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Bighorn Rams: Macho Homos, Wimpish Heteros

August 21st 2010 10:14

To look at them, bighorn rams are the very image of hypermasculinity. They live on the rugged mountain slopes of Montana and Canada, in an environment that demands strengh, athleticism and stamina. Their appearance is impressive, with large thick horns curling back behind the ear, and they’re big, weighing up to 300 pounds. They exude so much machismo, that their image has been appropriated by numerous as a symbol for many male athletic teams. And they like their sex – with other males. Those few who don’t, are described by researchers as “effeminate”.

(One researcher was so distraught at seeing what was quite obviously sexual behaviour between rams, that rather than accepting that these animals lived homosexual lives, for two years he insisted on describing this as "aggresso-sexual behaviour", to avoid having to think of them as queer. Eventually, to his credit, he came to face facts, and to call a spade a spade. These animals live in homosexual societies.)

For bighorn sheep (and also for thinhorns), “natural” sex is same-sex, including elaborate courtship rituals, genital licking, and anal penetration. (Many rams also find a way to “masturbate” – not with their hooves, but by rubbing on the ground.) In this “homosexual society”, almost all rams routinely participate year-round in sexual activity with each other, but heterosexual intercourse is limiting to the rutting season. Even then, not all rams, especially the younger ones, get to participate.

For Bighorn and Thinhorn Sheep, heterosexuality is emphatically not “normal”.

From “Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People ” (Joan Roughgarden):

“The females live separately from the males. The sexes associate only during the breeding season, from mid fall to early winter. A female is receptive for about three days, and will not allow herself outside of these three days.”

This emphatically does not mean that the males endure sexual abstinence for the rest of the year.

The males have been described as `homosexual societies`. Almost all males participate in homosexual courting and copulation. Male-male courtship begins with a stylized approach, followed by genital licking and nuzzling, and often leads to anal intercourse in which one male, usually the larger, mounts the other. The mounted male arches his back, which is identical to how a female arches her back during heterosexual intercourse. The mounting male ahs an erect penis, makes anal penetration, and performs pelvic thrusts leading to ejaculation.

The few males who do not participate in male sex are described as “effeminate”. These males are identical tin appearance to other males but behave quite differently. They differ from “normal males” by living with the ewes rather than joining the all-male groups. These males do not dominate females, are less aggressive overall, and adopt a crouching, female urination posture. These males refuse mouning by other males. These nonhomosexual males are considerd “aberrant”, with speculation that that some hormone deficiency must underlie their behaviour. Even though in physical appearance, including body size and horn development, these males are indistinguishable from other males, scientists urge further study of their endocrinological profile.

This case turns the meanings of normal and aberrant upside down. The “normal” macho bighorn has full-fledged anal sex with other males. The “aberrant” male is the one who is straight – the lack of interest in homosexuality is considered pathological. Now, why would being straight be a pathology, requiring a hormonal checkup? According to the researchers, what’s aberrant is that a macho-looking bighorn ram acts feminine! He pees like a female – even worse than being gay.

(Same sex mountings have also been described in several other species of sheep and goats in North America and Europe, and in farm animals

Also see additional posts on animal sexuality, at "Queering the Church":

The Wildlife Rainbow

Queer Bonobos: Sex As Conflict Resolution

Bisexual Snails

Exclusive Heterosexuality Unnatural?

Natural Law and Laysan’s Albatross

Bighorn Rams: Macho Homos, Wimpish Heteros

Same Sex Parents, Furred and Feathered

Animals Use Sex Toys, Too

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Posted By: Terence Weldon - Category: No Category

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"Unnatural" Nature, Immoral Butterflies: The Great Cover-Up of Animal Homosexuality

August 20th 2010 16:57

Back in 2000, an eminent and otherwise respectable biologist declared that except for a few instances observed among primates, there was no evidence of homosexuality among animals:

When animals have access to the opposite sex, homosexuality is virtually unknown in nature, with some rare exceptions among primates."

-G. Barlow, 2000

This was breathtakingly inaccurate. Just the previous year another biologist, Bruce Bagemihl,had published a book summarizing previously published scientific papers which described homosexual behaviour in over 300 species of animals and birds (listing dozens of papers for each), and also listing additional species of reptiles, amphibians, fish and even insects - over a thousand species in all, and tens of thousands of peer-reviewed articles. The first recorded observations of animal homosexuality were two millenia ago, by the ancient Greeks. In modern times, the first formal publication of scientific observations go back over 150 years. Photographic evidence of male swan couples has existed since the mid-nineteenth century.

Even this illustration, of male beetles doing it, was published as long ago as 1896:

Male Scarab Beetles

How could there be so much scientific ignorance- especially as same -sex mountings are so well known among domestic livestock, that serious research efforts have been underway for years to try to prevent activities which are so uneconomic (to the farmer)?

Such wilful blindness by a professional would be ludicrous, if it were not also a sign of the ignorance shared by many others, in the scientific community as well as the wider population. It typifies the widespread assumption that underlies the popular pseudo-religious belief that homosexual relationships are unnatural, that biological "plumbing" dictates only one form of legitimate sexual expression, and (for the Vatican) that the "purpose" of sex is procreation, and so sexual activity not geared to making babies must be rejected. How does this ignorance persevere? In addition to Bagemihl's book, two more major works of the last decade (Roughgarden, Sommer and Vasey) have atempted to explain this widepread ignorance. All three reach similar conclusions.

First, please note that the number of species where such behaviour has been described is certainly an underestimate. Detailed, close-up observation of any animal sex is difficult and rare. Frequently, where sexual activity is observed, there has been a simple assumption that this is between two different sexes - unless there is specific evidence to the contrary. One scientist after observing whales had the grace to publish his mistaken assumptions:

.....after about twenty minutes I realized that what I was watching was three males involved in most erotic activities! Then one, two, and eventually three pene appeared as three males rolled at the same time. Obviously, all three were males! It was almost two hours after the first sighting .... and up to that point I was convinced I was watching mating behaviour.

In many other cases, observers mistakenly identify biological sex and gender behaviour. Where one animal is observed mounting another, it is simply assumed that the mounter is male, the one being mounted female - even in the complete absence of corroborating evidence. More detailed observations have recorded how frequently this assumption can be wrong: males also mount other males, females mount females.

Mistakes in observation are understandable, even if the observers should take more care assessing their assumptions. Other factors are less excusable. One of these is a deliberate avoidance by some researchers of any attempt to publish their observations, out of a fear that they will be assumed by colleagues to be gay themselves – a form of academic closet keeps their observation hidden. Even after publication, a form of closet keeps the facts hidden – the anthologies and text books that usually introduce specialist papers to a wider scientific audience routinely ignore references to homosexual behaviour.

Although the first reports of homosexual behaviour among primates were first published >75 years ago, virtually every major introductory text on primatology fails to even mention its existence.

(Vasey, 1995)

More serious than mere burying of the evidence, is the attempt to deny its nature, in contorted attempts to explain it away as something other than it plainly is. Some researchers for example, attempt to explain their observations of two male birds involved in intercourse as “mistaken identity”. Do they really suppose that although they as human observers are able to correctly identify the sex of the chosen partner, the poor ignorant bird can not, and has chosen an "inappropriate" partner by mistake?

They also attempt to explain it away as a result of numerical imbalance, suggesting that males do it themselves when there are not enough females to go around – quite ignoring the observations that show the same phenomenon where females are abundant.

Others recognize what they are seeing, but simply deny that the bahaviour is sexual. Perhaps the most risible is this explanation of Orang-utan oral sex:

Two males regularly mouthed the penis of the other on a reciprocal basis. This behaviour, however, may be nutrively rather sexually motivated.

Got that? An Orang-utan blow-job is for – nutrition?

Other explanations attempted to explain sexual behaviour as aggression or dominance displays, rather than what it plainly was – pleasurable sex. Here’s another researcher, writing about bighorn rams, who eventually had to face the facts with honesty:

I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-ram mount S- ram repeatedly. ..True to form, and incapable of absorbing this realization at once, I called these actions of the rams aggrosexual behaviour, for to state the males had evolved a homosexual society was beyond me To conceive of these magnificent beasts as “queers” – Oh God! I argued for two years that, in wild mountain sheep, aggressive and sexual behaviour could not be separated. I never published that drivel and am glad of it. Eventually I called a spade a spade and admitted that rams lived in an essentially homosexual society.

Here is the key point – heterosexual assumptions are so deeply embedded in some people that they cannot believe the evidence of their own eyes that homosexuality is entirely natural, and must instead explain it away. There is extraordinary circular reasoning here: the starting point is an assumption that only heterosexual behaviour is natural, and that becomes drummed into us as a moral imperative. That assumption then colours our perspective, so that what we see is assumed to be heterosexual – unless there is clear evidence to the contrary. When it is acknowledged to be not heterosexual, it is explained away as not actually sexual, but something else – aggression, or pseudo-sexual, or mistaken identity, or some such. Anything, in fact, that allows to continue with our insistence that only heterosexual, procreative intercourse is natural. And so the conventional widom continues to tell us, in the face of all evidence, that only opposite sex interaction in the animal world is natural ... and that humans homosexuality is "contrary to nature".

But the most ludicrous of all comes from those observers who cannot avoid acknowledging that what they are seeing is clearly sexual behaviour, and clearly between individuals of the same sex – and then describe it, in anthropomorphic terms, as “immoral”, degenerate, or - “unnatural"!

In these snippets, note the adjectives - "perverted", "unnatural", "aberrant" - my italics.

This might be mistaken for fighting, but perverted sexuality is he real keynote.

Three unnatural tending bonds were observed a two-year old bull closely tended a yearling bull .. with penis unsheathed.

Among aberrant sexual behaviours, anoestrous does were very occasionally seen to mount each other.

That’s right, folks. If we accept the assumption that homosexuality is unnatural, then any evidence to the contrary must be – unnatural, or immoral.

I close with the priceless words of W J Tennant, who as late as 1987 published the classic paper

“A Note on the Apparent Lowering of Moral Standards in the Lepidoptera.”

It is a sad sign of our times that the National newspapers are all too often packed with the lurid details of declining moral standards and of horrific sexual offences committed by our fellow Homo sapiens; perhaps it is a sign of the times that the entomological literature appears to be heading in the same direction.

So: we dare not publish reports of animal homosexuality – because we should not draw attention to the poor moral standards of butterfles?

See also:

Our Queer Primate Cousins

Animals Use Sex Toys, Too

Same Sex Parents, Furred and Feathered

Natural Law, Laysan’s Albatross, and the Question of Evidence

Queer Bonobos: Sex As Conflict Resolution

Is Exclusive Heterosexuality Unnatural?

Bighorn Rams: Macho Homos, Wimpish Heteros

Books:

Bagemihl, Bruce: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (Stonewall Inn Editions)

Roughgarden, Joan: Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People

Sommer, Volker and Vasey, Paul: Homosexual Behaviour in Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective

Poani, Aldo:Animal Homosexuality: A Biosocial Perspective

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Posted By: Terence Weldon - Category: No Category

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Gay Gods 1: Some Patrons of Homosexual Love

August 19th 2010 15:17

In Christian theology, we are told that we are made "in God's image and likeness." Taking a broader view across all religions, it is more accurate to say that humans make gods & goddesses in our image and likeness - even where they are visualized in non-human form, their reported behaviour is frequently anthropomorphic.

This is especially obvious outside of the monotheistic religions. In these, the necessity for imagining gods & goddesses in relationships and interactions with other gods produces tales of jealousy, rivalry, and amorous adventures that look remarkably human. Reflecting what each culture sees in itself, the deities also reflect a range of interests, temperaments - and sexual preferences. Many pantheons, especially those from Classical Greece and Rome, China, India, South America and Oceania, feature prominent gods and goddesses who had homosexual relationships or adventures. (Hindu deities are especially notable for the ease with which many of them change gender from time to time).

This much I knew. But the biggest surprise for me yesterday, when I was reading some more about LGBT themes in mythology, was the discovery that in some mythologies, there are gods who are specifically designated not just as practitioners, but even as patrons of male homosexuality.

For the Aztecs, Xochipilli was the god of games, beauty, dance, flowers, and song - and also the patron of homosexuals. No room in the Aztec religion, then for the argument that "God Hates Fags!" Not only does he look after the homosexuals, but also homosexual prostitutes. Now, I wonder why they should be linking male homosexuals with beauty, dance, flowers and music?

Also in Latin America, the Mayas had a little (literally - physically small) god called Chin, who introduced homoerotic relationships to the Mayan nobles. The nobles obtained youths of the lower classes to be the lovers of the noble's sons. Such unions were considered legal marriages under Mayan law.

Chinese mythology, like Greek, features several gods who themselves had homosexual affairs. One particular one, Tu Er Shen (literally, "rabbit deity") is specifically designated as a protector who manages love and affections between men. He is said to have been originally a man called Wu Tien Bao who fell in love with an imperial official. When he declared his love, the official had him beaten to death. Because his "crime" had been one of love, the underworld officials decided to right the injustice by delegating Wu Tien Bao as the god and safe-guarder of homosexual affections. In modern Taiwan, a temple has been built by a gay Taoist priest and worship to the Rabbit deity resuscitated to cater to the needs of modern homosexuals. Other Chinese deities associated with same sex love or transgenderism are Chou Wang, Lan Caihe, Shan Gu, Yu the Great, and Gun.

In Japanese Shinto religion, homosexuality is said to have been introduced to the world by two servants of the sun goddess, and many deities participate in ritual pederasty. In one branch of Shinto (but not in the mainstream religion) "Shud? Daimy?jin" is recognised as a special patron.

Buddhist religion disapproves of any sexual relationships for monks, but not for lay people. Many stories of the Buddha himself in his previous lives include descriptions of close friendships with young men, including displays of affection (but not actual sexual intercourse).

Among an array of gods and goddesses in the vast Hindu pantheon with homosexual or transgender connections, the elephant-headed Ganesh is not only especially connected with homoerotic worship, but in some versions of his birth, he is said to have been born as the result of homosexual intercourse between same - sex parents.

In Europe, classical Greek mythology,where it is easier to track down gods who had male lovers than those (very few) who did not. Several, both gods and goddesses, were also considered patrons of homosexual love. Most favoured only men, but the Greek Aphrodite was a special patron of lesbians. Even in Norse mythology, which in many respects condemns (passive) homosexuality as unmanly, there are queer connections to one of the most important gods, Odin, the Viking "queer god of war".

Not all mythological systems include gods specifically designated as patrons or protectors of homosexual love, but as shown above, many do. Nearly all, however, include at least some gods who have same sex interactions, and in many cultures the gods also have significant transgender associations, either in themselves, or in their human priests and priestesses. The widespread occurrence of homosexual themes in nearly all regions of the world simply reflects the ubiquity of homosexual practices in the cultures behind them - and the frequent occurrence of transvestite or transgendered gods in some mythologies emphasises the recognition in many cultures of a "third gender" closely associated with special spiritual gifts.

Despite the often - repeated claims that God as known to Jews and Christians is opposed to homosexual activity, this is simply not so. But, for those who are taken in by these claims and are bothered by them, perhaps they can take comfort from the fact that in many other religions, gods not only tolerate homosexuality - they indulge in it themselves, protect humans who do, or even introduce it to the world of humans.

Connor & Sparks: Cassell's Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Lore (Cassell Sexual Politics Series)

Downing:Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love

Greenberg: Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions (2 Volume Set)

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Posted By: Terence Weldon - Category: No Category

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Our Queer Primate Cousins

August 19th 2010 09:44

A favourite argument used by the religious right against homoerotic relationships, and by the Vatican theologians against any form of sexual expression outside of marriage and not open to making babies, is that such sexual activities are "against nature", and that the "purpose" of sex is procreation.

Well, the people making these claims have never considered the actual evidence from , well, you know, - "Nature" itself, which shows the exact opposite. (But then, when did the Vatican, or the wingnuts, ever consider the trifling matter of evidence to interfere with their convictions

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Is Exclusive Heterosexuality Unnatural?

August 18th 2010 10:24

“I don’t know of any species that is exclusively heterosexual”

- Zurich Zoo tour guide, Myriam Schärz.

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Same-Sex Parents, Furred and Feathered.

August 17th 2010 09:51

There have been an increasing number of research studies which show that as parents, same sex couples are at least as good as opposite sex- couples. As a gay father and grandfather myself, I don’t really need to be told this by modern research: I first learnt of the evidence decades ago, from a family friend who was then a child welfare social worker, and is today a top authority on the subject. I also have the best of all possible authority, the experience of my own family. My daughter is very clear on the subject: she is on record as saying “Gay Parents? I recommend them”. She has told me that when she says a young child with two dads, her immediate response is - “Lucky child”. Still, it’s good to see the evidence getting a more public hearing. and reaching the mainstream.

I was interested though, to find that in this, as in so many other areas, of human sexuality, the same pattern is found in many species of animals and birds

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Same Sex Albatross Mums

August 16th 2010 09:48

A key part of the argument against homoerotic relationships, fundamental to the religious opposition gay marriage and gay adoption, is that same sex relationships are somehow “unnatural”, “against natural law”. This claim is entirely without foundation. What these groups have in common, apart from their conclusion, is a total disregard for the evidence. Some research into the Laysan albatross neatly illustrates this. The disregard of the need for evidence does not only apply to claims for natural law: exactly the same charge can be made against Vatican claims that "homosexuals" are motivated solely by -indulgence, and that homosexual "acts" lead one away from God - claims that likewise do not stand up to scrutiny. For now, though, I am concerned only about the problem as it applies to the argument from natural law.

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We're Everywhere

August 13th 2010 10:21

Here at "It's a Queer World", I will be drawing attention to the ubiquity and naturalness of same sex relationships, throughout the animal kingdom, in pre-industrial and non-Western societies on all continents, and in all periods of "Western" / European history - including the many homosexual bishops, cardinals and popes in the Catholic Church.

Watch out for the following series, which I will be tackling in logical order (some posts have already appeared on Orble under my other blog. Most will appear here only

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August 2010

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