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Queer Ducks and the Bisexual Advantage with Eliot Schrefer
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I'm so excited for this episode, and I think you will love it, too! I finally got to interview Eliot Schrefer, author of "Queer Ducks (And Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality", after picking up his book almost a year ago. The book focuses on scientific research into queerness in animals, which is much more common than most people think. Because sexuality has been viewed as so binary for many decades, scientists often observed same-sex sexual activity between animals and then labeled them as "gay", leading to arguments of animal homosexuality as an evolutionary byproduct, a mutation, a mistake, or a mystery. But the more these animals are studied, the more scientists are realizing that there are very few "gay" animals -- most of them are actually bisexual.
In this interview, we discussed how that plays out, why bisexuality can actually be evolutionarily advantageous (the "bisexual advantage"), how different species have sex for different reasons and with different results, the complex social structures among different animals groups and how sex affects them, how certain animal behaviors can be instructive for humans, the concept of animals having queer sex without having or needing a queer "identity", why it's challenging to do and publish research about animal queerness, and how all of this information has affected Eliot's queer journey -- and what he hopes this knowledge can do for the next generation.
Check out my Patreon for 20 extra minutes of bonus content in which we chatted about animals that defy the gender binary (not necessarily "trans" animals, because we can't ask them about their identity, but intersex animals and specific species that have to ability to change from male-to-female or female-to-male) as well as animals that have sexual or familial bonds that reflect our concept of polyamory as opposed to monogamy. In a human culture where queerness, gender fluidity, and polyamory are often stigmatized as "unnatural", these animals prove otherwise.
Thanks for listening!
Visit Eliot's website: https://www.eliotschrefer.com/
Buy "Queer Ducks": https://www.harpercollins.com/products/queer-ducks-and-other-animals-eliot-schrefer?variant=39684198563874
Episode art photo credit: Matt Wilson
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Two Bye Guys' and Book Season
00:00:07
Speaker
you
00:00:12
Speaker
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Two Bye, guys. It is book season, the continuation of book season. And today we will be talking about one of my favorite new books of the past year that deals with queerness in the animal kingdom. This is a science episode, my favorite. And I'm so, so excited to have my guest here today. I really have just devoured this book and I love it so much. And I wish I had read it 20 years ago, but obviously that was impossible.
Introduction of Elliot Schrafer and 'Queer Ducks'
00:00:42
Speaker
My guest today is Elliot Schrafer. He is a New York Times bestselling author. He has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, and he received a Stonewall honor for the best LGBTQIA plus teen book. His science writing has appeared in Discover, Sierra, USA Today, Nautilus, and The Washington Post magazine. And his book, Queer Ducks and Other Animals, the Natural World of Animal Sexuality,
00:01:11
Speaker
published in 2022 is what we'll be talking about today, and I love it so much. It received a Prince Honor from the American Library Association. It was named an Essential Read by Psychology Today, and it was named one of the top 10 teen books of 2022 from the New York Public Library.
00:01:31
Speaker
Elliot has an MA in animal studies from NYU, also where I have an MFA from NYU. He is also on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson and Hamline MFAs for creative writing, and he lives with his husband in New York City. Welcome, finally, to Two Bye Guys, Elliot Trafer.
00:01:50
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation. And I did not know you were a fellow NYU master's grad. So what was yours in?
Elliot Schrafer's Academic Journey
00:01:58
Speaker
I have an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, completed in 2009. So I don't think we crossed over, did we?
00:02:09
Speaker
No, I just received my diploma today in animal studies, so I graduated in 2023, and I started in 2019. It was like a very part-time master's. I had a second job, and all of a sudden, I was able to just write. I quit that other job, and I figured I would have to do something else in my time, so I decided to get a master's.
00:02:29
Speaker
Originally, I thought I'd just do more writing, but it turned out I just played more PlayStation, so I realized I had to do something extra with my life. But Animal Studies is where this book came from because it's obviously all about animals and their sexualities. Yeah, it's fascinating. I didn't realize that that was like a later in life thing because it seems like you've been studying this forever with all the knowledge that's in that book. And what timing? You got the diploma today. Congrats.
00:02:54
Speaker
Thank you very much. Okay. So I want to talk about that. I want to ask you about your writing career. And let me pose it to you this way, since this is what you say in your book. If you're willing to—and because I always start the podcast this way, but now it'll be slightly different. If you're willing to discuss your identifications, how do you identify and how have those identities affected your writing and your career as a writer?
Identity and Sexual Fluidity in 'Queer Ducks'
00:03:21
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Oh yeah. That's amazing reversal here because that is, I have six Q and A's in the book with various scientists and that's one of the questions that I throw at them and it's always really interesting to see their answers. I am a white, cisgender, gay man is the way I identify, although writing this book has made me really question the sort of binary-ness that I easily just slipped into by considering myself gay rather than some version of bisexual, which is what I've come to think most creatures are. So I've been on a journey around that.
00:03:49
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I still identify as gay just for the ease of it, but that's definitely something I'm looking forward to that part of our conversation potentially.
00:03:58
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Yeah, I mean, we can just get into that right now because I find that very fascinating. And my co-host, Alex, who doesn't do the show anymore, I think had a similar sort of trajectory, although he doesn't use the label gay anymore, he prefers queer. But a lot of our listeners, I think, have identified as gay
00:04:20
Speaker
for a long time and maybe still do, but also are sort of noticing the fluidity that might exist that they hadn't noticed before. So yeah, I mean, your book features like, it's called Queer Docks, but it features a ton of bisexuality and fluidity. Were you surprised when you started researching this to find so much sexual fluidity in the animal kingdom?
Inspiration and Development of 'Queer Ducks'
00:04:46
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I had a long journey towards this book. I've always been really interested in animals. So that's partly why I got this animal studies degree. And I was also interested in telling stories and figuring out ways to understand the world. And, you know, I think for a long time, I thought that was going to be novels and fiction.
00:05:03
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I've increasingly seen that looking at the natural world can be really calming. There's a way in which we get frantically in a little tiny echo chamber if we just think about humans and just consider the way that they exist in the world and that there's something about nature and the sheer acceptance of nature and the fact that
00:05:23
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There's no need to self-identify when you're around non-human animals because they don't really care about categories in the same way. And that's something that when I talked to the scientists in the book, it's something that really came up a lot was that they had these moments of peacefulness. There was one, especially one non-binary moose scientist who would talk about how when they were out in the field, they would relish these times that
00:05:46
Speaker
It could just be up to their ankles and mud, just looking at the animals they're observing through binoculars and not really worrying about all this sort of need to constantly self-identify, which a lot of us have struggled with in the process of coming out. So it's been a big part of this journey around the animals.
00:06:05
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. I found it so interesting because I think sometimes in my journey, I've really wanted to identify myself forcefully and fully to everyone. And then there's other times where I do think like, yeah, can't we all just exist? Do we need any of these labels? Can't we just be doing what we want to do? And who cares what you call it? And that's kind of what is happening in the animal kingdom and
00:06:33
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where all these observations without necessarily labeling it in the book was really fascinating.
Personal Coming Out Story and Nature Misconceptions
00:06:41
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Yeah. And when I was a young person really into animals, when I realized I was gay, which just for me was
00:06:48
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The moment puberty hit, it was almost the day before I didn't have a sense of sexual attraction. Then the moment I did, it was just like, guys, guys, guys. I stole my brother's Rolling Stone and just looked at the men's underwear ads in it nonstop. So it's this really moment. I know a lot of people have a very different journey towards their sexualities, but it's this really stark moment of realizing
00:07:08
Speaker
I was this thing that had been reviled in my middle school. The very worst thing to be would be to be gay or bisexual or lesbian. I would easily partake of that lunchroom conversation just so that people wouldn't think that I was gay. I would casually gabash, it's Adam and Eve, Adam and Steve and all of that. I was just part of that culture in order to survive middle school myself. Then when I realized I was gay when I was 11,
00:07:36
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I went and I looked up homosexuality in the encyclopedia because
Cultural Views and Science on Homosexuality
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I was a nerdy kid. It was the way to find out the answers I needed. On the natural side, it was very stark that it didn't occur in nature, everything that I saw. This is in 1990, 1991.
00:07:56
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really had said it was a psychological aberration that was unique to humans. And so I really internalized that message, that this is something that is humans only have same sex attraction and same sex behavior.
00:08:10
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And I came out on the other side of that. I had enough support that I came to really love that unnatural part of myself. I consider it the Oscar Wilde version of sexuality. Natural things are boring. Let's all be unnatural. That seems wonderful. It's a way to be unconventional and interesting. And that's the version I told myself in order to make it through. And I think
00:08:32
Speaker
You know, there's some young people who internalize this feeling of deep wrongness. This unnatural is something that gets attached to anti-sodomy legislations around the world, including the capital punishment legislation that just passed in Uganda.
00:08:46
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And this internalized message of something like, you don't exist in nature and therefore there is something wrong with you is really, really damaging. And so when I came across this, there's this episode of this 2004 documentary called Animals Like Us, and it had one episode on animal homosexuality. And I looked at it and watched it and it was kind of like a really budget documentary, but it opened my eyes to the fact that
00:09:10
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there's all this homosexual behavior happening in animals. The animals almost across the board, across the animal kingdom, vertebrates, invertebrates, birds, fish, have all these bisexual behaviors that really opened my eyes to like, I've been sold this poison pill, this version of existence that is really, that there's something wrong with queerness.
Research on Bisexuality and Fluidity in Animals
00:09:34
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And that when I found out that wasn't true, and I figured, oh, I'd have to really search to find examples, and instead it was the exact opposite.
00:09:40
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The Nature just did a study of studies and put together the total number and found 1,500 different animal species and counting have significant same-sex sexual behaviors in the wild. When I was running queer ducks, it really became like, I forgot, how do I pare down? There's so many different animals. If I can't have a chapter on garter snakes, I'd like more on the fact that I couldn't talk about garter snake sexuality, which
00:10:04
Speaker
Whoever your listener has ever considered garter stakes sex. Yeah, but it's really interesting. Now I want to know about that. Okay, well, we'll get to garter stakes in a minute and I want to dive into all of that too. Let me just ask because I'm curious. So you have you've written a lot of fiction as well. Did you like how long in the works was this and the transition to nonfiction or like how and when did you
00:10:33
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decide to do that? Yeah, it was about two years writing this book. And it really coincided with the beginning of the pandemic. So I started working on it in, I think, April 2020. And it was really my pandemic escape was I just closed myself in a little room. I still have my NYU library access because I was in the animal studies program. And I just dived into research and just learned about all of these different animal species and how their sexualities operate.
00:11:00
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And so it was a treat when human society felt like it was about to crumble all around us. It was a treat to just think about non-human animals for a little bit and put my mind elsewhere. It was a relief. Yeah, absolutely. I think you're the fourth person on this season, in myself included, whose new book that's coming out last year, this year, was a pandemic project.
00:11:24
Speaker
So, silver lining of the pandemic, we got a lot more queer books out there because we had time to write them. Well, in publishing, it's such a long lead time. It takes two years for books to come out that I'm really wondering, we're going to have a glut of books about contagion and pandemic coming up right around now. So, everyone should watch out. I will brace myself for that. I'm not sure if I'm prepared for that. I don't think I'm prepared either.
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00:14:20
Speaker
Let's dive into what you talked about and all this fluidity in the animal kingdom. I don't know that I noticed it as explicitly because I wasn't quite attuned to my queerness as early. I think because I was somewhere more in the middle, I just repressed part of it and explored the other part and I didn't come out as by until my early 30s.
00:14:46
Speaker
But I was a psychology major in college. I graduated in 07 and I specifically remember a course called Human Sexuality. I think it was called Human Sexuality even though we focused on animals a lot too. And it was essentially a course on evolution and taught me that
00:15:08
Speaker
you know, the survival of the fittest and only things that will help a creature reproduce or allow their offspring to reach reproductive age, those are the things that will be naturally selected and will win and other things will not. And everything was kind of viewed through that lens. So, like, why do you think evolution is more complicated than that framing, especially when it comes to sexuality?
00:15:38
Speaker
Yeah. Did you talk about bonobos in this psychology class? I feel like they're the animal that breaks through a lot for studying human sexuality. I don't remember. I don't remember now. And I want to talk about those, and I quoted the bonobo chapter in my book of your book. So they are fascinating. But
00:15:56
Speaker
I don't remember. The one thing I remember from that class, and then I'll let you talk, is the male nipple. And they were talking about how that's a byproduct of evolution and it really serves no purpose. It's just there because it's less costly than differentiating the sexes and not having a nipple. But
00:16:18
Speaker
I don't know. I've learned recently that my nipples are not useless. In fact, they come in quite handy and are quite sensitive. Well, and the same argument is done in the reverse about the female clitoris, right? That it's this proto penis that would have developed if that person had been sexually male, but just remains in a vestigial state, which I don't think many women think about their clitoris in this way.
00:16:43
Speaker
I think the evolutionary argument is really interesting because I think it holds water. It sort of makes sense if you haven't really looked at the science. It's a very reasonable argument to make that any behaviors that don't either produce more offspring or help the individual survive during its own generation, that those behaviors won't propagate. They won't spread because those genes aren't being introduced in the next generation in a greater quantity.
Human Exceptionalism in Scientific Misconceptions
00:17:11
Speaker
And I think that's a reasonable argument to make. And I think one of the problems is we have this long legacy of human exceptionalism, this idea that humans are a unique creature, unlike animals, that we have souls and internal lives and that animals don't. And this is something that was really bred deep into the scientific culture. And if you don't think about animals in any broad sense,
00:17:34
Speaker
then that Darwinian argument holds true. But that's assuming that animals, non-human animals, will only have sex to procreate. Whereas we know humans have a ton of motivations for having sex, right? And I think it's actually probably the minority of times is the goal to actually procreate when two humans have sex. And otherwise, it's like- Often that's the nopagal.
00:17:56
Speaker
Right. I think the vast majority, exactly that. Let's avoid this thing. Avoid that. Yeah. Right. Right. And so we'll have sex in order to feel close to someone else, in order to feel dominant or submissive, in order to like prove your status to someone else, like if you are close or not, that we have all sorts of motivations. Whereas we had thought of animals in a very, very simplistic way of thinking about the reasons they would have sex. But when you think about, you know, the benefits of sex,
00:18:23
Speaker
I mean, the basic one, especially for us mammals, is sex produces oxytocin, which is called the bonding hormone. And it makes you feel close to whoever you just had this physical contact with. And that is a huge social benefit, especially for creatures whose social lives are how they survive. So if you think about the bonobos, which I imagine we'll probably get a little bit deeper into, but bonobos
00:18:46
Speaker
if two females need to establish their alliance within the group, they can't really small talk, right? They can't sit down and have a conversation about it because they don't have speech. But they can groom each other, they can rub their clitorises together to orgasm, and that will produce this really strong feeling of closeness and establish their union within the greater group. And one of the primatologists I talked to, Christine Webb, makes this really great point about how
00:19:14
Speaker
We've had just one side of the story around animal sex, that we think of it as just this instinct to procreate, when actually all these other purposes of expressing reconciliation, of a way of feeling close, a way of supporting one another within the group and proving that support.
00:19:32
Speaker
Like these are all also useful for survival. These are ways that animals will make themselves survive their own lifetimes because we need each other, right? And this is one way of becoming really close. It's actually probably our most powerful way of doing it. And so when you think about it that way, then all of a sudden it's not an evolutionary dead end, right? It's this behavior that will produce this social benefit within the group.
Evolutionary Advantages of Bisexuality
00:19:58
Speaker
Right. And also, the argument for evolution and survival of the fittest doesn't disappear. It's just kind of rethinking all of these behaviors in the broader context of could these things actually be evolutionarily advantageous, even if when you look at it narrowly, it may not seem that way. And so you write a lot about the bisexual advantage, which I am thinking may be the title of this episode. But
00:20:27
Speaker
Can you talk about how fluidity, in addition to the bonding and developing social ties, can be evolutionarily advantageous broadly? And then later we'll talk about specific animals.
00:20:45
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and I think our blindness to same-sex sexual behavior and the essential bisexuality of the animal kingdom comes from what I talked about with the human exceptionalism, but also the biracial that occurs within the academy as well. Exactly. So if you think of creatures like humans, for example, as being either gay or straight, then you would be looking at animals and seeing them have same-sex sex and be like, oh, it's a gay animal.
00:21:10
Speaker
And I think that assumption then fuels that evolutionary argument because if an animal is 100% exclusively gay, then they won't be producing offspring in the next generation. So you do have that evolutionary selfish gene explanation that says this kind of behavior wouldn't propagate. Whereas if an animal is bisexual, can reap the benefits of sex with other animals of the same sex or the opposite sex, then they are mining all the social benefits and also
00:21:37
Speaker
having offspring in the next generation because they're having sex with partners of both sexes. I think that is where this bisexual advantage comes in.
00:21:48
Speaker
queerness in animals isn't that costly. A moment of sex doesn't cost a lot of time that they could have been foraging, and it produces these benefits, one of which can just be pleasure or it could be these social advantages. So bisexual advantage is this theory that basically shows like we've been assuming that animals were straight
00:22:09
Speaker
and that then they sort of evolved in these individual populations, a tendency towards same-sex sexual behavior and bisexuality. And these scientists, these young scientists, which, you know, the increasing diversity of who gets to do science is really important here because these are a lot of queer scientists, people coming from marginalized communities that are coming up with this theory.
00:22:28
Speaker
is that we're actually getting this backwards, that it's not like animals started straight and turned queer. It's that there is no really great evolutionary reason for animals to develop a prohibition against same-sex sexual behavior that way, way back in the tree of life, and we're talking about millions and millions and millions of years now, that animals didn't have sexes, like simple animals, like they were all one organism.
00:22:54
Speaker
And that once animal sex has evolved, they would then have to evolve some strong taboo against ever having sex with members of the same sex. And there's just not a great argument for why they would ever have that taboo. Because if the animals are bisexual, they're still having offspring, and they're reaping all these other benefits from same-sex sex. So why would they ever stop having same-sex sex is basically their argument, which I think is very compelling. And also, Bisexual Advantage, I hope, is the title of this podcast episode. That's fantastic.
00:23:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I find all that so fascinating and it makes so much sense both with the research and also just with the way I have felt about myself and my worldview of sexuality. And it really goes back to this class I took in college where
00:23:40
Speaker
it erased bisexuality pretty completely. I do not remember any discussion that some animals or humans could be bisexual. And it really looked at homosexual animals as the byproduct argument, the same as the male nipple.
00:24:01
Speaker
we don't really know, we can't really explain it, and it must just be this random differences that didn't get weeded out and it exists. But the reverse argument that you just made makes so much more sense. And doodlebugs are not on my list of topics to get to, but you have a chapter about doodlebugs who just
00:24:24
Speaker
fuck everything that moves because that's just sort of the best strategy.
Understanding Sexually Fluid Animals
00:24:30
Speaker
It's indiscriminate sexuality. And when you think about it, why not? Because that's how I felt for me is that it isn't a zero-sum game. When I have attractions or experiences with one gender, it doesn't make me then not want to
00:24:52
Speaker
be with someone else. If anything, it can help teach me about myself and what feels good and give me access to pleasure that then I want more of. And it's like a muscle that expands. It gives you lessons on your nipple journey.
00:25:08
Speaker
Right, exactly. I learned that from men, but then I can take that back to being with women. And so the idea of sexually fluid animals just makes so much sense. I want you to respond to that, but also you mentioned, and I think it's so interesting about who is doing this research. And so if you want to also talk about how do
00:25:31
Speaker
the biases of human scientists reinforce heteronormativity when studying animals. And is that changing and how? Yeah. Yeah. I think on the topic of insects and arachnids, since we're just on that, you're absolutely right that they will basically fuck anything that moves. So they're really, really rapacious sexually. And I think the
00:25:55
Speaker
Basically when scientists try to come up with reasons for this behavior, they just think like, there'll be a cost. Like if they pass up a mating opportunity that actually could have had offspring, there would be a cost to it. So why do that? If you're a wolf spider, like why not just have sex with any wolf spider you come across in case, because that way you might have offspring. And if not, then you just had sex and that's fine. You move on every day. Like what is the cost here? Like they're not worried about like facing their sense of shame or, you know, having to redefine who they are. Like it's just, you know,
00:26:25
Speaker
having sex where they can, which I think is really interesting. But it's a very different reason for why essential bisexuality exists in mammals and birds. So there's no one theory about homosexual behavior in animals. It's different depending on the animal. And I think one of the ways in which this by erasure and the scientific assumptions around the way animals work came out was in fruit flies.
00:26:49
Speaker
just to cap off our insect segment, but fruit flies, especially in the 90s, there was article after article finding a gay gene in animals. It was something that science was really concerned about because if you found a gay gene, then it would change the way that we would treat LGBT people in human cultures. That you could finally prove it's not a choice, that it's something biological. If you can't find a gay gene, then the
00:27:16
Speaker
they're like, oh, it is a choice after all. And they're just, you know, these humans that are making these sort of weird decisions. And so there was such an invested interest in finding a gay gene. And fruit flies were the main target for it. And this was in the mid 90s.
00:27:30
Speaker
scientists did claim to have found a gay gene in fruit flies. And what they did is they modified a sequence of amino acid pairs and the DNA of these fruit flies, and then all of a sudden these male fruit flies would have sex with each other. And they had this video of these fruit flies in the Petri dish of
00:27:47
Speaker
There's this long chain of fruit flies having sex in this dish, and they're all males. And so it was on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and everyone was saying a gay gene has been found. And meanwhile, it was just really sloppy science. First of all, they called this gene in question fruitless, which I thought was a really shitty name for a gene that encouraged its homosexual behavior. But anyway, this is the 90s. But what the scientists have done is basically just take away the fruit flies
00:28:14
Speaker
tendency to discriminate the sex of other fruit flies and so what these fruit flies were was bisexual and just by putting a bunch of male fruit flies only within the same group
00:28:23
Speaker
the males were all having sex with each other, but they hadn't turned them gay. But this idea that just skipping right over the fact that they really had created these bisexual fruit flies, like skipping over that fact and like just calling them gay in this sloppy way was I thought really telling about the way that our culture approaches sexualities and thinks about sexualities that we have this lionizing of straight and gay identities and then this habitual just ignorance of or even consideration of
00:28:50
Speaker
bisexual identities. And that came out really strongly in these fruit flies. Well, and actually, that topic is on my list for later, but let me just ask you this now because I thought that was fascinating. And then you wrote that… I forget if it was the fruit fly study or something else, but you wrote that The New York Times concluded eventually that 50% to 60% of sexual orientation might be genetic.
00:29:16
Speaker
essentially as inconclusive a result in either direction, as you could imagine. And you wrote that you really like that as the answer, that it's inconclusive. Why do you like that result? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's interesting arguments on both sides about whether you would want it. Like, what if it was 100% genetic? You know, your sexuality was encoded in your genes. And so we could actually
00:29:40
Speaker
do a DNA test, like 23andMe could actually tell you like, oh, you're bi and here's the gene pairs that show it. So it's a confirmation of who you are. There's all sorts of really positive consequences we could imagine about that if we're as queer people.
00:29:55
Speaker
you could then really say to your uncle at Thanksgiving, it's not a frickin' choice. Here's my 23andMe results. It says that I am 60% bisexual or 20% bisexual, whatever it is, however the science would work. It's quite a little, it doesn't work that way. But then you could have this, you could make this clear argument, especially to conservatives that
00:30:18
Speaker
that this is something that needs to be respected within our legislation and the way that we think about people. But on the flip side, then you would have this capacity to have this proof that feels like of the absolute 100% pure science, this proof that
00:30:37
Speaker
someone is gay or bisexual or lesbian. And you can imagine what that would do in the wrong hands, that you could picture someone running for president and saying, we need to rally together against this scourge of queer people. And now we have a database where we know exactly who they are. And we've all been blithely spitting into tubes and sending it to places like 23andMe, which still
00:31:03
Speaker
keeps this genetic information, right? And so they would be able to say, this is incontrovertible. It is absolutely true. And if we want to eradicate this menace, then they have this quote scientific proof of it. So it's both
00:31:17
Speaker
it could be a blessing and it could be a curse. And I think this idea of there being only 50 to 60% genetic correlation sexuality and that the rest might be cultural is actually a great mix. Because there is a genetic component, but it's not the only thing and that there's something else going on, which I think keeps us in this middle ground safe, middle ground space, which is the safest place for queer people to be as far as the greater culture.
00:31:44
Speaker
Yeah, I like that. The 50% to 60% might be genetic. It is kind of the perfectly complicated interplay of nature and nurture. And it's in addition to the safe zone reason that you talked about, I just kind of like that it's a little bit unquantifiable and undefinable and that's
00:32:09
Speaker
that's what it should be because it's so complicated and complex. And it works so differently, as you said, in many different animal species for different reasons, for different purposes. And so, yeah, there is never going to be like 100% in any direction of why.
00:32:28
Speaker
to answer why. We love those explanations when it is 100%. Incontrovertible proof, it's absolutely this way, but it's a sign that science is being done right when you get something like 50% to 60% as the answer. That is the way the world works, so it makes sense.
00:32:43
Speaker
Let me ask you, before we get into individual animals, let me ask you one question about your identity and what this book has kind of helped you rethink. I want to read something you wrote that a lot of people who identify, it's
00:33:03
Speaker
Well, it's in a chapter about trans animals, which we'll get to, but you wrote that a lot of people who identify as 100% gay or lesbian need convincing that bisexuality really exists, claiming that bisexual people are just in a phase or haven't fully come out yet, which makes me chuckle researching this book as it becomes increasingly clear that bisexuality came earlier in the history of life than homo or heterosexuality
00:33:27
Speaker
and people who identify as 100% gay or lesbian or straight are likely to be underestimating their own bisexuality. So did this book make you rethink what the baseline is for sexuality? And then also, even though you still use the gay label, how has it affected your perception of your own identity?
Debate over Identity Labels in Sexuality
00:33:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:52
Speaker
There's one, that's a great question. There's one scientist I talked to, Beans Velocci, who basically studies the history of sexuality in science. And they talked about their own trans identity, that they don't actually, among friends and in close conversation, they don't identify as trans, but they do when they're writing an op-ed or when they're teaching a class or giving a lecture. And that the reason is, it's like politically useful. Like it's a way you can really quickly establish
00:34:20
Speaker
your solidarity with a group of people and beings felt close enough to trans people to think like, this is expedient for me to use this when I want to. And then I can change that label depending on who I'm with. I can be a little more down to the nuts and bolts of who I really am. And I think of that sometimes with identifying as gay, that it's a
00:34:42
Speaker
instead of saying like a Kinsey 5.5, right? It's like a way to like sort of like really quickly like get something established and move on to the point I want it to make, which unfortunately that happens with so much frequency that it leads to this buyer ratio. And this would be no new news to most of the listeners through your podcast, but homosexual didn't exist as a word until the 1890s. And
00:35:05
Speaker
Up until then, you could have same-sex sex, but you couldn't be gay or homosexual. It wasn't an identity. It was just something that someone could do.
00:35:16
Speaker
And so when you think about the sort of, that's a blip, even in the timespan of human existence, it's a real blip to have the idea of being gay or straight. And those words are really, really new. And the idea of those identities is very, very new. And so you might have had laws against homosexual behaviors, but it wasn't an identity state. And I think that's
00:35:40
Speaker
even beyond the ways that animals prove, that animals which obviously don't carry a sense of internalized shame around their sexual identities, they can very freely have same-sex sexual behaviors and not feel any reason not to.
00:35:55
Speaker
But also like humans, we are living in, we are the aberration right now in Western culture that we think of things in terms of gay and straight. And then if you look at the history of human societies, they would have, it wasn't identity based in the same way, which I think was so freeing to think about.
00:36:13
Speaker
I know. I wish we could live in that society or like I wish I could live with a bunch of bonobos and just like not have to identify and just do shit. But yes, we do live in these very politically charged times and because of a lot of homophobia and biphobia of the last hundred years, we sort of have to use these identity labels to combat that. But it does make me think your book that
00:36:43
Speaker
The real utopia is like back in a labelless world in some ways, if that were possible someday.
00:36:56
Speaker
If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you probably know that I'm a big proponent of sex toys. I used to never use them, but over the past four, five, six years, I have acquired quite a collection. And I think whatever your sexuality, wherever you are in your journey, whatever your relationship is with sex and with other people or not,
00:37:17
Speaker
Sex toys can make all of that more fun and interesting. You can try things you've never tried and see if you like them or not. You can explore dynamics like Dom sub-dynamics or kink or fetish play. And so if any of that sounds interesting to you, I think you will love bunnyshop.com.
00:37:34
Speaker
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00:37:58
Speaker
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00:38:16
Speaker
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00:38:33
Speaker
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00:39:06
Speaker
Well, we'll skip over a few things that I think we'll get back to, such as masturbation. I'm sure it'll come up. But let's talk about chimps and bonobos, because that's the part of your book that I ended up quoting in mind. Actually, a couple parts. But
00:39:25
Speaker
They're the closest animals to humans. They share almost 99% of their DNA with us. And yet the two species are pretty opposite in terms of how they're experiencing sex and using it in their social groups. Can you talk about the sex lives of those two species and how that could be instructive to understand some aspects of human sexuality?
00:39:53
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Chimps and bonobos, it's a fascinating slam dunk metaphor model for how humans could be. They're by far the closest animal relatives we have. Orangutans and gorillas are way, way behind. I think it's like 91% or 92% DNA overlap. Whereas chimps and bonobos are much, much more recent common ancestors with us. And yet you have these two very, very different societies between the two animals.
00:40:19
Speaker
chimps live in this patriarchal male-dominated culture that is very violent. And bonobos, which are tied to chimps as their closest relatives, have this matriarchal female-dominated society where there's no recorded instances of them murdering each other in the ways that chimps will quite frequently kill each other. And the origin of this peacefulness of bonobo societies
00:40:47
Speaker
lies in their bisexuality. So it was long known that female bonobos, the most frequent sex between bonobos is between females, that those females are also having sex with males, but they are coming together in these sexual alliances.
00:41:03
Speaker
And you have all these connected, sexually connected mothers. So most of the Nobos are always, all the females are raising an offspring, an infant at some, for most of the time. And so you have these mothers with infants having sex with each other, going foraging together, forming this really, really tight society. I think of them as sort of like the pink ladies from Greece. They are like just really a sexually, sexually unified group. Not the pink ladies who are having sex, but I think they probably were. I think Rizzo was definitely having sex with someone else in that group.
00:41:34
Speaker
They form through this sexual connection. They're incredibly promiscuous as well. They have sex multiple times a day. Basically, everyone's having sex with everyone else within this group. They feel close together. They don't have this level of violence that chimpanzees have.
00:41:52
Speaker
And it's actually interesting, the same primatologist I mentioned before, Christine Webb, really is an expert on chimps. And she feels like our conception of chimps is these male-dominated animals.
00:42:03
Speaker
has led to us to erase observations of their bisexuality as well. And that now that we are actually looking for homosexual behavior in chimps, there's a lot more studies coming out, even just in the last two to three years, that there's a lot of homosexual chimp sex. There was a great paper, I forget the exact title, it came out about a year and a half ago, but it was, Felatio as a means for reconciliation among
00:42:30
Speaker
chimpanzees in Gombe which is a place in Tanzania. So it's like getting to fight, have really hurt feelings, fellatio is a way to sort of get over it and come back together and that this is a strategy chimps will turn to and obviously they're also feeling pretty good in the moment as well.
00:42:48
Speaker
Of course. That makes sense. Yeah, that's right. It's not like chimps are the straight animal, bonobos are the bi animal. Chimps are bi too. It's just bonobos are really bi and you really can't miss it. I spent time at a bonobo sanctuary in Congo for about two weeks. Especially the female sex, they have these giant grapefruit sized clitorises that they are
00:43:12
Speaker
very sensitive and bring them a lot of pleasure, which is, it's very clear from the moment you see two females, two female bonobos having sex. And they will, it's called clitoral rubbing. They will have the, that's their preferred form of female, female sex. And they do it a lot and it's, judging by the sounds they make, it's rapturous.
00:43:34
Speaker
God. Do you want to give us an example? No. Yeah, I found this chapter fascinating, and that is interesting that they're finding more by behavior in chimps and not just for dominance and control. That's interesting.
00:43:51
Speaker
What it just made me think of is like, A, I wish we could all be like bonobos a little more.
Transformative Experiences with Male Relationships
00:44:01
Speaker
And before I came out as queer, I just kind of had this sort of competitive view of sexuality and finding a partner and I'm competing with other people and there's one partner out there for me and I have to find them. And
00:44:20
Speaker
It just… That's just how I thought about the world and most people around me, I think, thought about dating and it didn't sit well with me, but I didn't know what other options there were. And then finally exploring sex with men and coming out as queer, it really changed my whole view of humanity in a way. I softened up in a way and I felt
00:44:47
Speaker
less competitive with other people. And I felt like, oh, I can experience pleasure with a lot of people in a lot of different ways. It doesn't have to just be in this very limited way that also involves this concrete goal of finding a mate. The pleasure can exist just for pleasure's sake, but then it did
00:45:12
Speaker
feel like it bonded me to other people in these unexpected ways. And like you wrote about in the book, an experiment where when bonobos get introduced to a honeypot or like a really sweet treat, they all have a big orgy and then they split that treat fairly.
00:45:35
Speaker
And it makes you see how sex is not just about sex. It's about so much more across the spectrum of emotion and interpersonal relations. When I get in these arguments with people who are claiming that homosexuality is unnatural or bisexuality is unnatural,
00:45:58
Speaker
The bonobos are the ultimate go-to. Here's an animal that, depending on who's doing science, might actually be even closer related to us than chimps, and that they are as bi as it gets. The food distribution example is an amazing one with bonobos. There's such a clear argument to be made about the social benefit that they're all reaping through this bisexuality of their society.
00:46:21
Speaker
That it is this this feeling of closeness and unity and you can see it proven by by looking at the outcomes for bonobos versus chimps Like bonobos have a great life and chimps have a really rough hardscrabble life And this all this like sort of wonderful unity in the bonobo group is from this sex like so after they you know have a big orgy they're they're full of oxy and
00:46:41
Speaker
oxytocin and they're blissed out. It's easy to distribute food when you're all feeling great and you're in a great mood. This post-coital food sharing is a really great technique that they've come up with. It's interesting because I think Japanese macaques are another primate that has a lot of same-sex sex. They're an interesting example to me because bonobos, you have this evolutionary story about why it exists and it's really incontrovertible. It makes so much sense why bonobos have
00:47:12
Speaker
so much bisexual behavior. The Japanese macaque monkeys, these are the snow monkeys that live in the north of Japan, so you might have seen videos of them. They sit in these hot baths and they're surrounded by snow and it's basically because they're in this one environment and they're all socializing all the time, it's sort of like 90210. They're just over-socializing and they're just always grooming each other and who's wearing the hierarchy is very important to them.
00:47:37
Speaker
Anyway, there's this primatologist Paul Vasey, who has done a study for decades on a population of macaques, trying to figure out why there's so much female, female sex among the macaques. So they're all like the bonobos, basically bisexual. The males will sometimes have sex, the females will very often have sex, and then there's a lot of heterosexual sex happening as well. And he tried to figure out, took all these theories about why these macaques were having homosexual sex that scientists could come up with, and he was trying to figure out
00:48:05
Speaker
Does the data hold? Some theories were that maybe the females were bartering for parental care, which meant females were having sex with another female in order to get a babysitter basically for their own offspring. That maybe the females were reconciling after fights. That's why they were having this sex. Maybe it was a way to establish dominance. So whoever was higher in the hierarchy would be topping the one who was lower in the hierarchy.
00:48:31
Speaker
My favorite theory that primatologists had come up with was that the females were staging sexual encounters to excite males. They were just a way to get male attention. They were like, you like this, guys? You like this? Come on over. That tells me more about the researcher. Totally. Totally. You wish, guys. You totally wish that this is the way it worked.
00:48:52
Speaker
Anyway, all those theories would predict certain sets of data. So if it wasn't they were staging sexual encounters, you would expect there to be a male present when the females had sex, that they would then have sex with the male, or if it was bartering for parental care that the females would actually get parental care from this other female. Anyway, none of the theories helped.
00:49:12
Speaker
none of the explanatory theories about homosexual sex in these macaques held, and he ultimately had to conclude that they're having sex because they want to. These macaque monkeys, we've developed sexual organs for the evolutionary purpose of procreation. He's not saying that that's not true. But once they have them, and these animals have a mind and have the capacity to have desires,
00:49:37
Speaker
Two females are sitting next to each other in this thermal bath surrounded by snow. And they have the experience to feel pleasure together with their sexual organs. So they're going to do it. And then maybe it'll be with a male like 10 minutes later, but they're going to do it right now. They don't have to be some grand evolutionary theory for it.
00:49:53
Speaker
And especially since a CAC monkey doesn't have to, you know, come out as a lesbian and then like sort of, you know, 10, 10 years later, say like, Oh, actually, I'm bi after all, like, we don't, they don't have that need to like self identify and that assumption of binary ness and certainly no feeling of inherited feeling of shame that their culture has taught them around queer identity, that they'll do it like, why wouldn't they like they're, they're relaxing in the afternoon and they'll have sex with each other. It makes you wonder how much we've lost as humans by not having access to that
00:50:22
Speaker
a sort of essential acceptance of a variety of sexual expressions.
00:50:26
Speaker
Yeah, well, and it also does seem tied to this idea that there has to be a reason for everything, that pleasure isn't enough of a reason. But why not? Pleasure, I do things for pleasure. We all do things for pleasure. And why can't animals just do things for pleasure? It speaks to what you talked about earlier about the inner lives of animals that, for a long time, scientists don't really
00:50:54
Speaker
consider their feelings and emotions. And things can be pleasurable, and we can do that. And I think that's also reflected among humans. Maybe recently, there's a bit more of a focus on just pleasure for pleasure's sake, especially in the queer community. But
00:51:11
Speaker
that is not seen as a good reason for sex by many people in our current world. They also look at it like scientists have looked at animals that you should have sex for a purpose and pleasure is not a good enough reason, but it should be. I totally agree.
00:51:36
Speaker
I want to talk about one other bisexual animal, which is the dolphins, the bottlenose dolphins. Are they just gay sharks? Can you talk about how sex works for them and the social structuring and the complex societies they form and how sex is involved in forming those?
00:52:01
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. I mean, the bonobos are kind of a slam dunk example for why there's this lot of female, female sex within their group. And bottlenose dolphins, male sex is the rule of the day for the bottlenose dolphins. And bonobos are promiscuous, but bottlenose dolphins are really promiscuous. They have sex on average 2.4 times an hour, these males who are having sex, which is just really exhausting to think about.
00:52:27
Speaker
I mean, two or four times a day would be a lot. Yeah. Two or four times an hour. So there was actually one- That does seem like a lot, even for me. Even for me, that's a lot. There's one great article about a male-male dolphin sex, and it had a picture of two male dolphins having sex, but the caption said the owner of the erection was not identified.
00:52:49
Speaker
They couldn't tell on this massive dolphin sex, whose penis it was. Anyway, bottomless dolphins are the most common kind of dolphins, and they're one of the few whale species that we've actually been able to study at length because they conduct most of their life in the shallows. Other whales like humpback whales and blue whales conduct most of their sexual lives and most of their lives in the deep, so we don't actually get to see them very often. In fact, no one has ever seen a blue whale or humpback whale having sex.
00:53:18
Speaker
heterosexual or homosexual sex, like you've just never seen it. But dolphins and orcas will conduct their lives in the shallows, so they're much more studied as far as their sexual lives. And bottlenose dolphins, the only lasting union, the only lasting partnership in their society is between males. Females will raise their calf, but after a few years of gun buy and the calf is now an adult, they will part ways and never to see each other again. Whereas these males will form these lifelong unions.
00:53:47
Speaker
Sometimes it's a throuple, often it's just two male dolphins. And it was long known that male friendship is what they called it, was the structuring element of dolphin society. But it wasn't until 2006 that Janet Mann, who runs a dolphin research site in Australia, published on the mechanism of that friendship, which is this incredibly frequent sex, this 2.4 times an hour.
00:54:09
Speaker
And it's for a similar reason. I mean, the theory is that it's a similar reason as the bonobos, that it produces this oxytocin bonding. And so it's really important for these males to feel incredibly unified, to be like sort of warrior brothers within their society. Like they know exactly what the other one is thinking and they feel they act as one.
00:54:29
Speaker
And sex is the easiest mechanism and the most effective mechanism for dolphins to do this. So they will have sex all the time. They'll invite a female in for a couple of weeks and keep mating with her. And then she will go raise her, once she's pregnant, she'll go and raise her calf with other females or by herself. So these males will then go on and try to find more females. And they're competing for desirable females.
00:54:51
Speaker
all their really, really frequent homosexual sex is a way to also get an advantage as far as getting the right females that they want for their heterosexual sex. And this is happening across dolphin societies across the world, the various dolphin cultures. And so it's this really amazing explanatory, it really helps explain why there'll be this bisexuality within the group. You can see the advantage very clearly and it's got a really, really compelling evolutionary explanation.
00:55:21
Speaker
does that last part work where the having sex with other male dolphins allows them to compete for access to the best female? How does that work? The males are very aggressive within their groups. If they find a female who's desirable, they will fight each other to have access to her and prevent other male dolphins from approaching.
Dolphins: Social Alliances and Bisexual Behavior
00:55:44
Speaker
So if you have a
00:55:46
Speaker
strong dolphin bro that you're really close with, together you can fight to get access to the most desirable females. They're using their union. Sometimes two couples or two thrupples will join together and these six dolphins will also find ways to compete for the best females and fight each other off in order to have access to them.
00:56:07
Speaker
Interesting. I see. I see. I thought you wrote, you had a fascinating observation in this chapter that you said that male sexual alliances and dolphins are surprisingly similar to how homosexuality has played out in human history. Can you talk about what you meant by that and the bi-erasure of that in both human culture and animal research?
00:56:34
Speaker
Yeah. It was really fascinating to think about. So all that I ascribe with dolphins is actually really kind of pretty close corollary with something like ancient Greece. Yeah, that too. R.C. Kirkpatrick, this anthropologist did basically a study of what we know about all human cultures over all human history and found that 65% of them either
00:56:53
Speaker
were really supportive of or certainly very tolerant of homosexual behavior within their societies. And this is all thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago. So you don't have this sort of homosexual straight binary that we have now. You just had bisexual behavior as part of the group, part of the way this society worked. So when you think about ancient Greece, female-female sex was happening. We have less record of it because Greeks weren't writing about female lives very much because
00:57:23
Speaker
They were very focused on men. But males were, a man would have two really important unions over his life in ancient Greece. He would have his marriage to a woman and then also a sexual relationship that could change, the partners could change over the course of that man's life, but a sexual relationship between typically younger and older men. And so those unions were also political. So it wasn't just, you know,
00:57:52
Speaker
having sex left and right, it was often like something the families would discuss about when a young Greek man and an older Greek man would pair up. It was just as talked about and just as important to their society. And it was such an assumed fact of, like bisexuality was such an assumed fact of ancient Greece that Greeks would actually look suspiciously on a man who was only having sex with women. Plato argued that men are attracted to men because of the virility, manly nature of a man.
00:58:21
Speaker
Like what could be more manly than having sex with a man is what Plato argued. And so that if a man is only attracted to women, then he's probably effeminate, right? Like he's just, he's only into girls, right? Because like he doesn't have the manliness inside him. And like what a like mind blowing reversal. Yeah, exactly. What a mind blowing reversal of like the way that we treat these things now. And so it was, it was not just that like bisexuality was accepted in ancient Greece. It was really a foundational part of their society and their culture.
00:58:51
Speaker
And the dolphins as well, this is, you know, homosexual behavior in order to get heterosexual behavior with the right female is very similar to the way that ancient creeds worked.
00:59:10
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this episode, everyone. Don't go anywhere, there are still 10 more minutes coming up. But there are also 20 extra minutes of bonus content not available here, which you can only find on my Patreon. Patreon.com slash Robert Brooks Cohen. You won't want to miss those extra 20 minutes, we had a fascinating discussion. We talked about animals that defy the gender binary.
00:59:33
Speaker
We don't necessarily call them trans animals because we can't ask them about their identity, but we talked about intersex animals and other species that actually transition from male to female or female to male during their life cycle and why that happens and what we can learn from it. And we also talked about animals that are essentially
00:59:52
Speaker
polyamorous, or they have sexual or familial bonds that sort of reflect our concept of non-monogamy or polyamory. Those examples are really interesting. That is where the name Queer Ducks comes from, and we got to talk about those garter snakes. All of that is in the bonus content only on Patreon. Head there to listen, you will be glad you did. Thank you so much to those who have subscribed for supporting my work, and now here is the rest of the episode with Elliot Traver.
01:00:25
Speaker
You mentioned there's about 1,500 animal species that queer behavior or other things have been observed, and that's probably a lot more than 10 years ago than 20 years ago. Scientists are noticing it more lately because they weren't looking for it, and when you don't look for it, you don't notice it. But
01:00:48
Speaker
Why has it been so hard? You wrote about it that it's hard for research that uncovers queerness to be published. What are the obstacles for queer scientists and how can we overcome that?
01:01:04
Speaker
Well, I think for the most part, it's not nefarious. Most animals are sexually monomorphic, which means that males and females don't look different to human eyes. So if you think about a pigeon or a squirrel, it's an animal where you can't just eyeball it and decide if it's male or female. Some are
01:01:25
Speaker
really hard to distinguish, like penguins, where you really need a blood test in order to distinguish between the two. There's no way to physically identify if a penguin's male or female because they don't even… They just have a cloaca. All the sexual organs are tucked far away. Yeah, we didn't even get into penguins. That's another fascinating chapter. And everyone needs to pick up the book because, yeah, that's
01:01:47
Speaker
there was a lot on that that we couldn't get due today, but it's fascinating. Yeah, a third of all penguin pairs are same-sex and it's this amazing same-sex partner. And all the stuff about gay penguins that we had heard in the news. Actually, it's even more complicated than that and many of them were bisexual. Okay, go on. Absolutely. Yeah.
Queer Erasure in Animal Science
01:02:10
Speaker
So I think because they are sexually monomorphic,
01:02:13
Speaker
For the most part, scientists haven't been sexting animals they find having sex in the wild. So you see a duck on top of another duck. If they're of a species where the males and females don't look different, you'll assume the one on top is a male and the one on bottom is a female and just log it that way and not bother to look twice. Because of this assumption we have around A, the naturalness of only heterosexuality in the animal world, and that anything that
01:02:40
Speaker
wasn't producing offspring wouldn't proliferate. So it must be heterosexual sex. And that humans have this wide variety of reasons and that animals don't, right? That they're only having sex to procreate. So put that all together and you have this misidentification of what's going on in the wild. There's a great example of a scientist in the 1960s who was
01:02:59
Speaker
had pigeons. He was raising pigeons, and in order to determine if they were male or female, he would put two in a cage and saw which one was dominant and which one was submissive, and then log that as a male on top and a female on the bottom. Then realized, once they started having offspring and laying eggs, and he was like, oh, wait, I got all the sexes wrong, or most of the sexes wrong in these pigeons. What actually happened was whichever pigeon was the second one to enter the cage,
01:03:25
Speaker
would take the submissive role as a way to communicate, I'm not trying to take your territory. And whichever one was the original penguin in the cage would take the dominant role.
01:03:34
Speaker
And this could be two females. It could be a female dominating a male. It was just a way of communicating between the pigeons about who's in charge here. And it was really a case where, and those are, you couldn't eyeball it and tell the difference between the two. So, you know, that's a scientist who didn't mean to do queer erasure, but came with assumptions. Science is made by scientists. And this scientist came with assumptions around what was going to happen and then found it, and didn't really have to look twice until all his data was weird when they started laying eggs.
01:04:04
Speaker
And so I think that's the majority of the cases right now. But there is examples of scientists who love their animal that they studied and didn't want to spread bad news around the animal or what they consider bad news because of their own homophobia or anti-queer beliefs. So there's a sheep researcher, Valerius Geist, who basically observed they live in basically homosexual societies for most of the year. The males are in one group having sex with each other. The females are in one group.
01:04:33
Speaker
and that they only come together to rut for a few weeks out of the year. But he didn't publish on that because he didn't want, as he said later, he didn't want people to conceive of these magnificent beasts as queers and that he just couldn't put that story out there. It was too awful. And so it was just this homophobia playing out in the way that he was doing his science. And so I think this changing of the guard as far as who's doing science and the kinds of things that they're looking for, and this assumption that
01:05:00
Speaker
We actually do need to figure out if it's a male and a female when they're having sex, or if it's two males or two females. It might be that this is actually quite prevalent, that we need to start looking. Now that we're looking, we find this explosion of research and studies into animals having same sex, that it's much more common than we ever thought. And we only didn't really know about it because we weren't really looking.
01:05:22
Speaker
hopefully people will be looking more and more and finding it more and more, and the word will get out there. Even as all this research exists and it's here, there's still a disconnect between what most people today believe is happening in the natural world and what scientists are uncovering.
01:05:45
Speaker
I am curious, how do you think your own identity development or your life would be different if you'd been aware of queerness in animals from a younger age?
Reflections on Queerness in Nature and Self-Acceptance
01:05:58
Speaker
Because you wrote about wishing you had known all this as a kid. How do you think that would have changed your life?
01:06:11
Speaker
there's a loneliness to being queer or there can be. And I certainly felt it deeply. I felt I was someone who was unmoored from my family, my friend groups. As a closeted person, I felt like I was living with a secret that no one else had. And I didn't know any other LGBTQ people around me. And that was doubled and magnified by this feeling that I was also
01:06:38
Speaker
isolated and alone from the natural history of animals. That I was also like, I was something that had no, no referent and no, no past to it. That it was, I was sort of in a blip, this anomaly of 1990s, um, queerwater Florida culture just produced me. And I was just like, oops. Um, and so that all came together to have a really damaging, um, message that I internalized, um, that, that I was, I was wrong, not just as a human, I was wrong as an animal as well.
01:07:08
Speaker
And I think not having that internalization would have sped me along my own journey to self-acceptance a lot. And so that's partly why I wrote Queer Docs for Younger Readers is to, I want adults, most of my readers have been adults for the book, but I want, my main goal is like those, you know,
01:07:32
Speaker
teenagers who feel isolated and wrong and aren't getting any other stories to tell them otherwise can find out about this growth in science that, unfortunately, biology textbooks are really lagging behind and haven't caught on to it and haven't caught up yet. Yeah. Yeah. I feel the same way. I feel like, you know, I believed what I was taught in my psychology classes that looking back, it feels like I was maybe not intentionally, but kind of gaslit a little and it caused a lot of
01:08:01
Speaker
confusion. There was a disconnect of the way I felt about fluidity and the, at the time, very binary way it was discussed in textbooks and stuff. And so I think it's great. Your book will be out there. And it is great for adults. It's a great read. It's so funny and personal. And you talk
01:08:24
Speaker
about your personal journey in almost each chapter and how it relates to these things. But it is also super accessible for young people. And there's great little cartoon images of stuff happening and examples of the animals that are just so fun and interesting. And so any one of all ages will enjoy it.
01:08:48
Speaker
I really encourage you to pick it up. Last question, I saw you have written a new book called Charming Young Man that is fiction, I believe. Can you tell us about that and what else is next for you? What is exciting you these days as a writer?
01:09:04
Speaker
I'm in my queer YA era. I wrote a sci-fi novel with a gay romance at the center called Darkness Outside Us a few years ago and then Queer Dox and Now Charming Young Man is coming out this fall. It is about a real life figure that I discovered who was a young piano prodigy in France in the 1890s.
01:09:26
Speaker
and was won the first prize in piano at the age of 13, which was unheard of and was heralded to be like France's next great thing. But he wound up, A, making friends with Marcel Proust, who was a 19-year-old gossip columnist at the time, and they tried to game their way into high society and tried to get into the good salons and the great parties. And Marcel Proust introduced him to
01:09:46
Speaker
this Count Montesquieu, who is this dandy of French society, and Montesquieu became the patron for this young pianist. Anyway, it's a part falling out. The Count poisoned all the connections he had made for this young man. This is true to history. And then he disappeared, Leon, the young pianist, disappeared from history at the age of 17.
01:10:05
Speaker
I'm trying to recreate his story and what I think happened. It's a look into gay life in French society in the 1890s and how it would have impacted this teenager who had so much musical potential that he never lived up to.
01:10:21
Speaker
that sounds awesome. I have enjoyed your nonfiction work. I can't wait to read some of your fiction.
Praise for 'Queer Ducks' and Listener Encouragement
01:10:28
Speaker
That sounds awesome. And yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for being here today, Elliot. The book is Queer Ducks and Other Animals, the Natural World of Animal Sexuality. We'll put a link in the show notes to his website and the book and everything. Check it out there.
01:10:46
Speaker
And yeah, thank you so much. I mean, the science of queerness is always fascinating to me. And this book really just showed how much there is to uncover that most people don't know about at the moment and that is really being uncovered and publicized recently. So thank you so much for being here and sharing all that with us, Elliot Trafer.
01:11:11
Speaker
Thank you so much, Rob. This has really, really been a joy and thank you for the terrific questions and the conversation that made me grow and think too. It's been really fun. Awesome. I'm glad. Thank you.
01:11:25
Speaker
2 by Guys is produced and edited by me, Rob Cohen, and it was created by me and Alex Boyd. Our logo art is by Caitlin Weinman, our music is by Ross Mincer, we are supported by the Gotham, and we are part of the Zencaster Creator Network. Use promo code 2 by Guys to get 30% off. Thanks for listening to 2 by Guys.