that focused on lordosis and mounting alone with the
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aim of extrapolating human behavior from them. Although Akers and Conaway made no mention of its signicance, their focus on female sexuality may also explain why they included a larger range of behaviors in the sexual repertoire of their subjects. Unlike the neuroanatomical and genetics studies examined above, their study placed value on affectional and social ties, elaborate solicitation patterns, and polymorphous sexual contact. Thus it moved away from the phallocentric tendency that structures most studies on mammal sexuality, and a whole new eld of signication came into view. In contrast to Oldenwald and Zhang, Akers and Conaway did not import terminology from human society to characterize their subjects as either fundamentally homosexual or heterosexual. Paradoxically, in this earlier study of homosexuality in a species closely related to humans, the trafc between nature and culture was more subtle than in recent neuroanatomical and genetics studies taken up with such enthusiasm by the popular media. In fact, Akers and Conaways denition of nonhuman primate sexual behavior came closer to how we normally dene human sexuality, that is, as something not dictated by instinct or reex alone but mediated by social and psychological phenomena. Thus while they suggested a new way of looking at human homosexuality, Akers and Conaway did not assert a direct correlation. But given the assumption that we are the close cousins of other primates, perhaps Akers and Conaway did not have to take such a liberty; it may have been taken so long ago, especially in primatology, as to have become by now an unspoken given.47 Yet the effects, in this case, are far more multifaceted than the reduction of homosexuality to a genetic element or neuroanatomical aberration. The tendency to make links between aspects of homosexuality across species takes interesting forms. In the nal example, an interesting reversal in trafc is enacted. Here sexual culture in contemporary Western society provides models for making sense of homosexuality in animals.
A Queer in Sheeps Clothing

As gay and lesbian life gains greater visibility in mainstream culture, we see its powerful impact on scientic studies of homosexuality in animals. This last example offers a vivid illustration of how homosexuality in humans, rather than being the rationale or end point of an analysis of homosexuality in animals, provides resources for explaining a crisis in the sexual performance of rams. Thus it allows us to watch a different ow of trafc. A study with no pretext of explaining human homosexuality, it imposes contemporary understandings of gay male identity and culture on the behavior of rams to make sense of declining rates of wool and lamb
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production in the western United States. Herein the practical concerns of animal husbandry shaped the methods and theoretical assumptions of biological research on hormones and behavior in sheep. They also encoded images and stories that grow out of a popular imagination informed by signicant cultural and political redenitions of sexuality now, at the turn of the twenty-rst century. In 1990 Anne Perkins and James A. Fitzgerald at the U.S. Sheep Experimentation Center in DuBois, Idaho, reported that over a three-year period 15 to 30 percent of the rams they had observed failed to show sexual interest in female sheep. They also noted, following several stimulus tests, that many of these so-called duds were actually homosexual, because they had mounted males instead of females.48 Thus this research represented a signicant shift from most research on homosexuality in animals, which denes homosexuality in terms of atypical sex role behavior. In this case, sexual orientation was dened only in terms of object choice. In addition to publishing their ndings in trade journals, using humorous and accessible language, Perkins and Fitzgerald published articles in the authoritative Journal of Animal Science and Sheep Research Journal.49 What makes this study interesting for our purposes is that (1) like Oldenwald and Zhang, who used the designation gay fruit ies, the researchers labeled certain males homosexual rams, thus reifying behavior into a category of presumably xed identity; and (2) they placed this label on the ram that did the mounting, not the male that was mounted. Thus Perkins and Fitzgerald turned the sex inversion model from neuroanatomical and genetics studies on its head, since the ram labeled homosexual acted in a male-typical manner. In fact, they noted that homosexual rams seemed to have normal genital endowments and healthy libidos. They were studs in every way but one: they wanted to mount males. Hence Perkins and Fitzgerald coined a popular name for the problem: the Dud Stud Phenomenon. Driving home the point that a homosexual ram need not be an anatomically decient ram, a humorous caption under a cartoon drawing of a well-endowed ram cautioned sheepherders, Dont be blinded by large testicles (g. 10).50 The authors stressed that the problem was not the rams sperm count or lack of virility but his preference for mounting other males rather than the appropriate sex objects, females: No matter how many bullets are in the clip, nothing happens until ring commences.51 The economic stakes are considerable. Rams cost between $350 and $4,000 apiece. If a sheepherder buys a dud, he or she faces longer breeding and lambing seasons, which in turn decrease the reproductive efciency and overall size of the ock. Normally, a sheepherder has a high ratio of one ram for thirty to fty ewes; with optimal or high performance rams, the ratio goes up to 1:100 125. Increasing the number of ewes bred to properly performing rams
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Figure 10. Dont be blinded by large testicles, sheep! July 1990. Permission granted by sheep! Magazine
decreases the sheepherders costs per lamb. Having a dud deprives the herder of this advantage, since fewer lambs born means lower prots in the wool marketplace and at the slaughterhouse. Thus Perkins and Fitzgerald urged producers to test rams for performance in order to select the most adept ones; they offered stepby-step tips on administering a servicing test (to determine rates of successful mounting and insemination) and a sexual preference test (to weed out the maleoriented duds). Their long-term goal was to develop ways to predict breeding performance by determining the biological and genetic bases of sexual behavior in order to weed duds out of the population. In various experiments Perkins and Fitzgerald sought an organic or genetic origin for the apparent indifference of certain rams to ewes, which they suspected was due to a hormonal abnormality in the rams.52 Because their work centered on heterosexual reproduction and impediments to it, the researchers labeled the indifferent rams with the misnomer sexually inactive, a category further divided between rams that mounted neither females nor males and homosexual or male-oriented rams (hardly sexually inactive if we regard homosexual behavior as sex). Perkins and Fitzgerald rst investigated the roles of plasma luteinizing hormone (LH) and testosterone (T) as they might inuence the rams aversion to females.53 They hypothesized that because heterosexual rams (those that readily mounted ewes) experienced
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increases in plasma LH and T when exposed to their objects of choice (estrous females), homosexual rams would show a similar response to other rams and not to ewes. Consider how this hypothesis differs from the sex inversion rolebased paradigm of the earlier studies: it is not that the male-oriented rams would be more like estrous ewes but that their source of stimulation would be males they mounted.54 To test the hypothesis, Perkins and Fitzgerald devised a sexual preference test to classify rams as either homosexual or heterosexual and to see if the former experienced elevated levels of LH and T when exposed to males and females. The test was administered to rams already suspected of being homosexual because they did not mount estrous females after three preliminary exposures of thirty minutes each and one overnight exposure. Rams that mounted females at least once during these exposures were deemed heterosexual and eliminated from the research.55 The sexual preference test ended when the rams (eight total) that preferred to mount males exclusively were classied as male-oriented (homosexuals). In a second experiment involving prolonged exposure, two of the eight rams showed a preference for both males and females. Thus the researchers dened a ram as homosexual if, when given a choice between estrous ewes and restrained males, they consistently display a preference for males.56 While these rams might be more accurately classied as bisexual, they were not. (Given the monetary interests involved, why take a chance on a partial dud stud?) Furthermore, heterosexual rams in the study were observed mounting both estrous females and males, although a preference for the former was noted. Ultimately, the hypothesis was proved wrong: homosexual rams showed no elevated levels of plasma LH or T when exposed to other males that they mounted, but heterosexual rams did show elevated levels when exposed to estrous females. Therefore Perkins and Fitzgerald concluded that homosexual behavior did not have the same physiological effects as heterosexual behavior. Finally, they stated that the homosexual rams indicated typical male motor patterns (e.g., foreleg kicks, investigatory sniffs, mounts, pelvic thrusts, and ejaculations) and showed no female-typical behaviors with the exception of female [sic] preference. Thus they tentatively rejected the sexual inversion hypothesis of the Phoenix model.57 To explain homosexual ram behavior, they proposed an interactive model, according to which early-life behavioral imprinting might have a priming effect on hypothalamic structures, modifying the higher brain centers and thus inuencing the LH secretory response to female or male stimuli.58 The authors therefore submitted that homosexuality might have a biological substrate linked not to sexual dimorphism between males and females but, perhaps, to a new kind of sexual dimorphism along the lines of sexual orientation.
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The practicality of this research, aimed as it was at remedying an economic problem, and its focus on animals may account for why it was funded during a time of considerable political controversy surrounding research on human homosexuality.59 Indeed, the main press coverage it received was in a 1992 Washington Post column reporting that while the NIH was being prevented from funding research on the origins of human sexual orientation by Republicans who saw such research as threatening to family values, similar research aimed at identifying, separating, and studying a group of gay sheep had been funded for four years without controversy by the Department of Agriculture.60 In contrast to the studies on fruit ies, rodents, and octopuses, the Perkins and Fitzgerald research was reported neither in mainstream nor in gay newspapers, indicating that its publishers and sponsors did not write press releases to emphasize its relevance to human homosexuality. Indeed, its authors did not expect their research to be illuminating to anyone but other biologists and a handful of sheepherders. How might the shift in terms between the studies of laboratory animals and those of rams reveal the trafc of meanings between human and animal sexual behavior? Labeling the mounting ram a homosexual mirrored a change in styles among gay men toward a more typically masculine image, dating from the rst appearance of the Castro or Christopher Street clone and the macho men of the Village People. Indeed, Perkins and Fitzgerald seemed to have no problem identifying certain rams as essentially homosexual, importing a category of identity from late-twentieth-century Western culture to describe a particular kind of sexual behavior. Moreover, these rams were not effeminate. Buff gay men who work out at the gym and signify handsome masculinity in the pages of Details magazine and International Male catalogs represent an image of male homosexuality that does not assume effeminacy. Here we have a study that labeled a brawny and sexually initiating ram as homosexual, in sharp contrast to LeVays sexually inverted lordotic male rats, which served as a counterpart to gay men. We might ask whether Perkins and Fitzgerald were unconsciously picturing Tom of Finlands leather daddies when they observed the sexual behavior of those eccentric sheep (g. 11). It is quite clear, however, that the homosexual ram is dysfunctional primarily with respect to reproduction; in spite of his strength and prowess, he makes bad object choices. Perkins and Fitzgerald warned sheepherders and breeders that unless these duds were identied and weeded out, their faulty genes would be passed (whenever they did manage a successful mount) to future generations, causing an increasing number of duds in circulation. This would translate into real losses of money when a herder had to feed and tend a homosexual dud while watching the rates of wool production and lambing decline. Bad genes and bad object choices
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equal bad investments. Smart money is spent on the Perkins and Fitzgerald sexual preference test devised to weed out negative prospects. The same goes for sheepherders and the wool-wearing, lamb-eating, taxpaying public.
Coda
By the late twentieth century in the United States scientic culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. . . . Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between animals and humans to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Donna Haraway The multiple meanings given to sexuality and sexual orientation in science reect the elaboration of these terms among humans in culturally and historically specic contexts. Nature and the organisms that populate it represent both a repository for human mythmaking about sexuality and a screen on which meanings given to human sexuality can be projected. Is it any wonder that we now nd queer rats, homosexual sheep, and gay fruit ies wandering through the pages of scientic journals? Or that we nd reports of homosexual bouts among female rhesus monkeys and same-sex close encounters among deep-sea octopuses spicing up the shelves of science libraries? I have argued that there is a great deal of trafc back and forth between the scientic meanings given to animal sexuality and those given to human sexuality, particularly in the case of homosexuality. In recent neuroanatomical and genetics research on sexual orientation, the stories animals tell are always the stories humans tell about them, pronounced in the headlines that pepper mainstream and gay newspapers across the country. Today we nd evidence of a boundary-obliterating trafc circulating around what we mean by homosexuality, a term freighted with cultural assumptions and deeply felt personal investments, corresponding to an array of conicting political positions. As increasingly complex questions of gender and sexual diversity pose political and theoretical challenges to our culture as a whole, it is very likely that scientists, journalists, and lay readers will continue to turn to animals to tell culturally encoded stories about social organization and, though often unconsciously, about social relations of power along axes of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Indeed, claiming that a behavior is natural can promote tolerance in political argu-
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Figure 11. Tom of Finlands leather daddy. Permission granted by Tom of Finland Foundation
ments, unless, of course, nature is imagined to be corruptible and in need of social intervention, as eugenicists have espoused. As Haraway and other feminist critics of science have noted, nature is a narrative spacea world of material, metaphorical, and epistemic resources for understanding, describing, and rationalizing given and changing social orders.61 The creatures that populate the narrative space called nature are key characters in scientic tales about the past, present, and future. Various tellings of these tales are
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possible, but they are always shaped by historical, disciplinary, and larger cultural contexts. Neuroanatomists and geneticists, working within a transspecial framework, bring assumptions about sexuality to their inquiries and then assume the relevance of their ndings to human subjects. Primatologists studying social behaviors in a species-centered approach bring a more socially complex understanding of sexuality to their research and, at times, explicitly stress the relevance of their ndings to humans or conne their ndings to the species in question. Biologists concerned with practical matters of animal husbandry bring distinctly human categories to their studies of animals. In the midst of this trafc, popular journalism serves up amusing and fascinating stories about the nature of homosexuality, favoring a perspective that invites humans to see themselves in animals. Certainly, the ability to read all these stories critically and in context is all the more important at a time when homosexuality continues to be a source of fascination, anxiety, and puzzlement, evenor perhaps I should say, especiallyin the scientic laboratory.
Notes
Thanks to the following for their helpful comments and suggestions: Laura Briggs, Lisa Cartwright, Leyla Ezdinli, Jenrose Fitzgerald, Marjorie Garber, Ted Goldfarb, Inderpal Grewal, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Janet Jakobsen, Sandy Jones, Caren Kaplan, Parissara Liewkeat, Ira Livingston, Judith Mayne, Terry Moore, Negar Mottahedeh, Katherine Park, Michael Scarce, Cynthia Schneider, Marilyn Schuster, Andrea Slane, Eric Smoodin, Susan Squier, Sharon Ullman, Patricia White, Ara Wilson, and the countless pet owners and animal lovers with whom I have conversed while composing this article. 1. Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149 81; Haraway, The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others, in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 295 337. See, e.g., J. C. Slimp, B. L. Hart, and R. W. Goy, Heterosexual, Autosexual, and Social Behavior of Adult Male Rhesus Monkeys with Medial Preoptic-Anterior Hypothalamic Lesions, Brain Research, no. 142 (1978): 105 22; and Jean S. Akers and Clinton H. Conaway, Female Homosexual Behavior in Macaca Mulatta, Archives of Sexual Behavior 8 (1979): 63 80. An example that broadened the scope of sexuality appeared in a 1992 article that emphasized the central relationship between female sexuality and sociality among bonobos. Scientists studying this species dened sexuality as a multifaceted activity with important effects related at least as much to ensuring social order as to supporting biological reproduction. According to the articles
2.
186
3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
author, females use sex to cement relationships with others in this group of primates, noted for affording high status to females. GG-rubbing (genital-to-genital stimulation) between females reinforces social ties and relieves tension. Thus, the researchers reasoned, female homosexuality is no doubt pleasurable but also offers advantages to the female seeking support to survive in the group, a strategy resembling typical female bonding behavior: Once inside the new group, a female bonobo must build a sisterhood from scratch. In groups of humans or chimps, unrelated females construct friendships through the rituals of shopping together or grooming. Bonobos do it sexually. Although pleasure may be the motivation behind a female-female assignation, the function is to form an alliance (Meredith F. Small, Whats Love Got to Do with It? Discover 13, no. 6 [1992]: 51). So, when looking across the human-bonobo boundary, one can consider lesbianism, grooming, and shopping as functional equivalents in a social system, each driven by particular desires, pleasures, interests, and needs. Far from being frivolous activities, sex between females and girl bonding at the mall or nail palace are seen as central to the social organization of these species. William Byne and Bruce Parsons, Human Sexual Orientation: The Biological Theories Reappraised, Archives of General Psychiatry 50 (1993): 228 39. See, e.g., Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975). New Puzzle on Sex Life of Octopus, New York Times, 18 October 1994, B11. Emphasis added. Richard A. Lutz and Janet R. Voight, Close Encounter in the Deep, Nature, 13 October 1994, 563. Interestingly, in all recent studies of human sexual orientation, the authors go to the trouble of suggesting that their research might offer insights into lesbianism. Yet they also acknowledge, in a now predictable discursive move, that it does not directly deal with female homosexuality (e.g., Simon LeVay, A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men, Science, no. 253 [1991]: 1034 37; Dean H. Hamer et al., A Linkage between DNA Markers on the X Chromosome and Male Sexual Orientation, Science, no. 261 [1993]: 321 27; Angela M. L. Pattatucci and Dean H. Hamer, The Genetics of Sexual Orientation: From Fruit Flies to Humans [paper presented at Theorizing Sexuality: Evolution, Culture, and Development, Wenner-Gren Foundation Symposium no. 116, Lisbon, Portugal, 19 27 March 1993]). Frequently, the authors posit that female sexuality, whether heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, is too complex to be accounted for by their research protocols and ndings. They note that lesbianism merits future inquiry following modied protocols, about which they are usually vague. Perhaps these discursive gestures have something to do with the fact that much of this research is undertaken primarily by gay men who assume that it will interest not only other scientists but also gays and lesbians who are curious about the personal and political ramications of locating sexual orientation in biology. If the hope is that such evidence will further the cause of gay and lesbian rights, as
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8. 9. 10.
11.
12. 13.
14. 15.
LeVay, Hamer, and Richard C. Pillard claim, then mentioning lesbians may be an effort to establish some unity of position and purpose among gay men and lesbians. In other words, if we are to stake a claim for equal protection against discrimination on a biologically based sexual orientation, then it would behoove scientists to determine the biological correlates to lesbianism. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). E.g., LeVay, Difference in Hypothalamic Structure. Ibid. An earlier study had reported that the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus was 1.7 times as dense in homosexual men as in heterosexual men, and contained more than twice as many cells (D. F. Swaab and M. A. Hofman, An Enlarged Suprachiasmatic Nucleus in Homosexual Men, Brain Research, no. 537 [1990]: 14148). That this study received much less media attention than LeVays, just a year later, was due, Michael R. Gorman argues, to the differences in their deeper messages. In contrast to LeVays ndings, which reiterated a traditional framework for equating homosexuality with femininity in men and with masculinity in women, Swaab and Hofmans research indicated that while the brains of homosexual men were different from those of heterosexual men, they did not resemble those of heterosexual women (Male Homosexual Desire: Neurological Investigations and Homosexual Bias, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 38 [1994]: 61 81). Byne and Parsons, Human Sexual Orientation; Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men, 2d ed. (New York: Basic, 1992); Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Wald, Exploding the Gene Myth: How Genetic Information Is Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers (Boston: Beacon, 1993). John Maddox, Is Homosexuality Hard-Wired? New Work on the Hypothalamus Suggests the Answer May Be Yes! Nature, 5 September 1991, 13. E.g., Gnter Drner et al., A Neuroendocrine Predisposition for Homosexuality in Men, Archives of Sexual Behavior 4 (1975): 1 8; Drner et al., Stressful Events in Prenatal Life of Bi- and Homosexual Men, Experiments in Clinical Endocrinology 81 (1983): 83 87; Drner et al., Sexual Differentiation of Gonadotrophin Secretion, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Role Behavior, Steroid Biochemistry 27 (1987): 1081 87; N. K. Gartrell, D. L. Loriaux, and T. N. Chase, Plasma Testosterone in Homosexual and Heterosexual Women, American Journal of Psychiatry 134 (1977): 111719. Byne and Parsons, Human Sexual Orientation. Even in rodents, social learning and contingent experiences such as sleep, stress, litter size, and nutrition can mediate the inuence of hormones (Lynda I. A. Birke, How Do Gender Differences in Behavior Develop? A Reanalysis of the Role of Early Experience, Perspectives in Ethology 8 [1989]: 215 42; Celia Moore, Development of Mammalian Sexual Behavior, in The Comparative Development of Adaptive Skills:
188
16. 17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22. 23. 24.
25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
Evolutionary Implications, ed. Eugene S. Gollin [Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1985], 19 56; Moore, Another Psychobiological View of Sexual Differentiation, Developmental Review 5 [1985]: 18 55). Birke, How Do Gender Differences in Behavior Develop? Lynda I. A. Birke, Is Homosexuality Hormonally Determined? Journal of Homosexuality 6 (1982): 34 49. Birke also notes that typicality is extracted from mean frequencies of certain behaviors in a population and then used to make hypotheses about how behavior results from physiological and biochemical causes. Furthermore, she observes that some individual animals may be typical in one trait or behavior but not in another; that is, they fall in the mean for that trait but are aberrant in another. No animal is likely to be typical in every trait, but in an effort to establish typicality, exceptions are generally discarded (Birke, How Do Gender Differences in Behavior Develop? 226). Frank A. Beach, Sexual Attractivity, Proceptivity, and Receptivity in Female Mammals, Hormonal Behavior 15 (1976): 105 38; M. McClintock and N. T. Adler, The Role of the Female during Copulation in Wild and Domestic Rats (Rattus Norvegicus), Behaviour 67 (1979): 6796. C. H. Phoenix, R. W. Goy, A. A. Gerall, and W. C. Young, Organizing Action of Prenatally Administered Testosterone Propionate on the Tissues Mediating Mating Behavior in the Female Guinea Pig, Endocrinology 65 (1959): 369 82. Laura Allen and Roger Gorski, Sexual Orientation and the Size of the Anterior Commissure in the Human Brain, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 89 (1992): 7199 202. Heino Meyer-Bahlburg, Sex Hormones and Female Homosexuality: A Critical Examination, Archives of Sexual Behavior 8, no. 2 (1979): 10119; Meyer-Bahlburg, Psychoendocrine Research on Sexual Orientation: Current Status and Future Options, in Sex Differences in the Brain: The Relation between Structure and Function, ed. G. J. de Vries et al., Progress in Brain Research, 61 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1984). Drner et al., Neuroendocrine Predisposition for Homosexuality; Drner et al., Stressful Events in Prenatal Life. Laura Allen, M. Hines, J. E. Shryne, and Roger Gorski, Two Sexually Dimorphic Cell Groups in the Human Brain, Journal of Neuroscience 9 (1989): 497506. Roger Gorski, J. E. Shryne, and A. M. Southam, Evidence for a Morphological Sex Difference within the Medial Preoptic Area of the Rat Brain, Brain Research, no. 148 (1978): 33346. Byne and Parsons, Human Sexual Orientation. Ibid. Slimp, Hart, and Goy, Heterosexual, Autosexual, and Social Behavior. Larry Thompson, Search for a Gay Gene, Time, 12 June 1995, 60. Hamer et al., Linkage between DNA Markers. For a review of the controversy, in which Hamer was investigated for cooking his data, see John Crewdson, Study of
189
30.
31. 32.
33. 34. 35.
36. 37.
38. 39. 40.
Gay Gene Challenged: Author Defends Findings against Allegations, Chicago Tribune, 25 June 1995. Pattatucci and Hamer, Genetics of Sexual Orientation, 7 8. In their NIH-funded research, predating Oldenwald and Zhangs ndings, Pattatucci and Hamer reported that in a strain of fruit ies they called fruitless, males that were homozygous for the fruitless trait lined up, mouthparts-to-genitals-to-mouthparts, forming spectacular courtship chains. This behavior and other distinguishing features are thought to be linked to mutations on the third chromosome. Pattatucci and Hamer noted that their research on fruitless males could be useful to research on human sexual orientation, because they hypothesized that the latter might be sex-limited or sex-linked. Thompson, Search for a Gay Gene, 61. As Pattatucci and Hamer point out: A courtship bout in mature Drosophila characteristically begins with the male closely following a moving female, occasionally tapping her abdomen with a foreleg. Then the male will extend and rapidly vibrate one or both wings to produce a courtship song, typically followed by extending his proboscis to lick the females genitals. At this point, the male will curl his abdomen and thrust his genitalia toward those of the female in a copulation attempt. These behaviors are performed with the goal of stimulating a sexually mature female to open her vaginal plates and copulate with him (Genetics of Sexual Orientation, 8). Thompson, Search for a Gay Gene, 61. Ibid. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948); Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953). Crewdson, Study of Gay Gene Challenged. Kate Brandt, Doctor Angela Pattatucci: Not Your Typical Government Scientist, Deneuve, December 1993, 44 46; Dean H. Hamer and Peter Copeland, The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Richard Saltus, Scientist Wants to Ban Prenatal Tests for Homosexuality, Boston Globe, 21 February 1994. Saltus, Scientist Wants to Ban Prenatal Tests. Akers and Conaway, Female Homosexual Behavior in Macaca Mulatta, 64. Previous research on female homosexual behavior in everything from chimpanzees to cows to lions and other cats had suggested that the mounted female (whether mounted by males or by females) was usually estrous. See Robert M. Yerkes, Social Dominance and Sexual Status in the Chimpanzee, Quarterly Review of Biology 14 (1939): 115 36; J. Hammond Jr. and F. T. Day, Oestrogen Treatment of Cattle: Induced Lactation and Other Effects, Journal of Endocrinology 4 (1944): 53 82; and Frank A. Beach, Factors Involved in the Control of Mounting Behavior in Female Mammals, in Perspectives in Reproduction and Sexual Behavior, ed. Milton Diamond (Blooming-
190
ton: Indiana University Press, 1968). These studies seldom commented on the hormonal condition of the mounting female. 41. See Mina Cauleld, Sexuality in Human Evolution: What Is Natural in Sex? Feminist Studies 11 (1985): 34363; Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989); Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone, eds., Radical Feminism (New York: Quadrangle, 1973); Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism (New York: Stein and Day, 1972); Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Lesbian/Woman (San Francisco: Glide, 1972); Robin Morgan, comp., Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Womens Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage, 1970); Ginny Vida, ed., Our Right to Love: A Lesbian Resource Book (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978); and Adrienne Zihlman, Woman and Evolution, Part 2: Subsistence and Social Organization among Early Hominids, Signs 4 (1978): 4 20. Research conducted during the 1970s reects a trend, particularly among women primatologists, to explore the signicance of homosexuality in social relations within primate groups. For example, Suzanne ChevalierSkolnikoff observed that stumptail monkeys revealed frequent prolonged, intensive genital stimulation between individuals of the same sex . . . in positive emotional contexts, suggesting that both homosexual and heterosexual encounters train individuals for adult sexual roles and that homosexual behavior is a basic primate pattern not exclusive to man (Homosexual Behavior in a Laboratory Group of Stumptail Monkeys [Macaca Arctoides]: Forms, Contexts, and Possible Social Functions, Archives of Sexual Behavior 5 [1976]: 511). Chevalier-Skolnikoffs conclusion, voiced in a nonjudgmental fashion, was typical of much 1970s primate research on homosexuality, which described the boundary between homosexuality and heterosexuality as uid and viewed homosexuality as a benign variation of sexual behavior that frequently improved the groups stability, compatability, and chances of survival. 42. Solicitation patterns included follow the leader, in which partners alternated playing leader and follower, and hide-and-seek, in which they took positions on either side of a tree and peeked at each other, just outside each others reach, as they circled the tree slowly. Kiss and run, a game played by one female, consisted of walking up to another female, quickly rubbing noses and touching lips, and running away. Sometimes her partner would grab her by the ear and pull her head around to nuzzle her. Lipsmack and circle, a common prelude to a mount, involved one female circling another and smacking her lips, making smaller and smaller circles each time. Females solicited mounts by presenting their genitals, pulling a potential partners tail, jumping up and down, or forcing another animal into position. 43. In the heterosexual mount, the mounter clasped the mountees waist rather than her shoulders and mounted her legs rather than her hips. In the partial mount, the mounter stood with her feet on the ground and her hands on the mountees hips while
191
44.
45. 46. 47. 48. 49.
50. 51. 52. 53.
54.
55.
rubbing and thrusting against her. The sideways homosexual mount was referred to as a clumsy position in which the mounter was perpendicular to the mountee. During the clutching reaction, the mountee smacked her lips vigorously and reached back to grab at her female partners head and body hair, in a manner virtually identical to that in male-female mounting. In some cases the mounter would exhibit a pause during which the mounting female stopped thrusting, arched her back, and stared into space. Interestingly, while the authors noted that this pause resembled the male ejaculatory pause, they made no mention of female orgasm, remaining symptomatically silent about the meaning and signicance of this event. Akers and Conaway, Female Homosexual Behavior in Macaca Mulatta, 78, 76. Ibid., 78. Haraway, Primate Visions. Anne Perkins and James A. Fitzgerald, Is Your Ram a Dud or a Stud? Knowing the Difference Pays Off, sheep! July 1990, 45. Anne Perkins and James A. Fitzgerald, Luteinizing Hormone, Testosterone, and Behavioral Response of Male-Oriented Rams to Estrous Ewes and Rams, Journal of Animal Science 70 (1992): 178794; Perkins and Fitzgerald, Sexual Behavior of Rams: Biological Perspective to Flock Management, Sheep Research Journal 9, no. 2 (1993): 5158. Perkins and Fitzgerald, Is Your Ram a Dud or a Stud? 4. Ibid. Perkins and Fitzgerald, Luteinizing Hormone; Perkins and Fitzgerald, Sexual Behavior of Rams. Interestingly, their reason for investigating LH and T in these rams stemmed, in part, from controversial hormonal research on men in which homosexual men responded differently and showed a slight LH surge when homosexually stimulated, a weak version of what women normally experience in the menstrual cycle (Brian Gladue, Richard Green, and R. E. Hellman, Neuroendocrine Response to Estrogen and Sexual Orientation, Science, no. 225 [1984]: 1496 99). Here we nd more evidence for the reversal of trafc in the use of research on human biology to inform studies of sheep biology. There was almost no discussion of and apparently little interest in whether the homosexual rams were mounted, although such a study might account for their prolonged attachment to other males in a manner that would impede their interest in females (see also n. 55). Perkins and Fitzgerald, Luteinizing Hormone. The test itself was rather curious. Rams were isolated for forty-eight to seventy-two hours to prevent courtship and mounting of male pen mates. The test animals were then exposed for about thirty minutes to stimulus animals, two males and two estrous females, each restrained in a four-way stanchion. Stimulus rams were chosen on the basis of approximately eighteen hours of preliminary home pen observations. Rams that were mounted repeatedly (receivers) by pen mates were chosen to be stimulus males, presumably because
192
56. 57.
58.
59.
they would not resist being mounted and were perhaps more desirable, due either to their smell or to their status in the social hierarchy of the group, although Perkins and Fitzgerald offered no such explanation. If a test ram did not mount any of the stimulus animals during the rst choice test, it was sent back to its home pen, where it was observed for two hours. If it mounted another male during this time, the mounted male was used as a stimulus animal in the second round of the preference test. Again, the authors did not explain why they checked to see if an individual ram had a particular preference among his pen mates. We can only speculate that they assumed such a preference between these males. Perkins and Fitzgerald, Sexual Behavior of Rams. Perkins and Fitzgerald, Luteinizing Hormone, 1793. Instead they speculated that elevated T levels in the homosexual and heterosexual rams might have to do with establishing social status, as in the homosexual organization of wild mountain sheep societies, in which those acting like males separated from the females and juveniles. In the normal homosexual organization of these herds, dominant rams act the role of courting males, while subordinate rams behave like estrous females (1793). But this says little about the homosexual rams in Perkins and Fitzgeralds study: they, like dominant heterosexual rams in the wild, did not behave like ewes but, rather, mounted other males. Perkins and Fitzgerald subsequently sought to determine the relevance of LH levels and stimulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis in rams response to estrous ewes, hypothesizing that these were indicators of breeding efciency. Again, they found that homosexual rams did not experience elevated LH levels when exposed either to estrous females (in contrast to their heterosexual counterparts) or to other males. They concluded that these data show that aspects of the physiology of homosexual and heterosexual behavior differ and thus revised their earlier rejection of the Phoenix model, stating that homosexuality in rams might result from postnatal maternal experiences [that] are important in subsequent sexual performance of adult males. If, as they suspected, such experiences are similar in effect to the opiate drugs they administered to young rams, low sexual performance (including homosexual behavior) may be a result of a lack of receptors for endogenous opiates (Sexual Behavior of Rams). Congressional debate over the funding of a comprehensive sex survey to update the Kinsey studies began in 1989, after John Gagnon and Edward Laumann, drawing on preliminary research they had conducted through the University of Chicago, applied for funds to complete their study of the sexual habits of Americans. In 1992 their critically acclaimed $1 million proposal to study sexual behavior among twenty-ve hundred adults in two cities was rejected by Health and Human Services secretary Louis Sullivan as a result of opposition spearheaded by Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Representative William Dannemeyer (R-Calif.). Another application for $18 million to survey teenage sexual practices had been shelved two months earlier. Because Gagnon
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and Laumann expressly intended to use the data to make recommendations about how to stem the spread of HIV, Helms saw the study as part of a gay agenda to use tax money to promote homosexuality. He insisted that funding be devoted instead to the development of a national campaign to promote sexual abstinence except in marriage. Eventually Helms won the battle, and the University of Chicago team turned to private sources for support. Their study was nally published in 1994. See Edward O. Laumann, Robert T. Michael, John H. Gagnon, and Stuart Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 60. Jack Anderson and Michael Binstein, Suppressing Sex Studies, Washington Post, 14 June 1992, C7. This was not the rst time in U.S. history that studies on homosexuality in animals had been deemed worthy of government funding while research on homosexuality in humans had been seen as either too distasteful or too speculative to merit it. An application for funding to study homosexual patterns among men and women in New York City during the 1930s and 1940s was turned down by numerous bodies, including the National Research Councils Committee for Research on Problems of Sex, on the implied grounds that it was too speculative and that its methods and aims were unclear. Meanwhile scientists focusing on homosexual behavior in a wide variety of species received support from the committee (see Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior [New York: Harper, 1951]). However, this group saw t to support Kinseys surveys of human sexual behavior, primarily because he proposed what the committee regarded as sound research goals and methods. Interestingly, Kinsey, a zoologist trained in observing the behavior of gall wasps, approached human sexual behavior in a similar manner (i.e., he considered it discrete, objective, quantiable data), although his investigations of humans did not consider the relationship of biology to sexual behavior. Federal and state funding was almost nil for such efforts unless they investigated links between homosexuality and vice crimes or marital maladjustment (Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999]). 61. Haraway, Primate Visions; Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto; Donna Haraway, Otherworldly Conversations; Terran Topics; Local Terms, Science as Culture 3, pt. 1, no. 14 (1992): 6498; Haraway, Promise of Monsters; Evelyn Fox Keller, Nature, Nurture, and the Human Genome Project, in The Code of Codes: Scientic and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, ed. Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 28199.

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