Daphne Willemsen

Hi everyone.

Starting with a spoiler today, animals are gay.

We know at least 1500 species across different taxa display some form of same-sex behaviour.

The first written record we have of queer behaviour in animals is Aristotle in 300 BCE.

And he wrote about gay quails and partridges.

You might be wondering, if the first written record is 2,000 years ago, why is it that most of the written records are only from the last 20 years?

And that is partially due to Thomas Aquinas.

He was an Italian friar, and he wrote that homosexuality was a special sin because it wasn't found in nature.

And this idea dominated culture.

So it changed the laws, and it changed how society viewed homosexuality.

For 700 years after he writes that, we enter an era of suppression.

And I'm going to go in what that era of suppression looked like in the scientific record, starting off with subconscious suppression.

This is where you see homosexual behavior in animals, and you're just like, there's no way that was homosexual behavior in animals, because that doesn't happen.

Now, my favorite example of this was written by everyone's favorite pub combo, Burger and Beer.

who wrote an article on the laughing gull.

The laughing gull, you can't tell the sex externally.

They wanted to study the difference in behaviour between the sexes.

So they made two small assumptions.

One, that any bird mounting another bird was male, and the other was that any bird being mounted was a female.

So by definition, in their paper, you will never find homosexual behavior, even if it occurred in their population.