Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

the same category as human beings because of its size and upright, two-legged gait. Combining images of male- female and bird-mammal, the Waris and Arapesh peoples also believe that cassowaries suckle their young from their neck wattles or wing quills, which are found in both male and female birds.³⁰

Ritual performance of the cassowary’s gender-mixing also occurs. Among the Umeda people, for example, a central feature of the tribe’s Ida fertility rite involves two cassowary dancers whose costumes, movements, and symbolism combine both male and female elements. The dancers impersonating the birds are both men and are called by a name that refers to male cassowaries. Yet they are identified with the ancestral mothers of the tribe (who act as female tutelary spirits to the dancers), and the entire ceremony is said to have belonged in mythic times only to women and was performed without men. Each cassowary dancer also has an exaggerated phallus consisting of a large black gourd worn over the head of his penis, but the enormous mask/headdress that he carries (representing the cassowary’s plumage as well as a palm tree) is imbued with feminine symbolism (in the form of its inner layer of underbark). The dancing of the cassowary impersonators emphasizes their male sexuality: they rhythmically hop and move their hips in such a way that their penis gourds flip upward and strike their belts in a motion that imitates copulation, and their phallic organs are said to become enormously elongated during the all- night ceremony. At the same time, the two men frequently hold hands and dance as a pair, activities that are otherwise seen only in female dancers among the Umeda.³¹

The figure of the gender-mixing cassowary reaches its greatest elaboration among the Bimin-Kuskusmin people. In the belief system of this remote tribe of the central New Guinea highlands, the cassowary presides over an entire pantheon of androgynous and sex-transforming animals, and it is physically embodied in the form of special human representatives that ritually enact its transgendered characteristics. In addition to the cassowary and sex-changing birds and grubs mentioned previously, numerous other creatures are believed to combine male and female attributes in the worldview and mythology of the Bimin-Kuskusmin. Several species of marsupials, a bowerbird, and a python are all considered androgynous or hermaphroditic. The wild boar is regarded as a feminized male that never breeds but instead fertilizes androgynous plants with its semen and menstrual blood. And a species of centipede is thought to be female on its left side and male on its right, using its venom to bring life to other androgynous centipedes and death to nonan-drogynous creatures.

At the pinnacle of this transgendered bestiary stands the creator figures of Afek, the masculinized female cassowary, along with her brother/son/consort Yomnok, a feminized male fruit bat or echidna (the latter being a spiny anteater, an egg-laying mammal related to the platypus). Both are descended from a powerful double-gendered monitor lizard and are believed to be hermaphrodites possessing breasts and a combined penis-clitoris. Afek gives birth through two vaginas (one in each buttock), while Yomnok gives birth through his/her penis-clitoris. The gender-mixing of these mythical figures parallels the way they straddle the categories of bird and mammal: the cassowary is a “mammallike” bird—huge, ferocious, flightless, with furlike feathers—while the echidna is a “birdlike mammal”—small, beaked, and egg-laying (the fruit bat is also birdlike, being a flying mammal).

The Bimin-Kuskusmin elect certain people in their tribe to become the sacred representatives and lifelong human embodiments of these primordial creatures: they undergo special initiations and thenceforth ritually reenact and display the intersexuality of their animal ancestors. Two postmenopausal female elders in the clan are chosen to represent Afek: they undergo male scarification rituals, experience symbolic veiling or dissolution of their marriages and children, adhere to combined male and female food taboos, receive male names, and are awarded both male and female hunting and gardening tools. During ceremonial functions—in which they are sometimes referred to as “male mothers”—they ornament themselves with cassowary plumes, often cross-dress in male regalia, or wear exaggerated breasts combined with an erect penis-clitoris made of red pandanus fruit. Physically intersexual or hermaphrodite members of the tribe are selected to be the embodiments of Yomnok. They are adorned with echidna quills or dried fruit-bat penises, wear both male and female clothing and body decorations, sport an erect penis-clitoris (made from black, salt-filled bamboo tubes) during rituals, and are lifelong celibates.³² In each case, these living human representatives of the primal animal androgynes become highly revered and powerful figures in the tribe. They apply their sacred double- gendered power in curing, divination, purification, and initiation rites and officiate at ceremonies that require the esoteric manipulation and mediation of both male and female essences. Above all, these transgendered and nonreproductive “animal-people” are symbols of fertility, fecundity, and growth—corporeal manifestations of what one cassowary man-woman calls “the hidden secret of androgyny … inside the living center of the life force.”³³

Ritualized “performances” of homosexuality combined with animal imagery are also found in the extraordinary initiation and circumcision rites of several cultures of Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides), including the Nduindui and Vao peoples. During these secret ceremonies, symbolic homosexual intercourse is enacted or implied between young male initiates and their elder initiators or ancestral male spirits. Along with other ritual inversions of everyday activities or breaking of taboos during the rites, these ceremonial homosexual activities are thought to imbue the participants with an unusually intense, dangerous, and glorious power. All of these activities coalesce around the image of the shark. The ceremonies are known as shark rites; participants wear elaborate shark headdresses; the initiators /elder partners in actual or symbolic homosexual relationships are referred to as sharks; the rituals are staged in enclosures that symbolize a shark’s mouth; and circumcision itself is likened to the bite of a shark. In some cases there is a connection to other gender-mixing creatures. During the enactment of ceremonial homosexual overtures or intercourse, for example, participants sometimes refer to hermaphrodite Pigs, and the story of one Vanuatu culture hero bearing the title of “shark” tells how his son brought intersexual Pigs to several islands. The linked themes of androgyny and Pigs also appear in narratives from outside the Vanuatu region, for example among the Sabarl people. In their tale “The Girl Who Dressed as a Boy,” a young woman adopts warrior paraphernalia—and later assumes the full garb of a man—during a heroic encounter with a giant Pig who is the offspring of an androgynous creator god.³⁴

Gender-mixing Pigs also feature prominently in another fascinating Vanuatu cultural practice that honors sexual and gender variance in animals (in some cases alongside ritual human homosexuality/transgender). Hermaphrodite Pigs are highly prized in a number of Vanuatu societies, being valued for their uniqueness and relative rarity. Although only a minority of Pigs are intersexual, their husbandry is an esteemed pursuit (especially in the northern and central regions), and animal breeding practices that result in hermaphrodite offspring are encouraged. As a result, nearly every village in some areas has intersexual Pigs, and gender-mixing animals comprise a fairly high proportion of the total domesticated Pig population, perhaps as much as 10–20 percent in some regions. In fact, on these islands there are more hermaphrodite mammals—probably numbering in the thousands—than anywhere else in the world. These intersexual Pigs possess internal male reproductive organs and typically grow tusks like boars (although they are sterile), yet their external genitalia are intermediate between those of males and females, tending toward the female. Behaviorally, they often become sexually aroused in the presence of females and may even mount other females while exhibiting clitoral erections. Among the people of Sakao, seven distinct “genders” of hermaphrodite Pigs are recognized and named, ranging along a continuum from those with the most femalelike genitalia to those that are truly ambiguous to those with the most malelike genitalia. The indigenous classification of these gradations of intersexuality exceeds in completeness any conceptual or nomenclatural system developed by Western science. So precise is this vocabulary, in fact, that the native terminology was actually adopted by the first Western biologist who studied the phenomenon in order to distinguish the various types of gender mixing.

In these Vanuatu cultures, hermaphrodite Pigs are a status symbol of sorts, since their ritual sacrifice is required to achieve progressively higher rank within the society (they are also used in dowries). In some cases, a sophisticated monetary system and trading network has developed in which pigs actually function as a type of currency, complete with forms of “pig credit” and “pig compound interest.” In this system, intersexual Pigs (and the sows that produce them) can be worth up to twice as much as nonintersexual Pigs. The prestige of these animals also extends to the domestic sphere: hermaphrodite Pigs are often depicted on finely carved household items such as plates and bowls, and intersexual Pigs are sometimes kept as pets. They may even become highly valued “family members,” to the point of being suckled by a woman like one of her own children. Moreover, men who raise tusked Pigs (either boars or hermaphrodites) are in some cases viewed as sexually ambiguous or androgynous themselves, since their intimate tending and nurturing of the Pigs is thought to parallel the mother-child relationship. Simultaneously “father” and “mother” to the creatures, they constitute another example of the indigenous concept of “male motherhood” as it pertains to animals.³⁵