Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity

ancestors, anthropologist Karl Schlesier makes explicit the concordance between ancient and modern perspectives, and the essence of sexual and gender variability that is at its core. According to Schlesier, “The new scientific paradigm initiated by physics and astronomy during the last decades has not only overthrown the rationalistic description that has dominated science for merely four centuries, but is testing concepts regarded as factual in the Tsistsistas world description. The Tsistsistas world description understands power (‘energy’) in the universe … as cosmic power”—a power that controls quantum phenomena and exhibits paradoxical properties, including being both local and nonlocal, causal and noncausal (among others). Central to this understanding is the figure of the gender-mixing or two-spirit shaman, the “halfman-halfwoman” who is a living exemplar of the reconciliation of contraries, a “traveler in the androgynal quest” uniting within him/herself apparently contradictory categories. This conjunction of opposites is seen as a return to the original and timeless state of all matter—the primordial mystery of totality. Homosexuality/transgender is therefore regarded as a hierophany, a manifestation of this sacred oneness and plentitude. “This organic Tsistsistas world description, in which all parts of the universe were interrelated, saw life as wondrous … . This is perhaps the greatest achievement of shamanism since its development: … to interpret the world with all its manifestations as a place of miracles, transformations, and immortality.”¹³⁸

On the eve of the twenty-first century, human beings have begun to reimagine and reconfigure some of the most fundamental aspects of nature and culture. Stepping into a social and biological landscape that could scarcely have been imagined a few decades ago, homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered people are now offering new paradigms of sexuality and gender for all of us to consider. As part of this process, they are looking simultaneously to indigenous and futuristic sources of inspiration:

In the search for new vocabularies and labels, terms like shapeshifter and morphing have come to be used to refer to gender identity and sexual style presentations and their fluidity. Shapeshifter, originally from Native American culture, was introduced into current popular culture from science fiction, especially a new offshoot of the cyberpunk subgenre made famous by William Gibson and exemplified by the work of Octavia E. Butler, the African-American author of the Xenogenesis series. Butler’s books are inhabited by genetics-manipulating aliens, a polygendered species whose sexuality is multifarious and who are “impelled to metamorphosis,” whose survival in fact depends upon their “morphological change, genetic diversity and adaptations.”

—ZACHARY I. NATAF, “The Future: The Postmodern

Lesbian Body and Transgender Trouble”¹³⁹

Ironically, one need not look into the future or on “alien worlds” to find appropriate models: shape-shifting and morphing creatures are not merely the stuff of fantasy. The animal world—right now, here on earth—is brimming with countless gender variations and shimmering sexual possibilities: entire lizard species that consist only of females who reproduce by virgin birth and also have sex with each other; or the multigendered society of the Ruff, with four distinct categories of male birds, some of whom court and mate with one another; or female Spotted Hyenas and Bears who copulate and give birth through their “penile” clitorides, and male Greater Rheas who possess “vaginal” phalluses (like the females of their species) and raise young in two-father families; or the vibrant transsexualities of coral reef fish, and the dazzling intersexualities of gynandromorphs and chimeras. In their quest for “postmodern” patterns of gender and sexuality, human beings are simply catching up with the species that have preceded us in evolving sexual and gender diversity—and the aboriginal cultures that have long recognized this. The very melding of indigenous cosmologies and fractal sexualities suggested in the passage above is already well under way—but within the realm of science fact, not fiction.

The Magnificent Overabundance of Reality

It is early morning in the mountains of Sierra Chincua in central Mexico. Covered with what appear to be the golden and orange leaves of autumn, the forest is aquiver, “her trillion secrets touchably alive”¹⁴⁰— but these are not leaves, nor is it autumn. The sound of a distant waterfall fills the air—but no cascading rapids are nearby. It is the fluttering of hundreds of thousands of paper-thin wings—for this is the overwintering site of Monarch Butterflies, resting after their epic migration across North America. They cling to the trees in such numbers that the branches are bent toward the ground, and the forest floor is carpeted with their densely packed bodies. Some of the butterflies are in tandem, since mating often takes place at these overwintering sites. And some of this mating is homosexual: one study of an overwintering site revealed that at the peak of mating activity, more than 10 percent of the Monarch pairs were composed of two males, while later in the season, this percentage rose to nearly 50 percent.¹⁴¹ When the Monarchs take to the air en masse, they form a thick orange cloud that engulfs the trees and requires thirty minutes to pass. Seen from above, their multitude is staggering: the forest seems to be on fire, burning with millions of tiny butterfly-flames. This image is a powerful evocation of the central theme of Biological Exuberance: the glorious multiplicity and bounty of life, what author Hakim Bey has called “the magnificent overabundance of reality.”¹⁴²

We conclude this section with a reflection on where this journey through the speculations of post-Darwinian evolution, chaos theory, and biodiversity studies has led us—a journey along circuitous routes, following clues that at times seemed far-flung, straying down paths that never quite lost us (in spite of their tangential meanderings). Our final resting spot—the concept of Biological Exuberance—lies somewhere along the trajectory defined by these three points (chaos, biodiversity, evolution), although its exact location remains strangely imprecise.¹⁴³ Seen in the light of Biological Exuberance, animal homosexuality/transgender and other nonreproductive behaviors finally “make sense”—they find an intuitive connection to a larger pattern. Yet they are still, paradoxically, “inexplicable,” since they continue to elude conventional definitions of usefulness. Nothing, in the end, has really been “explained”—and rightly so, for it was “sensible explanations” that ran aground in the first place.

Nevertheless, by looking at one particular aspect of animal behavior, we have actually stumbled upon something much larger—a new way of seeing the world, of perceiving broader patterns in nature and human society. Animal homosexuality and transgender may appear far removed from our everyday lives, but through these phenomena, we also arrive at an understanding and appreciation of some of the simplest, most ordinary things around us. Biological Exuberance is available, if it is nothing else—at our fingertips, everywhere we turn, in the fibers and textures that surround us, in the spices that fill our nostrils as we walk past the corner store, in the cloud formations above us and the dandelion seeds strewn by the wind about us, in the embrace of a friend and the kiss of a beloved—in all the colors and patterns and sensations that fill our lives. How many of us haven’t, at one time or another, been overcome by this variety, this feeling of what poet Louis MacNeice describes as “the drunkenness of things being various,” the world as “incorrigibly plural”?¹⁴⁴ Biological Exuberance simply takes our intuitive understanding of the diversity of life and makes it the essence of existence. We needn’t be living in material wealth or in an isolated wilderness to experience this lavishness, either. The weeds struggling through a sidewalk crack or choking an abandoned urban plot are every bit as sumptuous as the most refined of rose gardens, the most magnificent of mountain forests—if not more so. Gifted with this heightened understanding, we can now find the intoxication contained in a glass of water, where before even the most sophisticated wine seemed flavorless (to paraphrase Hakim Bey).¹⁴⁵

Ultimately, the synthesis of scientific views represented by Biological Exuberance brings us full circle—back to a way of looking at the world that is in accordance with some of the most ancient indigenous conceptions of animal (and human) sexual and gender variability. This perspective dissolves binary oppositions, uniting dualities while simultaneously cherishing unlikeness. It suffers difference, honoring the “anomalous” and the “irregular” without reducing them to something familiar or “manageable.” And it embraces paradox, recognizing the coexistence of contradictory and seemingly incompatible phenomena. It is about the unspeakable inexplicability of earth’s mysteries—which are as immediate as the next heartbeat. Biological Exuberance is, above all, an affirmation of life’s vitality and infinite possibilities: a worldview that is at once primordial and futuristic, in which gender is kaleidoscopic, sexualities are multiple, and the categories of male and female are fluid and transmutable. A world, in short, exactly like the one we inhabit.