The real question for science to answer is why we're not even gayer
Keep your friends close and your friends with benefits closer
You may have seen that there’s a new study out on the evolution of same-sex sexual behavior (the academic shorthand for “looks gay to us but we can’t exactly ask them how they feel about it”) in mammals. It’s a good one! The researchers used phylogenetic analysis, which is basically creating a red-string conspiracy board that connects a bunch of organisms to suss out how their genes and traits overlap.
Thankfully for grad students everywhere, scientists can run this kind of analysis with computers instead of DIY murder boards. You pop in all the data you have about where animals live in the world, what their DNA looks like, and what sorts of traits they’ve got. After a lot of hard work making and refining algorithms that I have the luxury of not caring about, you’re left with info about where those organisms were last connected on the evolutionary family tree—and where on those branches the traits you’re interested in most likely arose.
Think of it like this: Imagine you’ve got some highly hereditary traits in your family, like extra fingers and bright red hair. Your mom is a polydactyl ginger, and so are you and all your siblings. You can already see where you got these shared traits when you sit down at the dinner table, because your dad has a paltry 10 fingers and dishwater blonde hair (sad). You know that your mom’s brothers and sisters all share these unusual traits too. But when you go to their family’s massive reunion, you notice that while all of your cousins have red hair and freckles, only a few have extra fingers. For the sake of the analogy, let’s say that your great-grandma brought powerful redhead genes into your lineage from some ancestor you’ve never met, and so did all of her siblings. But your grandpa was the first polydactyl in the family, because the extra finger started with a random mutation in his genome. That’s phylogenetic analysis in a nutshell.
So where does the gay stuff come in? In my defense, statistically speaking, at least some of the aforementioned six-fingered redheads were also gay. But I digress.
This new study suggests that same-sex sexual behavior evolved multiple times in mammals’ evolutionary history, because lots of mammals display it without having an obvious common ancestor to pin the origin of the behavior on. What’s especially cool is that the researchers found a correlation between a species being social and a species being sexually fluid. In the animal behavior world, “social” just means that animals tend to live in groups instead of going it alone.
The idea that queer sex might come in handy for social animals isn’t new. I actually talked about it quite a bit in my book. There’s evidence that male and female animals alike engage in same-sex sexual behavior to bond with friends and allies, keep the peace when tensions are high, and stay warm and comfortable during cold nights. Humans aren’t alone in using sex for stuff other than procreation; it’s totally natural for it to happen when making babies isn’t on the table.
That might sound obvious, depending on the circles you circulate in, but it’s something science as a whole is only just starting to admit. Even in coverage of this new study, I saw several major outlets suggest that the researchers were seeking to solve the “paradox” of animal queerness. This is an outdated notion that, since animals have to reproduce to keep their genes in the pool, anything that doesn’t encourage procreative sex should logically get screwed out of existence. But we know that animals can engage in non-procreative sex and still find the time and energy to make babies elsewhere. We also know that there can be evolutionary benefits to having some sex be just for fun; besides the social bonding stuff, there’s a whole “gay uncle hypothesis” around the idea that ancient communities with adults who didn’t breed might have produced hardier offspring overall, since queer relatives could share their resources and energy with newborn-laden heterosexuals. Some researchers have even argued that it’s a mistake to assume bisexuality isn’t the evolutionary default.
There’s never going to be one single evolutionary explanation for sexual orientation. Bats may have started doing gay stuff for totally different reasons than bison did. And humans are, of course, an especially complex quagmire of genes and circumstance and social pressures. But it’s increasingly clear that sex, as we know it, evolved for much more than just reproduction. I can’t promise that the stuff you’re into has a deep and meaningful evolutionary history, and it doesn’t need to have one to justify your right to do you (or whomever). What I can promise is that we’ve only scratched the surface of queerness in the natural world and in our species’ history, because scientists have only just begun to actually question it.
Rachel’s Recs
Buy: This gay space witch dress I made
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