GLR January-February 2025

ESSAY

Consider the Common Cockchafer A NDREW H OLLERAN

I T HAS ALWAYS ASTONISHED ME, given the num ber of people attracted to their own sex in this world and the pain that being homosexual has caused a sig nificant number of them, that so little has been done to find the “cause” of their divergence from the norm. Why, I used to wonder, did the parents of a friend of mine from Worcester, Massachusetts, produce four homosexu als out of five children—one of them the first openly gay judge in that state? Was it something about the mother, whether she drank alcohol during pregnancy, or the level of the father’s testosterone during conception, or the legendary “gay gene”? What determined the outcome of this exchange of DNA? It was ordinary curiosity, I suppose, to wonder about such things, ex cept that I had a personal stake in finding out. It rankled me when homophobes claimed that I had simply “chosen” to be gay—presumably because homosexuals were sybarites who just wanted to have fun, to be free of the burdens of parenthood, to live for pleasure. Homosexuals replied with a question of their own: Do you really think anyone would choose a life as difficult as this? If only we could find the “cause” of homosexuality, I thought, we could prove that it wasn’t a choice. That’s why I perked up in 1991 when a British scientist named Simon LeVay noticed that the hypothalamus glands of a group of male homosexuals he’d studied were smaller than those of women and heterosexual men. But this excitement did not last. The problem was that there was no way to know if the smaller glands were a result or a cause of same-sex attraction. The findings were attacked on all sides, and the attempt to explain why some of us are drawn to our own sex was replaced by the El Dorado of the “gay gene,” which inspired Jonathan Tolins to write a play called The Twilight of the Golds , in which a couple is informed by doctors that the child they’re about to have will be homosexual. So do they want to abort? In other words, homosexuality as a birth defect. Eventually the search for a cause subsided in a vague cloud of “nature” and “nurture” in some unknown combination, mean ing, for all practical purposes, “We don’t know.” And the pub lic returned to its previous incuriosity, no more eager to understand why some men are attracted to men than why oth ers are attracted to women. Heterosexuality was easier to un derstand: it produced children and kept the human species going. Homosexuality was sterile and made no sense. Even Norman Mailer said that part of the drama of heterosexual coitus is the knowledge that life may be created. So why in the world did homosexuality exist? Just what were we—mere mu tations, mere mistakes? Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand. His other novels include Grief and The Beauty of Men .

Enter the lesbian seagulls. The lesbian seagulls were discovered in 1972 nesting off the coast of California on one of the Channel Islands. They were not the first instance of homosexuality in birds to be noticed, but they created a sensation, as Joshua Davis explains in his fas cinating new book, A Little Queer Natural History . This hap pened because they were noticed just when the Gay Liberation movement was on the rise. In fact, same-sex relations in the an imal kingdom had been noticed early in the 19th century, when a German schoolteacher named August Kelch came upon two male common cockchafers (aka doodlebugs) copulating in the woods; though that was explained, as so much same-sex copu lation would be by heterosexual scientists, as simply an exercise in dominance. But in 1864, a Russian diplomat and entomolo gist named Carl Osten-Sacken observed two more doodlebugs having sex and noted that the larger one was the passive partner, not the smaller, so it wasn’t about power. Then what was it? In 1896, the French entomologist Henri Gadeau de Kerville ar gued that male-to-male copulation in beetles came in two forms: one based on necessity, the other on preference. Then, in 1923, ornithologist John Peacock Ritchie was ram bling around a loch west of Glasgow when he came upon two black swans nesting. After stopping to take a photograph, he chased the birds off to see what was in the nest. The nest was empty. A week later he checked again and there were still no eggs. “At first, he suspected that railway workers nearby had stolen the swans’ eggs,” Davis writes, “but on a third visit to the pair the nest remained bare. After several more visits in the

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