Biological Exuberance. - Review - book reviews

Whole Earth, Fall, 1999

BIOLOGICAL EXUBERANCE Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

Bruce Bagemihl. 1999; 751 PP. $40. St. Martin's Press.

Much much more fun than reading E.O. Wilson. A thoroughly researched refutation of the attitudes of sociobiology, which tried to tie homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered behaviors in animals to a deviant genetic quirk. Part 1 goes through the evidence carefully, tracking homosexual behavior in courtship, pair bonding, and parenting. It pops the Victorianism out of Darwinism and muscles the uptight, mechanical model of evolution toward a more accurate understanding of Nature's version as sloppy and exuberant. Part 2 is a heavily documented bestiary of field research on the polysexual, polygendered world of bird and mammalian life.

I haven't read a more stimulating book in biology in a decade. Maybe field workers who have suppressed their observations because they ran contrary to the academic establishment will now come out of the closet. No dearie, two male manatees in the sixty-nine position are not just bonding socially or performing tension-regulation or demonstrating pseudo-heterosexual displacement behavior. They are, God forbid, enjoying themselves.

P.S. As a maniacal field worker, I would like to see a longer essay that would enrich a few understandings, especially how brother/sister bonding changes "homosexual" parenting and single-sex groups. But Bagemihl has set the stage.

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose." --EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST J.B.S. HALDANE

"In the dimly lit undergrowth of a Central American rain forest, jewel-like male hummingbirds flit through the vegetation, pausing briefly to mate now with a male, now with a female. A whale glides through the dark and icy waters of the Arctic, then surges toward the surface in a playful frenzy of churning water and splashing, her fins and tail caressing another female. Drifting off to sleep, two male monkeys lie gently in each other's arms, cradled by one of the ancient jungles of Asia. A herd of deer picks its way cautiously through the semidesert scrub of Texas, each animal simultaneously male but not-quite male, with half-developed, velvety antlers and diminutive, fine-boned proportions. In a protected New Zealand inlet, a pair of female gulls--mated for life--tend their chicks together. Tiny midges swarm above a bleak tundra of northern Europe, a whirlwind of mating activity as males couple with each other in midair. Circling and prancing around her partner, a female antelope courts another female in an ageless, elegant ritual staged on the African savanna.

"Biological Exuberance is, above all, an affirmation of life's vitality and infinite possibilities: a worldview that is at once primordial and futuristic, in which gender is kaleidoscopic, sexualities are multiple, and the categories of male and female are fluid and transmutable. A world, in short, exactly like the one we inhabit.

"Astounding as it sounds, a number of scientists have actually argued that when a female Bonobo wraps her legs around another her partner's while emitting screams of enjoyment, this is actually `greeting' behavior, or `appeasement' behavior, or `reassurance' behavior, or `reconciliation' behavior, or `tension-regulation' behavior, or `social bonding' behavior, or `food exchange' behavior--almost anything, it seems, besides pleasurable sexual behavior."

"A good example of the difference between behavioral transvestism and homosexuality is in the Bighorn Sheep. In this species, males and females lead almost entirely separate lives: they live in sex-segregated herds for most of the year and come together for only short months during the breeding season. Among males, homosexual mounting is common, while females do not generally permit themselves to be mounted by males except when they are in heat (estrus). A small percentage of males, however, are behavioral transvestites: they remain in the female herds year-round and also mimic female behavior patterns. Significantly, such males also generally refuse to allow other males to mount them, just the way females do. Thus, among Bighorn Sheep, being mounted by a male is typically `masculine' activity, while refusal of such mounting is typically `feminine' behavior. Males who mimic females specifically avoid homosexuality. This is exactly the opposite of the stereotypical view of male homosexuality, which is often considered to be a case of males "imitating" females. It is also a striking reminder of how important it is not to be misled by our preconceptions of human homosexuality when looking at animals."