Queer Ducks (and Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality

Traditions are just peer pressure from dead people.

Say you're a 20-something studying geckos, and the 600 pages of scientific literature that currently exist on geckos, published by giants in the field, don't mention any homosexual behavior. You saw it, though. You could bravely write on that finding, contradicting your immediate advisor and the professors who are in charge of your academic future, and risk established scientists writing to the journal to complain that your upstart study contradicts their own, well-accepted study, or you could decide to publish on some other aspect of gecko behavior. If you want to get a job and pay your bills, wouldn't it be easier to just publish on foraging strategies instead of homosexuality? Everyone loves foraging strategies! No one writes hate mail about foraging strategies. So, you make that reluctant choice. Your queer-erasing article comes out. Now there are 620 pages of scientific literature on geckos that don't mention homosexual behavior. There's even more pressing and discouraging young and unestablished researchers from going against the flow.

Have there been barriers to publishing on sex reversal or same-sex sexual behavior? [Max Lambert] Absolutely. A paper I published in 2019 on sex reversal being very common in frogs, I think I submitted it to nine or ten different journals? We got very positive reviews back, and after every indication it was going to be published, they just went, 'Nah.' The journal is basically saying, 'We don't want to rock the boat.

Gonochoristic' is what's known as a 'retronym,' or a word that's only necessary because a new, opposing concept has been invented. Like how we didn't need the term 'snail mail' until we invented email. We just called it 'mail.' 'Heterosexual' is also a retronym. 'Homosexual' shows up first in the English language, and then everyone had to scramble to find a word to describe people who are attracted to people of the opposite sex. Linguistically speaking, gays came first. So did 'sex-changing animals.' The 'straights' and 'non-sex-changers' came after.

[Beans Velocci] I think of 'trans' much more as a political tool than a classification tool. Because I'm into picking apart classifications in general, and so I don't think there's an inherent way to classify people's gender at all. That said, I still identify as trans because I like to make myself legible as a part of a shared experience, as part of a community, and to articulate a sense of politics.

The females are physcially smaller, but if a male gets aggressive toward any one of them, she can count on a squad of intimate female allies having her back. Over millions of years, male bonobos have learned that the females have too much social support for male violence to succeed.

There's a very good reason you are who you are. It's not just random. How wonderful to be linked into the giant web of life that way.

Up until then, I'd just been 'me.' But now, I was 'gay.

The cattle industry, the most red-blooded of american livelihoods, land of the cowboys and marlboro man, has been relying on same-sex attraction for years and years.